I have a great deal of concern about pastors providing counselling, because of the reasoning so commonly demostrated in experiences like @jammycakes described. There is a great deal of interest in my denominational part of the Church in “biblical counseling”. Sometimes that is all that is needed for Christians. Not all counselling is a matter of mental health.
But when a matter of mental health is involved, or matters of addiction, or neurodiversity, or a host of other matters, pastors and other biblical counselors can do great harm by attempting to apply ancient models, particularly, when we have a much better understanding of many mental health problems and their causes.
There is also a great deal of “church culture” pressure to avoid “secular psychologists.” Because, well, they’re secular I guess. While I havent heard this from a pastor, it is common in the pew.
Yes, that was the exact reason why I didn’t seek professional help at the time.
@jammycakes, great testimony; thank you. I went through a somewhat similar burnout in med school, and felt awful about having to take some time off. It did help me, both to improve and to support others better, who go through similar experiences. I was grateful for a very gracious faculty, who allowed and supported me to take the time off. I do support counseling
I was chuckling over the comments in the attached article on counseling for OCD. That’s a tough one. I suspect that many counselors are OCD themselves, in order to get to their degree–meds are often a mainstay when the OCD is overwhelming. It can be crippling.
There’s a story of Elijah and depression that reminds me, I think, that the Bible looks at depression with compassion. For background, serotonin is a natural transmitter in our brains that tells us everything is ok, and promotes comfort and peace. It goes up when we eat or sleep, and down when we’re under stress–often, with depression. Most of the common antidepressants today help boost natural serotonin by preventing excess breakdown that occurs with depression. These include Prozac and Lexapro, for example.
In the story, Elijah was up at least all of one night, competing with the prophets of Baal in a demonstration about which God would bring down fire on their sacrifices. Elijah waited all night, and Baal didn’t come through for his prophets. He then drenched his own altar and sacrifice with water, and God burned everything up. He then went through a grueling stretch, outrunning King Ahab’s chariot. Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, sent him word that by that time tomorrow, she would have killed him. In response, Elijah entered the wilderness and sat under a broom tree, exhausted. He prayed, “God, kill me, for I am no better than my fathers.”
At this point, my church usually takes time to point out how weak we are, and how easily we give up. On the contrary, the sequence of events seems to me to emphasize God’s patience, and maybe even a biblical observation of how serotonin works. God doesn’t chastise him, After allowing him to sleep, an angel feeds him. Then, he sleeps, and eats again. Wow–both of those things are great at raising serotonin!
He then talks to him in a still, small voice–a contrast to the violence he has gone through.
It seems like he’s combining a natural Prozac and counseling.
It’s an interesting story to muse on, anyway.
Thanks.
Here’s an example of a pastor ruining things. (A Christian school tried to have an “Autism Aware Week” but then the ignorant pastor shut it down):
Christian school’s pastor cancels Autism Awareness Week, calling it “demonic”
The “us” vs “them” mentality is a red flag.
They made decisions that led them to be alcoholics; they did not decide one day, “I’m going to become an alcoholic”. This is a critically important distinction for fighting the addiction!
Sorry, but no. Over the years I’ve had two friends who were extremely overweight for whom changing eating habits made no difference. One was a roommate who dropped his calorie intake to 1200 a day and even with regular moderate exercise kept gaining weight. It took dropping his intake to under 1000 calories per day to stop weight gain – and even that didn’t work until he started fasting two days a week. In order to be able to eat normally he required surgery that removed much of his intestines.
I’ve known two people who suffered from schizophrenia and there were no “lifestyle habits” involved; their lifestyles were identical to those of their families including siblings. One, in fact, ate the same things, played the same sports, had the same hobbies, and did almost everything together with his brother, yet despite identical lifestyles one brother suffered from schizophrenia starting when he was fifteen while the other never had any issues.
I’ve had hundreds of acquaintances who drank alcoholic beverages and never drank to excess. I’ve also had a few dozen acquaintances who used different drugs but didn’t fall into addiction.
If getting drunk was inherently bad, Jesus wouldn’t have turned a huge amount of water into excellent wine at a wedding where the guests were already well-sloshed. Many people drink moderately the vast majority of the time but “cut loose” on celebratory occasions.
Where I spent part of my grad school time a BA was required before entering the ministry program – and that BA had to include four years of Greek and two of Hebrew plus two in either Latin or German because so much theology is written in those languages. They didn’t consider someone competent to even begin theological studies without being able to pick up anything at all written in Koine Greek or anything written in biblical Hebrew.
I wish I could remember what study it was and who did it, but it showed that people in old “mainline” denominations were far more accepting of people with mental issues than those in ‘non-denominational’ churches. A huge difference was that in the second category mental issues were frequently treated as demonic affliction, and when prayer didn’t change things the individual was admonished for lacking faith.
The most striking answer I ever got to that question was, “I don’t know – how could I?” I found it insightful because expecting someone to be able to answer the question involved the assumption that they were “okay” enough to know!
This reminds me of a Lutheran missionary who’d come back to the U.S. on sabbatical to do some graduate studies, on an occasion when a Pentecostal preacher was expounding the view that there is no mental illness, just demonic activity, while an Episcopalian priest was arguing exactly the opposite: the missionary just shook his head and told both of them they should go live where there is real demonic activity and where mental health issues go untreated and they’d see the reality of both.
I encountered a case where hearing voices caused incredible distress, not because of anything the voices were saying but because the person couldn’t tell what they were saying, describing it as being like hearing a cocktail party from the next room: lots of different voices at different intensities, many sounding extremely urgent, but being unable to catch so much as a word. The person was convinced he needed to know what the voices were saying and could be thrown into panic attacks from being unable to make out anything at all.
Medication didn’t make the voices go away, but it did drastically decrease the panic issue, which allowed the person to tell himself that if the voices had anything important to say they should speak up! Diminishing the panic slowly diminished the loudness and frequency of the “cocktail parties”.
That’s vile. That guy is just doing tribal witchcraft dressed up in Christian costume.
Ah, theology by making stuff up!
If it hadn’t been alcoholic, it wouldn’t have been called “the best wine”, it wouldn’t even have been recognized as wine.
And it can be very scary to deal with.
I’m thinking of the brother of a guy in my house at university, who came to visit one weekday. He believed something was chasing him and that he’d be safe in a house with fifty guys.
One strange symptom was that he would just “turn off” in the middle of a conversation, even right in the middle of a sentence, then hours or days later pick up right where he’d left off, like stopping a video, going off to do something else, then later starting the video again. Sometimes he would realize the people he was with when the “video” started again weren’t the same as before, sometimes not.
When I tumbled into bipolar disorder the doctors explained that the genetic situation seemed to leave some people with a “switch” that can be flipped by trauma, so someone could be fine all through life until some event turned the gene on. They said that in such a situation it can be possible to flip the “switch” back to the “off position”.
The clinic where I get prescriptions filled informed me that it is required by law – I didn’t bother to ask if it was county, state, or federal.
Exactly.
And if new wine hadn’t been alcoholic, there would be no need for new wineskins!
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