Tag: mental health

Desiring God and Mental Health: Name It Claim It for Your Brain (UPDATED)

Update at the end of the post…
Last week, I wrote about Kenneth and Gloria Copeland who think you can speak cures for PTSD and the flu. Today, I present a different form of name it claim it – John Piper’s Desiring God and anti-mirror therapy for mental health. Earlier today, Desiring God tweeted:


Repeat after me: Mental health is health. Mental illness is illness. Brain is body.
I suspect John Piper would cringe to think he has something in common with the Copelands but turning mental health into a spiritual fruit is in that ballpark.
Copeland says soldiers can get rid of their PTSD with a dose of Scripture. Desiring God prescribes a spiritual refocus as if those who are mentally healthy are spiritually sound.
Perhaps I am sensitive to this message due to my clinical experience with Christians. I have seen the damaging effects of messages like this and know how Christians with mental health diagnoses hear this.
Tweets like the one from Desiring God reinforce the misconception that mental health conditions can be overcome by willpower or positive thinking. Those who struggle have to deal with their illness and the stigma from those in the church who spiritualize their illness. Although beyond the scope of this post, an important issue is that, generally speaking, evangelicals have not grappled with the reality of brain as body. Consciousness arises from brain and does not reside in a spiritual substance independent of body. Like it or not, if you don’t deal with this, I don’t think you understand who we are as human beings. Knock out certain parts of our brain and we become different people. I don’t think I have ever heard a sermon or Sunday school series on the religious significance of our brains.
Some people using the Tweet advice will find comfort because they have positive associations in their brains to images of God which might take their minds off a negative personal preoccupation. However, someone else with different brain chemistry and history may not make the same associations. They may try to work their brains in the same way, but due to something out of their conscious control, their feelings do not respond in the same way. They do not and cannot find mental health no matter how long they stop staring in the mirror.
When those who don’t succeed with anti-mirror therapy go to church, they feel even worse because their faith is questioned. They are told, even if subtly or indirectly, that they don’t have enough faith. If they just believed harder or put God first, or dealt with the sin in their lives, then the advice would work.
Last year, a friend of mine wrote about the frustration of depression:

Occasionally, bouts of depression are triggered by obvious catalysts, like losing a job or loved one or some kind of overt trauma. Often, though, nothing is “wrong”. We’re not upset or sad or angry or stressed about anything particular, but our body is deploying hormones as though we’re being attacked.
It is these episodes that are most frustrating to the friends and family of people who have depression; they don’t know what to do to help because there’s seemingly nothing wrong. The victims of those moments find it doubly frustrating, as a silent, crushing dread slowly bears down on our souls, challenging us to find a name for it.

This frustration is compounded by Christians conflating mental health with spiritual status. If the Desiring God tweet had said enlightenment or satisfaction or something other than mental health would come from staring at God’s beauty, that would be fine. I hope John Piper and his crew will pull that tweet and clarify that they are not the Copelands.
 
UPDATE (2/6/18): Not long after I published this article, Desiring God posted the following Tweet:


The link is to a 2007 tribute by John Piper to Clyde Kilby. This follow up tweet is confusing because the original tweet which aroused so much reaction isn’t found in the 2007 article. The closest statement to it is this statement attributed to Kilby by Piper:

Stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, and start drinking in the remedies of God in nature.

This isn’t at all what Desiring God originally tweeted. The “remedies of God in nature” could easily refer to medication or therapy or an experience in nature. Since Piper quoted it approvingly I don’t really know what Kilby meant. In any case, I am less concerned with the Kilby article and more concerned with the spin engaged in by whoever is running the Twitter account at Desiring God.

How Would a Biblical Counselor Handle This Case?

photo-1473508476344-269a87b502ee_optOn Monday, I wrote about the conflict between adherents of biblical counseling and Christian psychology. Biblical counseling denies the role of psychology in counseling while Christian psychology (as proposed by former Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Eric Johnson) uses the research and insights of psychologists to enhance counseling.
In the recent post, I mentioned a document titled 95 Theses for an Authentically Christian Commitment to Counseling. The document was written by Heath Lambert, a SBTS professor and executive director of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. Lambert said that the theses were written to stimulate debate. This post and future posts on the topic are written as a response to the theses.
I want to start by discussing the following statements and present a case study. I intend to send this post to Dr. Lambert and will post any response he sends.

The Nature of Counseling and the Content of Scripture
6. When people experience difficulties as they live in a fallen world, they require wisdom about life to help them face these problems (Prov 19:20).
7. The wisdom to confront life’s difficulties is most often communicated in conversations our culture refers to as counseling.
8. The issues of concern in counseling pertain to problems people face as they relate the difficulties in their life to the faith and practice described in Scripture.
9. Because counseling problems concern the very same issues that God writes about in his Word, it is essential to have a conversation about the contents of the Bible to solve counseling problems.
10. The subject matter of counseling conversations is the wisdom needed to deal with life’s problems, and so counseling is not a discipline that is fundamentally informed by science, but by the teaching found in God’s Word.
11. When the Bible claims to address all the issues concerning life and godliness, it declares itself to be a sufficient and an authoritative resource to address everything essential for counseling conversations (2 Pet 1:3-4).
12. Christians must not separate the authority of Scripture for counseling from the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling because, if Scripture is to be a relevant authority, then it must be sufficient for the struggles people face as they live life in a fallen world (2 Pet 1:3-21).
13. The authority and sufficiency of Scripture for counseling means that counselors must counsel out of the conviction that the theological content of Scripture defines and directs the conversational content of counseling.
14. The Bible teaches that the person and work of Jesus Christ provide God’s sufficient power to solve every problem of humanity so, according to Scripture, he is the ultimate subject of every counseling conversation (Col 2:2-3).

According to the statements above, a Christian approach to counseling should address life’s difficulties, and involve the Bible and Jesus Christ alone as the solutions to all problems. At the outset, we might have a disagreement about the proper subject matter for counseling. I accept the reality of mental and emotional disorders and believe that counseling conversations may also involve techniques and information which do not come directly from the Bible. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me first present the case (some identifying details have been changed).

A mother and her second grade son attended the first session together. The father was at work. A meeting with them revealed that the youngster was afraid to remain in his school classroom. The boy attended a local public school and had never been afraid to go to school before. However, within the first month of school, his pattern was to enter school and remain in his classroom. After just a few minutes, he bolted from the room to the school office seemingly in terror and asked for his parents. This had been going on for about a month nearly every day. He remained in school on days his class attended field trips or out of class activities (e.g., library days). The parents had tried alternating morning rides to school and his father had carried him back into the classroom on multiple occasions only to have the same result. He bolted from the class looking for his parents.
On examination, the boy had male typical interests, played rough and tumble sports, was tall for his age, and was socially popular. He had never displayed separation anxiety beyond the norm prior to this year. In all respects except the fear of remaining in his classroom, the boy and his family (one older female sibling) seemed entirely normal and unremarkable from a mental health standpoint. The parents were leaders in their Christian church and the boy happily attended Sunday School and had professed a belief in Jesus as his Savior.

I realize this puts any respondent at a disadvantage. I have the details and know how the case turned out. However, I am curious to know if this kind of situation would be taken on by a biblical counselor. Given the statements concerning the sufficiency of the Bible to handle all problems, I wonder how a biblical counselor would begin and what kind of interventions would be considered.
If I don’t hear from ACBC, then I will give my best guess about how a biblical counselor would respond based on the 95 theses, and then explain how I responded, and why I think this case is relevant to the discussion about biblical counseling and Christians in psychology.
To read all posts in this series, click here.

Fallout from the Arizona shooting

Most people commenting on the Arizona shooting are speculating about motive, the role of public discourse on the shooter, and the shooter’s mental health.  I confess my bias from the start – from what I have read, the shooter Jared Loughner sounds like he is paranoid schizophrenic. Of course, I am not engaging in a formal diagnosis since I have no direct data. However, the signs are certainly suggestive.

What is bound to happen for some time to come is the blaming of the event on ideology. The left seems to be pulling out Sarah Palin’s use of bullseyes on Giffords district and the right is doing the same – apparently some disgruntled far left people also know how to use bullseyes. For some reason, The Daily Kos removed a post which had some very disturbing things to say about Rep. Giffords.

In any case, my personal view is that efforts to locate this horrible act in ideology is a mistake. As with other shootings, I think mental illness is underestimated by policy makers. Apparently there were warning signs which were “handled” but were not addressed in any meaningful way. The curent laws do not allow for a long term response to signs of instability, but rather on short term detention for people who might seem to be a danger to themselves or others.

The right and left will blame each side for the tragedy, but I hope at some point we will come together and look at the need for a more comprehensive policy relating to the treatment of severe mental illness and the long term treatment needs of those afflicted.

North Jersey magazine says “Don’t blame mom”

I am quoted often in this article by Kathryn Davis on parenting, primarily mothering and various adult outcomes, including homosexuality and eating disorders. Her initial focus is autism:

In his book, Teaching Individuals with Developmental Delays, author O. Ivar Lovaas notes, “The number of proposed causes was limitless because professionals found it easy to be inventive, considering their ignorance of the etiology of behavioral delays. These delays already tend to be amplified by the parents’ guilt and anxiety over the possibility of having contributed to the problem (a characteristic of most parents regardless of the child’s problem).”

Lovaas was a behaviorist who taught George Rekers. Rekers adapted the behaviorism into his treatment of GID but did not follow his teacher’s skepticism of parental cause for childhood issues.

Today Show on PANDAS

Back in the spring, I wrote an article on Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus (PANDAS). The disorder has opened my eyes to the potential role of bacteria in mental illness. Recently, the Today Show did a segment on PANDAS with a remarkable case of a boy attending school at nearby Carnegie-Mellon University. Watch and learn.


 

I also blogged at length about this condition. Part one dealt with the condition and part two with a potential paradigm shift in mental health and part three developed an interactionist perspective.