Friday, May 11, 2007
Therapy or Confession?
Justin Taylor linked a while back to a WSJ piece on the increasing acceptance of psychology amongst the religious. I found this paragraph rather troubling:
So, for example, in cases of clinical depression (something I have more historical experience with than I commonly admit) the medication certainly provides an easy way of dealing with it, but can it be said to be curative? But more importantly, can it be said to be developmental?
Is coping enough? I, for one, do not think so. Christ does not intend for us to cope, He intends for us to be remade. I cannot help but believe that mental illness and disease are symptoms of our fallen state, not our recreated state. If we are true to Christ's calling, should we not seek; wherever possible, to cure rather than cope?
But where the line? - that is the important question. In some cases on mental illness, cure simply is not possible. I have a close family member that has been variably diagnosed as schizophrenic for more than 30 years. One thing is for sure. No amount of time "on the couch" is going to help him. Medication has been a Godsend. While he has never achieved "productive member of society" status, he has been brought to a point of individual independence and not harming himself or others.
But then there is my personal struggle, long enough ago that today's rip-one-off-the-script-pad solutions did not exist. Was overcoming that hard work? Some of the hardest I have ever known. It would have been much easier to reach for the pill bottle. But through it I discovered Christ in ways I am confident I never would have otherwise.
You see in the end, I had to succumb completely to the feelings of hopelessness and lack of control that drove my depression, at the bottom of them I discovered that I really had no hope and I genuinely had no control. But there was Jesus, who gave me hope and into whose control I had to place myself to survive.
I am all for physchoanalytical stuff, I actually think it is the protestant equivalent of the confessional - it was for me and as such it was a blessing. But I think we need to be careful about the medical, I think we can stand in God's way.
Related Tags: psychology, medicine, moods, confession
But Christians have also been more willing to engage in psychology thanks to recent advances in science. "Mental illnesses are now more often understood as being diseases rather than character flaws," says Jay Pope, a professor of psychology at Fresno Pacific University, a Christian college. "Christians," he notes, "never begrudge a person for taking anticonvulsants for epilepsy; nowadays the stigma attached to taking psychotropic medications for psychological problems has lessened."There are mental illnesses, I do not deny that, but the ability to treat a condition of any sort with medication is not, to my mind useful for delineating between a disease and a character flaw. We simply do not understand the chicken-and-egg question concerning mental state and brain chemistry well enough. Do moods control chemistry, or is it the other way around? Best I can tell, it is a cycle into which we arbitrarily drive a stake and say it starts here.
So, for example, in cases of clinical depression (something I have more historical experience with than I commonly admit) the medication certainly provides an easy way of dealing with it, but can it be said to be curative? But more importantly, can it be said to be developmental?
Is coping enough? I, for one, do not think so. Christ does not intend for us to cope, He intends for us to be remade. I cannot help but believe that mental illness and disease are symptoms of our fallen state, not our recreated state. If we are true to Christ's calling, should we not seek; wherever possible, to cure rather than cope?
But where the line? - that is the important question. In some cases on mental illness, cure simply is not possible. I have a close family member that has been variably diagnosed as schizophrenic for more than 30 years. One thing is for sure. No amount of time "on the couch" is going to help him. Medication has been a Godsend. While he has never achieved "productive member of society" status, he has been brought to a point of individual independence and not harming himself or others.
But then there is my personal struggle, long enough ago that today's rip-one-off-the-script-pad solutions did not exist. Was overcoming that hard work? Some of the hardest I have ever known. It would have been much easier to reach for the pill bottle. But through it I discovered Christ in ways I am confident I never would have otherwise.
You see in the end, I had to succumb completely to the feelings of hopelessness and lack of control that drove my depression, at the bottom of them I discovered that I really had no hope and I genuinely had no control. But there was Jesus, who gave me hope and into whose control I had to place myself to survive.
I am all for physchoanalytical stuff, I actually think it is the protestant equivalent of the confessional - it was for me and as such it was a blessing. But I think we need to be careful about the medical, I think we can stand in God's way.
Related Tags: psychology, medicine, moods, confession
