Hannah Allen – Rescued from Serious Mental Struggles

Hannah Allen – Rescued from Serious Mental Struggles

One of the most moving, honest, and encouraging stories of a battle with mental disturbances comes from a 17^th-century English Puritan, Hannah Allen, born around 1638 to pious parents. Her father, John Archer, a merchant, died when she was still young and her mother decided to send her to London to attend school. There, she lived with a paternal aunt until she was 12.

            Her battle with what she describes as “horrible blasphemous thoughts”[1] began when she returned home. She consoled herself thinking that God would forgive her, since she didn’t mean to have them, just as she would forgive a servant who was forced against his will to do something contrary to her mind.

            But the thoughts only grew worse and more insistent, day and night, until she became convinced she had committed the unpardonable sin. She didn’t tell anyone, thinking that no one in the world ever shared her condition. She only found respite when she read in a book by Bolton [no first name given] some comforting words that seemed directed to her. This helped her for some time, then the same thoughts and doubts returned.

            Around 1655, she married a merchant named Hannibal Allen, and had a son. Hannibal was often gone for work, leaving her alone with her thoughts. After about eights years of marriage, he died at sea, and Hannah moved back with her aunt.

Depression and Delusions

By then, her depression had escalated to unbearable levels. Her diary includes an account of her ups and downs – her conviction that she was damned, followed by heartfelt prayers and small rays of hope.

            Once, she heard a thunderclap right above her bed, followed by the voices of two men in her yard “singing for joy that they had overcome” her. She believed them to be devils, and that God had sent them to announce her final damnation.

            By then, she had spoken to her aunt about her doubts. When she revealed this event, her aunt replied: “Do you think God would work a miracle to convince you that you are damned? It is contrary to the manner of God’s proceedings. We do not read of such a thing in all of the Scripture.”[2]

            This wise answer didn’t convince Hannah. To her, it was just a confirmation that she was the worst of all creatures who had ever existed. After then, she took every Bible verse about the fate of the wicked as if they were directed to her.

            When her depression degenerated into an expressed desire to end her life, her aunt looked for help. She spoke of Hannah’s condition to Hannah’s mother, brother, and four uncles, who suggested that Hannah be taken to London where there were physicians dealing with these cases.

            It took much persuasion to convince Hannah to move. “I should surely die by the way,” Hannah said, “and had I not better die in bed? Mother, do you think people will like to have a dead corps in the coach with them?”[3]

            In the end, her mother, “with much patience and importunity, prevailed,” and the two traveled to London, where they stayed with Hannah’s brother while Hannah started some therapy (“physick”) under a local doctor. In the meantime, she continued to talk to her mother of her predictions of death and other strange things that crossed her mind.

            Finally, her mother said, “Well, if you believe you shall be saved if you die not this night, I will believe all that you say to be true if you die this night.”[4] Hannah agreed.

            During the night, they heard four successive loud knocks on their wooden bedroom door,. “See, mother,” Hannah said, “though I died not tonight, the devil came to let you know that I am damned.”

            “But you see, he had no power to come into the chamber,”[5] her mother replied.

            After this, Hannah’s delusions shifted. She became convinced that she was not going to die a natural death, but be taken away and “put to some horrible death.” When she saw a group of men gathered in the street, she told her brother that they or some men like them were sooner or later going to take her to prison.

            This same delusion continued. Whenever she heard people talking, she thought it was devils talking about her or mocking her. Even the flickering lights from their neighbors’ houses were to her “apparitions of devils.”

Suicide Ideations

To avoid the awful possibility to be arrested and executed, she thought of taking her own life. By that time, her mother had left and she spent most of her time alone in her brother’s “large solitary house” where she could easily entertain suicidal ideations.

She thought of taking opium and die in her sleep. In an age when no autopsies were conducted, everyone would think she had died naturally and her son would be spared the humiliation of a suicidal mother.

            She sent her maid to buy some opium, but every time the maid reported that the apothecaries didn’t have it or refused to sell it because it was dangerous. After several failed attempts, Hannah decided to put a spider in a pipe with tobacco, believing it was poisonous. She smoke some before bed. During the night, feeling she was about to die, called her brother and told him what she had done.

            Her brother rushed to the apothecary who gave him some antidote. The next day, he and his uncles decided to move Hannah to a safer place where someone would be home during the day. They took her to the house of some cousins, Peter Walker and his wife, who received her “very courteously.”

            One day, she yielded to a friend’s insistence to attend church. A few days later, she regretted her decision. It was, she said, as though the devil was telling her that she “enough sermons to answer for already.” To avoid going, she found “a place on top of the house, a hole where some boards were laid.” She hid in that narrow space, covered herself with a black scarf, and placed the boards back on top of her. Her plan was to stay there and starve to death. Her family would think she had wandered off and got lost in the woods, she thought.

            This plan didn’t work because after three days she was so hungry and cold that she called for help, and someone came to get her out.

            The local minister tried to bring her the good news of the gospel. “that she might hear the word of joy and gladness, so that the bones that God had broken might rejoice.”[6] But Hannah wrote him a letter explaining that his words would just add “a few scalding drops of the fury of the Almighty” to her soul, and encouraged him to pray instead “to God that he will rid the world immediately of such a monster, who am not only guilty of all the sins of the Devil, but likewise of such crimes as he is not capable of, which you will say is incredible, but woe and alas, ‘tis true.”[7]

            She could not finish her letter because the minister arrived while she was writing. His words didn’t have much of an effect on her but she agreed to spend a week at his house. Even that didn’t help much. Every time the minister’s wife invited her to pray, Hannah excused herself, thinking that her sinful lips were not fit to pronounce God’s name.

            Back at her cousins’ house, she continued her suicide ideations, either by spiders or by cutting her wrists. Since a local doctor was trying to ease her condition by blood-letting, she took advantage of one of his visits to take off the bandage he had placed on her vein when he left, and ran to her room, hoping she would bleed to death. But her cousin saw her and ran after her to stop her.

            She tried other methods, including asking a coachman to take her to the woods where she had planned to stay and die. But she changed her mind, and asked him to take her back. Looking back at this time in her life, Hannah gave credit to the Lord for stopping her.

            At times, Hannah would ask her cousin if he pitied her for being headed to hell. “Yes,” he answered, “If I thought it were true I would pity you, but I do not believe it.”[8]

            Since the famous author and preacher Richard Baxter had written about melancholy, Peter Walker tried to get him to visit Hannah, but he never came. Hannah didn’t expect Baxter would take time to visit someone like her, although she secretly wished he would. Previously, some writings by Baxter had convinced her that the love she formerly had for God was “carnal and diabolical.”[9] But when her cousin asked her if she would be convinced of her salvation if Baxter told her she was safe, she said yes.

            But if Hannah might have been willing to listen to Baxter, she didn’t want to listen to anyone else. When her grandmother told her of the great mercies we find in Christ, Hannah replied, “It had been better for me if there had never been a savior. Then I should have gone to hell at a cheaper rate.”[10]

            Her aunt didn’t give up. Since Hannah’s moods were up and down, she took advantage of the good moments to try to convince her that she was delusional. Normally, this only served to irritate Hannah, who would ask her to leave her alone: “Methink you might let me have a little quiet while I am out of hell.”[11]

            Throughout all this, she ate so little and lost so much weight that a neighbor said she had “death in her face.”[12]

God’s Faithfulness

            But God was not done with her. Once, a couple of long-standing friends, the Shorthoses, announced that they were coming to visit. Hannah had always liked this couple, but this time she didn’t want to see them. Moved by her tears, her aunt promised she would not take them to her, and kept her word. When the couple insisted, she said she could not break her word, or else Hannah would never trust her again.

            The second night of the couple’s visit, while they and Hannah’s aunt were dining at another friend’s house, the Shorthoses stole away and went back to the aunt’s house, walking in the house through the back door and surprising Hannah in the kitchen. Hannah ran to the fireplace and held up the tongs, screaming that her aunt had betrayed her.

            Reassuring her that her aunt didn’t know they had come, the Shorthoses managed to calm down Hannah and to bring her to the parlor where they conversed for a while. Encouraged by her response, they returned the next day and invited her to spend the summer at their house, promising that they would not force her to do anything she would not want to do. She agreed.

            Mr. Shorthose had some training as a physician and knew other physicians in town who prescribed some treatment for Hannah. Under his care, she began to improve, so much that at the end of the summer she was visiting friends and attending worship.

            “As my melancholy came by degrees, so it wore off by degrees,” she said, “and as my dark melancholy bodily distempers abated, so did my spiritual maladies also, and God convinced me by degrees that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humors, and not from myself, and this God cleared up to me more and more, and accordingly my love to, and delight in religion increased. And it is my desire that, less this great affliction should be a stumbling block to any, it may be known (since my case is published) that I evidently perceive that God did it in much mercy and faithfulness to my soul, and though for the present it was a bitter cup, yet it was but what the only wise God saw I had need according to that place, 1 Peter 1:6, ‘Tho’ now for a season ye are in heaviness through manyfold temptations.’”[13]

            Eventually, Hannah married again, this time to a widower from Warwickshire named Charles Hatt, who allowed her to “live very comfortably,” she said, “both as to my inward and outward man; my husband being one that truly fears God.”

Looking Back

Hannah saw her painful condition as a distemper of both body and soul. She opened her story with this statement: “The soul of man has a singular affection for its own body, rejoicing in its prosperity and sympathizing with it in all its maladies, miseries, and necessities. Hence if the body be out of frame and tune, the soul cannot be well at ease.”[14]

            She exhorted the reader to consider her story and other similar ones “with fear and trembling. How knowest thou but it may be thine own case? Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall. The peace, the comforts, the quiet, the joys natural and spiritual, they are all from grace; you have no longer a lease on them, no longer term of injoying them than the good will and pleasure of him who dwelt in the burning bush. ... As for the scoffers and mockers at such relations, that burlesque and ridicule these great instances of divine providence, I shall say nothing but ‘tis the sin of our age, foretold 1600 years ago, and accomplished in our day, an exercise for the present and possibly for surviving saints.”[15]

            Hannah concluded her book in 1681, signing her introduction as “Thy soul-fiend and servant for Jesus sake.” She ended the last pages with three passages from Scripture: Isaiah 43:1-2; James 5:11; and 1 John 4:4 – each of them experienced personally in her own life.