Notes by Doug Muder (1997)

Peck makes the point that, by transmitting the incongruity between our individual will and God's will, the symptoms of mental illness are themselves a gift of grace. "Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. … Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including he very symptoms from which they have recovered. 'My depression and my anxiety attacks were the best things that ever happened to me,' they will routinely say at the termination of successful therapy. Even if they emerge from therapy without a belief in God, such successful patients still generally do so with a very real sense that they have been touched by grace." [page 296]

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