DEVOUT

A young woman’s account of faith, church, and mental illness.

During her freshman year of college, Gazmarian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her diagnosis and subsequent struggle to find adequate treatment was complicated by her evangelical Christian upbringing. “I was determined to be a good Christian, but I struggled with doubt,” she writes. “In my community, doubt wasn’t welcome.” As the author narrates her path through therapists’ offices and experiences with a variety of medication regimens, she also notes the way that Christian teachings, narcissistic church authorities, and the prayerful passivity of the faithful created their own obstacles to mental stability and support resources. The text is a whispered challenge to the evangelical church and a subtle critique of how Gazmarian’s faith tradition accounts for and engages with mental illness, with hints at the inadequacies of other institutions, such as schools and medical professionals, to right this failure. Gazmarian also writes about seeking out Christian therapists, and she integrates into the text Scripture passages on which she continually relies, even in her darkest moments. The authentic version of the author’s personal faith journey is complicated and nuanced and may elude literary expression; the writing reflects a restless and distracted quality that suggests as much. However, both the doubts of the author and the solace she ultimately finds are presented in a manner that feels overly cautious, and many of the descriptions could have benefitted from tighter editing. The resulting rather anticlimactic reconciliation blunts the potential force of a much-needed exploration of the intersection between mental illness and faith. Readers are left knowing that Gazmarian’s ideas of faith, religion, and church have changed and expanded, but not the reasons why faith truly matters to her.

A mostly surface-level story about both the flaws and hopeful possibilities of religion.