So do men oftentimes find their greatest cross where they expected their greatest comfort. Sin has unhinged the whole creation, and made every relation susceptible of the crook. In the family are found masters hard and unjust, servants froward and unfaithful; in a neighborhood, men selfish and uneasy; in the church, ministers unedifying, and offensive in their walk, and people contemptuous and disorderly, a burden to the spirits of ministers; in the state, magistrates oppressive, and discountenancers of that which is good, subjects turbulent and seditious. All these cause crooks in the lot of their relatives. – Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot
The following is a part of my series of five blog posts that are meant to build anticipation for my upcoming book, “After Psychosis: How Biblical Counseling Can Help.” They are each almost completely cut and pasted from the Book and placed in the following as excerpts.
Chapter Three: Presumed Cultural Causes of Severe Mental Illness
Just like there are presumed cures for severe mental illness, there are presumed causes also, and some of those presumed causes are cultural! Ronald Laing was a British psychoanalyst who promoted the idea that psychosis was a sane reaction to an insane world. This appealed to people who were in the midst of the 1960’s cultural upheavals, and it is not hard to see why some people have speculated that mental illness is simply that! Ronald Laing himself would later admit that, even though everyone looked to him for the answers, he had none. Tragically, his own daughter suffered with the same illness as well.[1]
And there are things we blame modern culture for almost exclusively at times for schizophrenia or bipolar and others. Many individuals try to solve these, but none of us have seen any conclusive answers because the cause is most likely either variegated or undiscovered.
At the same time, the list that follows does have some impact on all of us, and they do cause mental health issues to some degree when considered broadly. But it is necessary to distinguish between severe mental health issues and the more typical forms of mental illness that might still be biologically based in some form or another. These can also be helped significantly by certain practices and counseling. Sometimes, anxiety and bouts with depression can be alleviated or cured in some sense by certain measures or means as previously expressed.
But it is foolish to place all of the blame for severe mental illness on one of the following items, or on all of them, just as it is likewise foolish to say that your personal area of expertise is the best cure for them (like some people do with diets). At the same time, I am in fact building a case for how the Bible itself contributes to real spiritual relief. I know for a fact that this has been my own story. I could not have majored in anything else in college that would have helped lift my spirits more and contributed to a healthier lifestyle nor left me with a stronger sense of community support. Biblical study has yielded all the personal benefits to my soul that have helped me the most. But what are those social ills that seem to hurt the most?
- Social Media
Some have attributed the rise of mental health problems to the rise of social media. And it is easier to feel like some kind of “big brother is watching me” because of the constant barrage of feedback we get from ads via Facebook and our own email. I can buy a product at Walgreens and see that very same product advertised on my newsfeed later in the day. I can even just talk about it and see it later!
Most people don’t think about this issue like it’s a big deal. They don’t seem alarmed by Google always “taking in topics that I speak to my relatives about” and then in turn trading hands with advertising agencies (however that happens). I actually have very little knowledge of how all that works. I just know that Facebook etc. can feel pointedly like an overbearing relationship or maybe an addictive relationship where you feel a need for constant feedback not always for the best reasons.
I have also witnessed a great deal of schizophrenics, who experience psychosis the most, complain about “propaganda” in advertising and in television/entertainment. I really believe that schizophrenics, from what I can tell, and from personal experience, are so inescapably reading into things that, given how psychological all the advertising alone as well as the movies are, they feel strongly as if it is all about them. The algorithms social media uses to target them really do strike these overtones. Their over-active minds cannot cope with the “seductive” nature of this and of entertainment in general.
All of this misses the fact that bullying and peer pressure are severe on many young people who are also on social media. This can and does lead to suicidal thoughts and ideations or severe anxiety! It is also worth considering the fact that a parent should keep their child off of social media completely for a significant time.
- Entertainment
I believe that I am right in saying that perhaps the first novel, or at least the first writing that led to our modern-day novel, was Don Quixote, which was originally published in Spanish.
I have an audiobook version of this work in Spanish on Audible. I have not progressed on my Babbel app enough (And perhaps never will) to start to trudge my way through some of its perhaps more sophisticated verbiage, but language learning helps build neuroplasticity which improves our mental abilities to adapt to the struggles we can possibly face as individuals. I encourage people if they are not as adept at language to really take this topic a little seriously, to at least get on the Duolingo app and enjoy language acquisition like it’s a game.
At any rate, Don Quixote was profound in its day because its author, Miguel de Cervantes, leads the reader through a barrage of characters who have deep psychological attributes. It is, in fact, a tale about a knight who is ironically losing his mind on a quest.
The reason I bring this up is because entertainment today has taken even deeper turns psychologically also. I say this not as an authority, but as a personal opinion. Any action movie or adventure movies that I see tend to be very rapid-fire with a lot of snarky, quick conversations and innuendos. There are a lot of seductive interests and exaggerated emotions. Even cartoons are similar. Movies in general don’t have the slow, dramatic march that a lot of stuff even in the 90’s, for example, seemed to have.
Of course, I am speaking from personal experience, and I have no authority as a movie critic. All I am suggesting is that all of this random and erratic stimulus does havoc to some minds. It is little wonder that more and more people are generally disconnected and engrossed in these things and immature!
Actually, there is a lot of post-modern preoccupation with dystopian confusion in entertainment. Of course, mentally-ill and psychotic people grab a hold of this. Normative control is focused on the expression of individual personality and taste, which is not a completely awful orientation in certain respects, and psychotic people do enjoy that cultural atmosphere. But that is why there are so many references to red pills (from “The Matrix”) and rabbit holes (from “Alice in Wonderland”) by psychotics. And there are so many more.
Yet, it is not uncommon for psychotic people to believe that there is symbolism and subliminal messages within movies and tv shows. They may even look for these messages to them while driving down the road or being out in public. That could be why they so value their private life. They tend to preoccupy themselves with those supposed elements rather than understanding what the storyline in a movie is portraying in itself. And often it is conflated with their own ego as is their interactions with anyone they might meet. But entertainment is the greatest source of escape for most people, and psychotic people use it in a similar vein, as do most people.
As an example, I remember a girl at blockbuster who claimed that scientists had predicted that humans evolving into X-Men was next in our evolutionary process! I also worked with a guy that believed rather adamantly that Marvel Movies were based on real-life stories. I am not sure what he meant, but he wouldn’t walk it back or qualify that somehow.
Kids are fixated on entertainment from very early ages. And they are plugged into it when they can scarcely tell what is real or not. I do feel that it is a slippery slope for all of us. Could it be that the heart of our built-in reverential and religious bent as human beings is being rather unwittingly manipulated by a subtle type of propagandistic entertainment? More people know all the latest from Hollywood before they are very much aware of anything really substantial apart from the “political activism of their favorite Hollywood crush.” Sounds a lot like worship and reverence.
It actually could be said that DC and Marvel are literally transported forms of mythology in secular garb. And the typical person absorbs hours of entertainment a week! While at the same time, they express zero to no interest in the theology of the Word of God! They would rather fill up their minds with “secularized myths” about superheroes who solve made-up world problems! Again, I am only speaking from what I have seen. Everyone has heard statistics to this effect at some point or another.
In fact, the message of Hollywood and entertainment in general is always progressive politically speaking. The politically correct agenda of the day is the real essence of entertainment, and it always goes against God’s intrinsic order in ways that are all too appealing. In fact, this counter-intuitive and counter-model to family dynamics and traditional political and economic hierarchy has always been an element of ancient myths and legends dating back to Greco-Roman and pagan alike where sexuality and morbidity were also prominent as they are today.
But complicating this somewhat, American culture is so fast paced! The cities are generally even faster paced. This doesn’t help with anxiety issues or feelings of suspicion. And severely mentally ill people have a lot of that already.
However, a combined natural side-effect of this fast-paced lifestyle and our preoccupation with entertainment is a total lack of community involvement or support. Things needed such as nurture and care must be amply supplied by the church. I testify that I got an overabundance of care and support in spite of it all, as well as spiritual rebuke in the best of terms, though I was still somewhat skeptical of that fact in my past.
Yet, I got just what I needed because God blessed me. Somehow, God managed to mature me socially and spiritually through stressful issues without a medication cocktail. However, I should have gone to the psychiatrist a lot earlier in recent history rather than suffer needlessly. Yet, I was afraid of practically becoming some kind of “medicinally inoculated” zombie because of increasing dosages, which can be part of the fear for guys like me.
There is just a confusing process that happens before all that does occur because the very organ of your body that helps you decipher your own need for meds and help is not operating properly! It literally took the humiliation of occupational dysfunction for me to garner the humility to seek help. But the biblical counseling so graciously supplied to me, along with the meds, have both applied right to the deep-seated issues both spiritual and physical that are a result of the condition I will likely always suffer from in life.
- What about Familial Relationships?
I am now also very much appreciative of the help and nurture of loved ones in stressful times, which leads me to another point. Mental illness is also said to be on the rise because of the absolute turmoil our family life has taken in this era. And yet it is not at all appropriate to blame family turmoil for severe mental illness. I need to clarify that up front. Do not blame families for biological disease!
But at the same time, insecurity and heartbreak and perhaps stress and anxiety associated with mental health concerns in general are on the rise because of family disunity. We heard so often in the 90’s as Christian, homeschool kids about the destruction of the nuclear family and all the honestly somewhat vain efforts, just in retrospect, to “capture the culture for Christ” by sending out your kids like arrows who were trained up in the way that they should go, as the popular Proverb says (and is misunderstood to say). I confess that I wish for those times back! They were far more preferable to the compromise we see now!
It seems no matter how hard you try, we are all inescapably impacted by our culture, and that is why there must be a focus on grace in parenting and for the parents themselves! I am simply so very grateful to be 40 years old, and to be able to afford medication all the time, but truly to be given the opportunity in life to repent as well. God is so good that He has allowed me to live long enough to have the chance to confront my own past and long-standing sins!
But that family support structure and the need to have a Biblical family that has your back and allows you to be yourself, even when that self is a little weird, is critical. We have lost that in our culture. Instead, we have fragmented relationships and backbiting. We have split holidays and subtle jabs at the dinner table (or Facebook more commonly), if families even eat together anymore!
Christians must make every effort to return to strong and supportive families by grace through faith alone. And a strong, dynamic understanding of grace is the single greatest component in that effort. We are the ones who attempt to stem the tide of culture. It doesn’t occur to us how critical this effort is, even in an albeit limited sense, to mental health. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Yet God has designed traditional families to be the hedge against these very destructive things in our culture also.
That being said, do not be the person who sees a schizophrenic, or clinically depressed, or bipolar young person and blame their family somehow. That is entirely inappropriate. There are very real things going on biologically that better account for their situation than simply their family dynamic. Of course family dynamics can cause stress and depressed feelings, but when someone is clinically and severely depressed, it is absolutely insulting to presume that if they just repented and dealt with their family issues right, then the problem would be solved.
4. Stress and Insomnia
Stress and insomnia, as common as they are in the modern world, are also medically linked to psychosis. More on this to come, but some biblical counselors dating back to Jay Adams have attributed these issues, often connected with “sins against the body,” to the root cause of psychotic episodes and schizophrenia. These are key to certain of these individuals’ assertions that sin is still the cause of mental illness. And certainly, there are a lot of biblical counselors who do not agree on these issues at all. I believe that most biblical counselors are not really onboard with this way of thinking currently, but that is just my opinion. Yet some of them still make everything of this with a lot of assertiveness.
I should also say that there are different biblical counseling organizations. There are a lot of people in this movement at large, and there can be a lot of disparity in their views on this one specific topic, more disparity than on most other issues! I prefer the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC), but even they can vary in their conclusions about psychosis and schizophrenia.
Some may even know it is a complicated issue, but they would rather attribute proverbial madness to not taking care of oneself or just to a need for more Niacin or other things in your body rather than to allow such people as myself to be proverbial “victims of biology.” And this is seen as very compassionate because if we were just defined as “chemically imbalanced,” then how could we be truly helped with God’s grace and real spiritual guidance! This is misguided, but we would remain “sinful” because of a possibly unnecessary reliance on medication as if it were some kind of real solution in itself! They may even go through extensive arguments trying to persuade us of this even though mainline psychiatry does not even in its own right instantly prescribe pills for every condition. Often, psychologists can offer tangible guidance and talk therapy as well.
At the same time, some biblical counselors do not concur with these arguments. I personally tend to side with these biblical counselors if only due to my own experiences and the real help I have received, not just from medication but from counseling. I can only say what I have found to be true of me and my own case, and that’s simply that I personally need medication, which indicates a biological basis of some kind! And I have found countless others like me who are in the same situation. Ultimately, if someone claims to have all the answers, then they usually aren’t worth listening to any more than random articles online that pop up claiming to have untapped treatment solutions that really work, but without hard case studies!
In fact, I do believe that there are enough cases where people who exhibit psychotic symptoms do recover, due to some of these things having been related, that the “solution” always seems valid to some people who are prone to believe the critics. However, the fact is that if a psychotic person recovered, then they never actually had the real underlying illness. I don’t cite sources for this specifically here because I cited some of the best available to me in my 2016 book where I developed these things more in-depth, and I don’t think that repeating myself here would be in the best interest of my current theme which is meant to fully support real biblical counsel in spite of certain authors who seem to be very anti-psychiatry!
At the same time, devout Christians have unquestionably suffered for years with mental and physical maladies. If these counter-cultural biblical counselors are right, then regardless, why are there never any huge numbers of tangible success stories to speak of despite their albeit massive amounts of knowledge to this effect? Nor does there ever seem to be real gains in recoveries despite so much supposed “certainty” as to the fact that mental illness is a myth. These same authors do not document all the people they could have supposedly cured, which I would presume to be possible if the illness itself was as “fictional” as they say. At best, it remains true that for every success story, there are ten failed stories of trying these different approaches, and usually the success stories that are published are from people who are only beginning to show symptoms or to have just been diagnosed. It can seem like the proverbial “uneven leg that was healed at the local miracle service.”
5.) Psychological Abuse
Even though Neil deGrasse Tyson and others have speculated that neuroscience will soon make mental illness obsolete in the not-so-distant future, I don’t pretend to be so optimistic. Some people, not biblical counselors, seem to think that being very spiritual is ultimately the key to addressing these things as they look back in time for answers either from the bible itself or to puritans for guidance.
This can be a source of harsh reactions toward hurting people. This sort of behavior causes real suffering, as real as that experienced at the hands of drunkards or by negligence. I doubt that neuroscience can really cure all this. And there are countless examples of persons who experience psychological abuse who turn out to have or develop severe mental illness. As I have likewise written, it is true in these cases also that stress, even undo stress and trauma, can trigger mental illness. It can simply be a tragic result, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t biological also.
And in spite of all that darkness, David Brainard as well as William Cowper are two devout and sincere Christians who are historic examples of what is clearly major depressive disorder who did not become so due to psychological abuse. Not to mention the countless men and women who have suffered with psychosis for whatever reason but have not made history due to their “shameful” insanity. It seems strange that we as Christians would not make allowance for the biological basis of schizophrenia or of psychosis as a disease of the mind if we as saints still “made allowance” for so many other mental disorders besides these, even if we just referred to them in less formal ways as simply “depression” or “melancholy.” Obviously, something was wrong with these individuals even though they were devout all the while!
Too often, we are trying to split hairs about the nature of the soul and the body, which perhaps I am guilty of at times, but we portend these analyses lead to greater precision in counseling methodology. I think the results in respect to the topic of psychosis are not there. We are psychosomatic beings who have bodily ailements on the one extreme and spiritual ailments on the other with a “muddy middle” that my current pastor mentions where you can’t really split hairs. Each person and situation is different and equally muddy. It is important to remember this for the topic at hand.
Apparently, the types of laymen and spiritual leaders I mentioned would rather persons who are literally psychotic, likewise suffer without the aid of medication and rely on spirituality and biblical self-care because that is more “spiritual.” The worst legalistic resources hang these themes over you, and at the same time, the worst entertainment and popular wisdom rather administers to your spiritual problems a chill nihilism, so you at least have the luxury of saying nothing really matters anyway. They simply assert the blunt reality that “We are all broken people.” Which of these is better – passivity or hyper-control?
6.) The Cult of Victimhood
Many psychotics love it, but the cult of victimhood and nihilism seems nowhere more immediately relevant to this topic, in my limited history of entertainment viewing, than in the 2019 film, The Joker. I appreciated it and hated it all at once. On the one hand, it was very epic in portraying the confusion of a mentally ill person, but it was very much like a social justice film for schizophrenics. I mean, I can’t say much more about it. It left me somewhat sick by the time I finished it.
But this film aside, I do sometimes wonder about the inherent worth there is in finding people who are victims and lifting them up as shining examples for the world. Is this all the result? Is it possible that this actual obsession is a contributing element to the rise of mental health issues? Is this Satan’s anti-theology? Is it that we are so inherently needy for the satisfaction of some kind of “social victim medal of honor” that we are consequently pushing some people into a drive to be damaged in some very special way, shape, or form? I don’t want to suggest that this is even the case most of the time, but could it be to some extent? Why is there a rise in emotional and mental health problems besides? How does social media interplay with this? And there are many factors to consider, some of which we already have. Entertainment and the breakup of the nuclear family, are all just a couple.
All that to say, you can either choose to be a victim who desires justice (as twisted as that can be), or you can be someone who would rather lay aside your wants and interests for the good of others. Even if you are a victim, you have a choice to lay down your selfishness and set aside what you want in some capacity so that others are blessed. That may be the one way in which you can become better than a victim.
How refreshing it is generally speaking to find someone who really suffers, but who is setting aside his personal time and is purposed to serve others with no strings attached. That, my friends, is what a struggling saint does! The struggling person without Christ can only express his wants and frustrations and selfishness and still brag about his victimhood. I dare you to be better than that! Volunteer to work for free! You have to start somewhere even if it is at the bottom. Serve selflessly even while you suffer, even if you can only do that in small ways with your family.
The world doesn’t know this form of spiritual vitality. They want to find, while smoking a cigarette (a common problem among psychotics as nicotine helps with clarity of thought[1]), solace in the irreconcilable and meaningless turn of events that made them who they are. It is a subtle joke that life makes of their story, and they like it that way. The only final answer is carpe diem, which is just the alternative we tend to desire apart from Christ!
Christians instead surrender to God’s design on their lives as purposeful, only they don’t find solace at the bottom of a wine glass or in pornography or in other forms of escapism. The alternative but real truth for these nonbelievers is actually worse than they imagine! The truth is that everything you do in life does matter because Jesus is Lord! They cannot abide that one true alternative.
The reason this point about victimhood is almost last is because it is also a very good final summation. Just because you or someone you know has suffered greatly in one or more of these ways, or even in terrible ways not mentioned above, is absolutely no reason to throw in the proverbial towel or to blame life events or people. You can become better than that! Ultimately, when you blame life, you blame God who gave you your life so that you could glorify Him with your response to it. Don’t succumb to these thoughts. Surrender your life instead to the Lord. I know that it isn’t easy, but hopefully this book can help, or other books that I recommend at key points throughout it, which have helped me on my own journey. Not many people like me can say that they were excommunicated from church even as a Christian ministry major in college and came back after it all without “deconstructing anything” other than myself.
7.) My Own Type of Icarian Theory
But taking all of this into account, my own type of “Icarian theory” is that there is a sense in which modern society is so overstimulated with technology and entertainment that we are uniquely self-absorbed. We have flown too high spiritually because our world is wrapped around us. Our plastic society makes it so that you almost have universal power to determine your own destiny and identity whether sexual, or food preferences, fashion, or career. You can almost move anywhere or do anything and post about it on your newsfeed the whole time.
I believe that God’s common grace has built in speed limits in our proverbial psychosomatic mental engines that stop at a predetermined speed on both a micro and macro social level. Biologically and individually, this proverbial speed limit is triggered by environmental stressors but also related issues of insomnia, exhaustion, and so forth. I think that globally we are approaching levels where at last, God’s judgement is catching up with us. Mental Illness is on the rise because, like Icarus, we have culturally made ourselves like the biblical King Nebuchadnezzar also with his pride. Either that, or we have achieved such self-satisfaction that we have only one thing left to do. So we invert our own cultural analysis until we are bits of clinical pathological pieces just giving us something worthwhile to do. And the effects are damaging.
Now, this emphatically does not mean that each person who is psychotic is proud or self-focused and that is the cause of his or her illness. Nor does it mean that severe mental illness is not also biologically based. Some people are very sweet and innocent who contract psychotic symptoms very young. Other cases are just so obviously severe. Christians, again, are not immune to mental health problems any more than nonbelievers. We live in the same culture and with the same shared experiences and, yes, biology. I think that mental health broadly correlates with the psychological state of the world we live in, only in a relatively minor sense, which is reflected in the studies cited for the United States’ reported cases of mental health that I referred to in chapter one. It is growing in affected numbers of people.
But the issue of mental illness is so complicated, and each person is so different, and these illnesses have in fact existed since the beginning of civilization with or without the post-modern culture, mindset, and technology. Again, it is the “muddy middle” of our psychosomatic identity. This is also why we cannot be so certain about psychosis. It is mysterious. It could have to do with autoimmune problems, but anyone who says they know exactly what is wrong, is most likely not worth listening to in general I think.
But I believe that the issues surrounding the “rise of the modern self” in Carl Trueman’s timely book make mental health issues not only more nurtured, in the conscientious treatment motivated by many in the mental health industry, but also these illnesses are culturally more tangibly real and unavoidable, except for biblical counseling and godly contentment in the midst of all we see and feel in this online and plastic world where self is sadly the end and the means. The DSM-V and our individualistic, unhealthy world is the result of a type of post-modern angst without God as center. We are on the tail end of the modern quest for truth, and all we have to show for it is personal identity issues.
[1] Torrey, Fuller E.. Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manuel. Seventh Ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2019, p. 251
[1] E. Fuller Torrey. Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manuel. Seventh Ed. (New York: Harper Perennial. 2019) p. 131
[2] Ibid. p. 251
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