Domestic violence within our plain culture?

[jahertz]

JAH, I pray for your full recovery, what a humbling experience.

The focus of my concern for domestic abuse among Anabaptists is authoritarian church/community structures that privilege men. I doubt there are more or fewer abusers than among the general population, but I fear for the women and girls who have little voice. I have put considerable energy into building church community where women have a voice, to the point that many would find me too far in the direction of egalitarianism, for this reason. I push back at "men's meetings" that are intended for making decisions rather than mutual encouragement or accountability. Authoritarian structures can accomplish a lot, nice buildings, stable conferences ect... but at what cost?

Barnhart, like you I have thought much about power structures and gender relations in the Kingdom of God, and my personal understanding is still evolving. My current position could probably be described as "Soft Complementarianism," but I have friends across the spectrum whom I think live out Godly power dynamics, from self-identified patriarchalists to egalitarians.

It seems to me that the Gospel as introduced into the world of the New Testament focuses less on the specific institutions and power structures, such as slavery, feudalism, and patriarchy, and more on the responsibility of all to use any power they possess sacrificially, for the flourishing of the whole society, especially those of the lowest status and power. I believe the Spirit-led use of power will lead over time to a roots-up natural reconfiguring of social structures to support just and healthy forms of equality.

The nonprofit I cofounded several years ago, LifeRing Christian Ministries, includes in its board both egalitarians and complementarians, and I think there is more than enough clarity in the Scripture and the example of Christ for all of us from anywhere in the controversy to stand without excuse if we allow power to be used destructively among us.

[Josh]

The mainstream world has fully embraced erasing gender distinctions and full-fledged “gender equality”, yet terrible amounts of abuse remain.

Hence I am sceptical that this is the answer to abuse, particularly when the Bible never puts it forward as the solution to sin. Indeed, the Bible makes it very clear what roles men and women have in regard to each other in marriage and leadership roles in church.

I also have the perspective of having lived in a very egalitarian setting, right down to being part of a church with male and female (husband and wife) co-pastors. She preached regularly; the theological conservatives eventually left that church. My ex wife was a director of a ministry there; my role was limited to setting up the sound equipment.

The church participated in a ministry to help trafficked women and women caught up in the prostitution trade, and I was proud to be a donor and supporter of this cause.

Years later, I got born again and my views radically changed. I went back to Southern California and visited some old friends.

I found out he had been seeing prostitutes for years and it finally came to light. He patronised the alleged trafficking victims and used the trafficking ministry to find new prostitutes. He had some kind of brief moment of clarity and confessed all of this and stepped down.

I mention this sordid tale to simply state that liberal theology, gender “equality”, and worldly founts of wisdom - my friends I was visiting were Fuller grads, the pastoral staff was well trained and educated - do not do anything to solve the problem of wicked human hearts. Only being born again does and having a church composed of born-again believers who follow the Bible without compromise. And last I checked, my Bible doesn’t have an allowance for a church member to beat his wife, be cruel to his children, but neither does it have an allowance for a wife to live in disobedience and rebellion to her husband either.

[Neto]

There is a teaching of equality of man & woman in the Scripture, but it is not a teaching of sameness in roles. It is a teaching of spiritual equality before God. The marriage vows I hear in our congregations ask the question: Will you take the sister by your side...?" Sister. That is spiritual equality. Forgive me for mentioning the Banawa again, but the relationship between a brother & sister in that culture is the closest human relationship, perhaps closer than it ought to be, because it is closer than that of a husband & wife. But it is exemplary in that it recognizes the need of a life-long protector for the sister. In Scripture, the husband is commanded, urged, and entreated to be a protector, and NOT an "overlord". So the Banawa culture, in the spiritual darkness that came into their past, kept this one thing, having lost the truth that the HUSBAND was to be that protector, so the brother had to step in, to protect his sister from, basically, her husband.
I agree that the solution is not to place husband & wife into the position of struggling against one another & battling each other for dominance. This also does violence to the woman, because she was created to be protected, not to dominate her husband, or to need to protect herself.
I understand that the intent of this thread was to focus on spousal abuse in the direction of husband on wife, but that is not the complete picture. Some years ago we had special meetings in our local congregation, and the speakers had a "message" that was so totally focused on this angle that they reduced the 'sister', the one they wanted to protect, to a person who was not morally responsible, She was always the innocent victim, never at fault. If there were marital problems, they asked the husband: "What did you do to your wife?" Unfortunately the Satan uses a simple tactic in marriage relationships: To tempt the husband to abuse his responsibility & role as protector and guide by seeking to take utter control over his wife. And he tempts the wife to attempt to control her husband. This is perhaps the two primary temptations that come to men, and to women, and it is pretty clearly recognized is what God says to Adam & Eve after sin entered their hearts.

[jahertz]

The mainstream world has fully embraced erasing gender distinctions and full-fledged “gender equality”, yet terrible amounts of abuse remain.

Hence I am sceptical that this is the answer to abuse, particularly when the Bible never puts it forward as the solution to sin. Indeed, the Bible makes it very clear what roles men and women have in regard to each other in marriage and leadership roles in church.

I also have the perspective of having lived in a very egalitarian setting, right down to being part of a church with male and female (husband and wife) co-pastors. She preached regularly; the theological conservatives eventually left that church. My ex wife was a director of a ministry there; my role was limited to setting up the sound equipment.

The church participated in a ministry to help trafficked women and women caught up in the prostitution trade, and I was proud to be a donor and supporter of this cause.

Years later, I got born again and my views radically changed. I went back to Southern California and visited some old friends.

I found out he had been seeing prostitutes for years and it finally came to light. He patronised the alleged trafficking victims and used the trafficking ministry to find new prostitutes. He had some kind of brief moment of clarity and confessed all of this and stepped down.

I mention this sordid tale to simply state that liberal theology, gender “equality”, and worldly founts of wisdom - my friends I was visiting were Fuller grads, the pastoral staff was well trained and educated - do not do anything to solve the problem of wicked human hearts. Only being born again does and having a church composed of born-again believers who follow the Bible without compromise. And last I checked, my Bible doesn’t have an allowance for a church member to beat his wife, be cruel to his children, but neither does it have an allowance for a wife to live in disobedience and rebellion to her husband either.

I think it is safe to assume for the purposes of this discussion that the people involved so far share a commitment to approaches to domestic violence based in our best understanding of New Testament and Creation principles, rather than on "erasing gender distinctions" and "mainstream" ideologies about gender equality. Speaking for myself, I wholeheartedly affirm that the ultimate answers to sin, including the sin of domestic abuse, lie only in the transforming power of the Gospel and the work of the Spirit of Christ in the lives of believers.

It's a deeply embarrassing fact, however, that if domestic abuse was being competently dealt with in every Anabaptist church that earnestly claims and intends to admit only born-again believers and to follow the Bible without compromise, this thread would have wound up immediately because domestic violence would be unheard of among most Anabaptist churches. It hasn't, and it isn't.

There are various reasons one may propose why so many churches and groups that profess both high levels of commitment to Biblical obedience, a strong teaching on personal new birth, AND a historic emphasis on nonviolence should be shot through like Swiss cheese with egregious cases of utterly antichrist gender and power relations. But it is undeniable that a simple commitment to Biblicism and born-again membership has not been enough to protect the weak among us, either from domestic violence or from sexual abuse, both on a staggering scale.

Something more is needed, and I would argue that the biggest and first missing component is a massive restoration of humility, enough to allow us to face the near certainty that these sins are not the problem of churches "over there"—backslidden liberals, dead traditionalists, theologically wishy-washy ignoramuses, gun-crazed Evangelicals, abusive Catholics—and seriously educate ourselves on the signs and symptoms and deceptiveness of these specific types of sin, including actively soliciting confidential input from the people in our congregations who have been least outspoken and most ignored.

Before we can take the first step toward resolving this or any issue hollowing out Anabaptist culture and faith from within, the 800-pound gorilla of pride blocking the path to learning must be confronted and destroyed. I have seen church leaders make a mess of abuse situations, recognize their failure, humbly return to the table again and again with the people harmed by their incompetence, apologize for their mistakes as they came to understand them, and respond with more wisdom to future situations. I have seen others who failed to make the slightest progress for years but stubbornly refused to accept any new perspective from outside their own tiny circle, preferring to leave the sheep unhealed rather than admit they were in over their heads and in need of competent counsel.

All the data I have access to (mostly anecdotal) says that as conservative Anabaptists, we are getting an F on this nearly across the board. I know of individual congregations that seem to be exceptions, but no denominations. Whatever we believe about the proper solution, the status quo is unacceptable.

There is a teaching of equality of man & woman in the Scripture, but it is not a teaching of sameness in roles. It is a teaching of spiritual equality before God. The marriage vows I hear in our congregations ask the question: Will you take the sister by your side...?" Sister. That is spiritual equality. Forgive me for mentioning the Banawa again, but the relationship between a brother & sister in that culture is the closest human relationship, perhaps closer than it ought to be, because it is closer than that of a husband & wife. But it is exemplary in that it recognizes the need of a life-long protector for the sister. In Scripture, the husband is commanded, urged, and entreated to be a protector, and NOT an "overlord". So the Banawa culture, in the spiritual darkness that came into their past, kept this one thing, having lost the truth that the HUSBAND was to be that protector, so the brother had to step in, to protect his sister from, basically, her husband.
I agree that the solution is not to place husband & wife into the position of struggling against one another & battling each other for dominance. This also does violence to the woman, because she was created to be protected, not to dominate her husband, or to need to protect herself.
I understand that the intent of this thread was to focus on spousal abuse in the direction of husband on wife, but that is not the complete picture. Some years ago we had special meetings in our local congregation, and the speakers had a "message" that was so totally focused on this angle that they reduced the 'sister', the one they wanted to protect, to a person who was not morally responsible, She was always the innocent victim, never at fault. If there were marital problems, they asked the husband: "What did you do to your wife?" Unfortunately the Satan uses a simple tactic in marriage relationships: To tempt the husband to abuse his responsibility & role as protector and guide by seeking to take utter control over his wife. And he tempts the wife to attempt to control her husband. This is perhaps the two primary temptations that come to men, and to women, and it is pretty clearly recognized is what God says to Adam & Eve after sin entered their hearts.

The worldly solution to abuse much in vogue now is to eliminate power differences and flatten hierarchies, and thus in theory make it impossible for anyone to abuse anyone else, either by reducing everyone to the same level of impotence or by redistributing the tools and tactics of violence and oppression more equitably so that the oppressors' drive to oppress may be countered by the threat of becoming the oppressed.

The Gospel and the Creation order shows an ideal different in kind: power applied as an elixir of healing and fertility, pouring from the generous and creative heart of God and multiplying down through the human and animal hierarchy, with each level of power focused on empowering and raising the levels below to mature into their highest potential for glory. Jesus and his apostles embodied this kind of power and wove it into the fabric of the first churches, but since then we've had a time of it keeping the old demonic patterns of domination, competition, and exploitation from reasserting themselves.

In Anabaptism in particular, I think the widespread problem with abuse of power in the home comes from a prolonged neglect, leading to deadly ignorance, of the entire topic of power and how profoundly the Gospel is meant to remodel our thinking from the default setting the world seeks to imprint on us. The power dynamic the Gospel is to generate is so radical and uncharacteristic of human societies that without constant tending and cultivation it will always wither and be lost. And for well on a century now, Western Conservative Anabaptist theological priorities have largely reflected those of mainstream Western white Fundamentalist Protestants, who as part of the dominant cultural demographic have been little interested in issues of justice, oppression, and the Gospel's implication for human power relations.

This neglect and ignorance has allowed our church power dynamics to default to something that often looks far too much like the unredeemed world around us, and that same worldly conception of power then corrupts the way we imagine power should work in the home. We urge people to use power with benevolent intent, but the way we conceive of power itself remains largely worldly, and multitudes of men with wicked, violent hearts hide their sin within the shadows of that confusion.

I know I've done a lot of apparent diagnosis here, but all of these thoughts are to some degree provisional, as this is a complex issue I do not believe I have mastered. I welcome thoughtful, constructive interaction with the ideas I'm trying to express.

[Josh]

I think it is safe to assume for the purposes of this discussion that the people involved so far share a commitment to approaches to domestic violence based in our best understanding of New Testament and Creation principles, rather than on "erasing gender distinctions" and "mainstream" ideologies about gender equality. Speaking for myself, I wholeheartedly affirm that the ultimate answers to sin, including the sin of domestic abuse, lie only in the transforming power of the Gospel and the work of the Spirit of Christ in the lives of believers.

If that could be a grounding priciple, it would be easier for me to work with these kind of "activists" who are popping up in plain circles. I, for my part, now have a certain degree of scepticism towards them. For example, I discovered that one of them in my own circles also (secretly) has been pushing for more acceptance of homosexuality. That kind of pairing doesn't make me think that "activists" who claim to have the recipe needed to "fix" the "domestic violence problem" in plain circles actually are here to fix anything.

It's a deeply embarrassing fact, however, that if domestic abuse was being competently dealt with in every Anabaptist church that earnestly claims and intends to admit only born-again believers and to follow the Bible without compromise, this thread would have wound up immediately because domestic violence would be unheard of among most Anabaptist churches. It hasn't, and it isn't.

Of course it isn't, because domestic violence (along with other problems like obesity, mental illness, suicide, and so on) is going to be found anywhere there are people. However, you will find a lot less of it in plain circles than you will in their "English" neighbours. I myself was a bit surprise to learn this, but it is simply the fact that it is true. Indeed, due to its rarity, most plain people don't know how to deal with it - the typical abuser is a skilled sociopath who knows how to evade ever being found out; if he is, he makes a very tearful and convincing repentance, and then often finds a new community to move to to start perpetrating again.

I have seen others who failed to make the slightest progress for years but stubbornly refused to accept any new perspective from outside their own tiny circle, preferring to leave the sheep unhealed rather than admit they were in over their heads and in need of competent counsel.

So who gets to decide what "competent counsel" is?

The world? The nearby state university?

Do they even have proven models for dealing with domestic violence to the point of improving it? If they did, why is domestic violence so rampant in society - indeed, increasing?

All the data I have access to (mostly anecdotal) says that as conservative Anabaptists, we are getting an F on this nearly across the board. I know of individual congregations that seem to be exceptions, but no denominations. Whatever we believe about the proper solution, the status quo is unacceptable.

What defines an "F"? If you measure success by moving closer to adopting the Duluth model, well, no, most plain Anabaptists aren't going to be doing that.

Overall, the formula the world puts forward is that the cure for domestic violence is divorce, and I'd like to see you being a bit more realistic that any kind of outside "competent counsel" is going to put forward divorce & separations as the cure for these problems, because that's exactly what they do every single day in the world. And I don't think the Anabaptist family is worth destroying just so that our already-low domestic violence numbers can be even lower. And so far, I haven't seen much from these quasi-church organisations other than simply pushing the same worldly solutions that already have been tried and failed in the mainstream world.

Know the single biggest factor in predicting someone will grow up to be a domestic abuser? Growing up without a dad.

If you want to see less domestic violence, then make sure marriages and families stay intact, that children aren't born out of wedlock, and that mothers don't decide to go file for divorces or choose to be separated. The Anabaptist community has been exceptional at doing that, and in a cultural context where virtually nobody else can do that.

[mike]

I might just have been in the wrong plain groups all my life, but I am not sure if I ever heard of an instance of domestic violence where there was physical abuse. I'm not as sure about verbal/mental abuse, but even with that, I can't really think of specific people or instances. Obviously this doesn't mean it didn't occur.

[Josh]

I might just have been in the wrong plain groups all my life, but I am not sure if I ever heard of an instance of domestic violence where there was physical abuse. I'm not as sure about verbal/mental abuse, but even with that, I can't really think of specific people or instances. Obviously this doesn't mean it didn't occur.

#1. I have been aware (first hand) of one. The couple involved also got divorced and both eventually left their church.

#2. I have been aware of a few more cases, but not quite first hand. One is someone who has an obvious mental defect - he got hit on the head at a construction site and has never been normal since and has to take a lot of medication, or he can go into flying rages. I don't think that really counts, and the situation was dealt with appropriately.

#3. There was another one of someone who was continuously cruel and abusive (it is a matter of rumour if it escalated to physical abuse). Eventually he was excommunicated and got divorced. A few years later, he returned to church and wanted to get remarried to someone else, which was not accepted. Eventually he ran off and married someone anyway and neither of them are living a Christian life anymore.

#4. Finally, there was a very bizarre case of someone who was cruel and abusive, variously trying to live a very "ascetic" lifestyle, right down to living without electricity, or else into very bizarre gross sins. Eventually his wife became discouraged with Christian life, divorced him, and got married to someone else, who was also very abusive. She has since left that marriage too.

One of the problems in the above cases is that the church can't really do that much. Once they intervene and tell an abuser to stop abusing, the abuser's response is to simply decide the church is wrong and leave it. When children are involved, they get caught in the cross fire. In #2 the children are all church members. In #1 some of the children are church members or regularly attend and want to live a Christian life, some have abandoned the plain world and are disgusted by it and prefer a non-plain kind of Christianity, and one gave up on living a Christian life. In #4 the children from the first marriage seem to be joining church and becoming members. The children from the second didn't grow up in church and are not going to church now nor interested in a Christian life.

One thing that is very obvious from the above is that deciding to treat early signs of mental illness is a very good idea. A lot of these problems could have been avoided if someone who started to act bizarre was reigned in early (including requiring such a person to submit to church authority) when they could still be reasoned with. These are not things to handle with kid gloves. In the case of #2, proper treatment kept the situation from ever escalating to a problem.

The above cases I am aware of is from a context of thousands of people, where there seem to be no problems at all. This is very low, particularly compared to what is alleged for the outside world, e.g., a popular statistic is that 1 in 3 women are or will be victims of domestic violence of some kind.

[jahertz]

I might just have been in the wrong plain groups all my life, but I am not sure if I ever heard of an instance of domestic violence where there was physical abuse. I'm not as sure about verbal/mental abuse, but even with that, I can't really think of specific people or instances. Obviously this doesn't mean it didn't occur.

Ten years ago I would have sincerely said the same thing. And I would have said that, even while living in close proximity to the household where I grew up, where severe verbal, emotional, and occasional physical abuse had been a fact of life for me, my siblings, and my mom since before I was born and was ongoing for her and the siblings still at home.

It's a paradoxical fact that many women in even physically abusive relationships, if surveyed, will state confidently that they are not victims of abuse. Their own experience is normalized, especially if it reflects the dynamics of the home in which they grew up, and they internalize the abuser's gaslighting to such a degree that they genuinely believe most of the unpleasantness they experience is their own fault.

Reinforcing the self-blame and silence of these Anabaptist women is the consistent refrain of most conservative Anabaptist preaching for wives, which comes across as much in what is omitted as in what is said: Be a sweet, responsive wife, a joy to come home to, learn to always have the house tidy, the children calm, supper steaming on the stovetop, and your own person smiling, good-smelling, and ready to listen to his stresses and problems.

What to do when one does one's best to achieve this nearly impossible challenge and finds it is never good enough to win one the approval and love one craves from the spouse it is meant to please? If this possibility is even acknowledged, the "solution" offered tends to be to "wife harder"―wake up earlier, offer more sex, work harder, submit to every indignity in even more silence, "that you may win him without a word." (Never mind that this counsel of Paul was given to Christian wives married to known unbelievers, not to couples supposedly mutually subject to the oversight of the church and the principles of Matthew 18.)

The result of this blithe, watered-down 1950s-housewife-advice-column approach to marriage teaching is that a wife subject to chronic abuse is never introduced to the recourse the Gospel offers the downtrodden in the context of a mutually accountable redeemed society, the church. She believes God expects her to bear and accept silently every kind of cruelty from the man who vowed at the altar to cherish and support her. It never occurs to her that the process of confrontation and appeal described in Matthew 18 could be for her―that the husband at her side is also her brother in the church, whose callousness toward her destroys the symbolism of Christ and the church, defies God's clearly revealed will for his spiritual growth, and jeopardizes his eternal salvation.

Because the abused wife recognizes none of these things—because the church has left her spiritually ignorant of them, while emphasizing at every turn her responsibility to support, cheerlead, defend, and burnish the reputation of her husband—she may suffer horrific abuse for decades without revealing a hint to her closest friends, much less to the church leaders, who will thus be free to continue in the sincere belief that their marriage teaching has produced a weed-free meadow of flourishing godly marriages.

But suppose a wife does begin to question the paradigm? Suppose she grew up with parents who modeled godly love and respect and had a mother, say, who happened to tell a story of a new wife who put her foot down against her young husband's cruelty and selfishness, who refused to be treated like a barnyard animal, and who saw him repent and grow into godly manhood? This woman is increasingly certain that the patterns she is experiencing are not normal, not Christian, not like the mutually supportive and nurturing model of marriage she saw in her childhood home. She is sure this is not what Christian marriage is supposed to look like, and her best efforts to play the sweet obedient wife have made no discernible difference.

Tentatively, she approaches her husband about the problem, and he reacts, say, by calling her a filthy four-letter word and telling her he doesn't know why she expects to be treated like the Queen of England if she serves beans fifteen times a week and is always like a wrung-out dishrag at bedtime. She's crushed and vanquished, and the next day he's in a better mood and shows a flicker of affection and kindness, which she gratefully soaks up, and for many months she does her best to be the perfect wife and bears all kinds of indignities without protest. But eventually she is at her wits' end again. The new baby has arrived and is keeping her up nights, she is exhausted and struggling with post-partum depression, and her husband, far from understanding and supporting her, escalates his insults and demands.

After an especially bad episode, in which he loomed over her and clenched his fists after she failed to get the baby quiet when he wanted to sleep, she feels things can't go on like this, and she drops a hint to the minister's wife that married life has been "pretty hard sometimes." The minister's wife is kindly, asks a few questions about the baby, and gives some tips that helped her when she was a new mother. The young wife hints a bit more, asking "Did your husband help much with the children when they were small?" The minister's wife takes the hint and probes a bit into the marriage dynamics, and the wife, embarrassed but desperate, spills a little more of the struggles she is facing―not the fists or the cursing, of course, but more than she's ever told anyone before.

The minister's wife is concerned, and says she will talk to the minister and have him check in with the young husband and see how things are going. The young wife becomes alarmed and says she doesn't know if that's a good idea. "I'm sure it will be better when the baby learns to sleep through the night. Just keep us in prayer, especially that I can learn to be a better mother."

The minister and his wife discuss it, and he decides to call the husband the next day when he knows he'll be on lunch break. After a bit of small talk, he mentions the conversation between their wives and asks how things are going. The husband chuckles apologetically and admits that the arrival of the baby has been "a big adjustment," and he "isn't proud of" some of his responses when the baby keeps them up all night and he is forced to go to work sleep-deprived. To make matters worse, his wife, he says, is like "a different person" since the baby came, and he's still learning how to support her in this new stage of life.

The minister offers some reminiscences of his and his wife's own early family rearing challenges and a few tips for supporting a new mother and baby. The husband thanks him, and requests prayer for both of them to be able to adjust to their roles in the new normal. They hang up and the husband goes back to work.

When the young husband arrives home that evening, he throws the entry door open and closed again with a viciousness that makes his wife jerk up her head in alarm. In two long steps he crosses the kitchen to where she stands at the stove, her mouth hanging open in puzzlement. He pulls her face to within inches of his, and she can feel him shaking.

"HOW DARE YOU go gossiping around to all the ladies about me, you b****! I work myself to the bone to get you a nice house, I put up with your whining day and night, I eat your burned dinners, and THIS is what I get???" He hurls his lunch box into the sink, turns on his heel, and heads to the bathroom for a shower, slamming the bathroom door on the way in.

Later that night, he slaps her for the first time.

A month or so later the minister is at a regional minister's meeting and someone mentions that there's been a lot of talk about domestic violence in the church lately. The minister agrees. "Terrible that such things should be happening in the church. May God have mercy. We are so blessed that we've never had that issue at home. I trust if we ever do, the Lord will give us the wisdom to handle it well."

[Neto]

One thing that is very obvious from the above is that deciding to treat early signs of mental illness is a very good idea. A lot of these problems could have been avoided if someone who started to act bizarre was reigned in early (including requiring such a person to submit to church authority) when they could still be reasoned with. These are not things to handle with kid gloves.

A not-so-young-anymore young (unmarried) man I know is potentially a very brilliant "thinker", also apparently able to easily learn new languages. He had a keen interest in missions work, but he has a chemical imbalance and needs to stay on medication all of the time. When he is on it, he is his real self. But he refuses to take it, and as an adult, no one, not even his parents, can force or convince him. So he lives his life in a fog.

How can the need to use medication be "de-shame-ized" in cases like this?

[Josh]

One thing that is very obvious from the above is that deciding to treat early signs of mental illness is a very good idea. A lot of these problems could have been avoided if someone who started to act bizarre was reigned in early (including requiring such a person to submit to church authority) when they could still be reasoned with. These are not things to handle with kid gloves.

A not-so-young-anymore young (unmarried) man I know is potentially a very brilliant "thinker", also apparently able to easily learn new languages. He had a keen interest in missions work, but he has a chemical imbalance and needs to stay on medication all of the time. When he is on it, he is his real self. But he refuses to take it, and as an adult, no one, not even his parents, can force or convince him. So he lives his life in a fog.

How can the need to use medication be "de-shame-ized" in cases like this?

You can't. Being a schizophrenic (for example) is inherently shameful. The idea of trying to de-stigmatise these things is a bit ridiculous.

Instead, the Christian needs to let go of pride and accept that some things are embarrassing or shameful, and just go forward anyway. That includes being a paranoid schizophrenic who needs to be on powerful psychiatric meds to keep them from hearing voices.