•September 6, 2023•

by Sarah Hudson Pierce

columnist

Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life, said, “we shouldn’t hide mental illness.” His youngest son, Matthew, a mental illness victim, committed suicide in 2013, having battled mental illness for years.  

When Rick shared his tragedy, he said he received more than 10,000 letters of sympathy. Sharing our pain lifts the load making our loss more tolerable. I would like to talk about some of the benefits of writing.

Dr. Molly Harrower Gaines, psychiatrist and author of Therapy in Poetry wrote “Long before there were therapists there were poets and from time immemorial man has struggled to cope with his inevitable, inner turmoil. One way of so coping has been the ballad, the song, the poem. Once crystallized into words, all engulfing feelings become manageable, and once challenged into explicitness, the burden of the incommunicable becomes less heavy.”

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