Mental Health and Your Church: Drugs and Talking Therapies

More highlights from “Mental Health and your Church”. This book is an introduction to mental health for Christians and churches. Continuing to look at the first section, “Understanding mental illness”.

Chapter 4 introduces us to the medications used to treat some mental illnesses. There is the usual wisdom and balance here. On the one hand we shouldn’t think of drugs as miraculous cures or targeted treatments. Many of them function in ways we don’t fully understand and affect far more than just the symptoms we’re trying to treat. On the other hand some of the drugs are very helpful and it is unwise to come off medication without the advice of a medical professional.

So the book suggests that rather than seeing drug treatments as the one-size-fits-all solution on the one hand or some kind of capitulation to non-Christian thinking on the other, we might be better served by seeing medication as one possible way of alleviating distressing symptoms, which will be useful for some people alongside other forms of support and help.

Chapter 5 introduces the variety of talking therapies. All counsellors and therapists seek to listen and to understand and to help people to understand and describe their experiences and the difficulties they are facing. But there are a wide range of counselling and some of them are closer to Christian understanding than others.

Psychodynamic therapy seeks the cause in childhood development. Behaviour therapy is only interested in people’s behaviour. Cognitive behaviour therapy tries to change how people think so that behaviour changes. Person centred counselling seeks to help people to bring out their innate drive towards growth, affirming them so that they are able to develop what’s inside them.

In all of these different therapies we can recognise common grace. Human beings studying the human mind have wisdom about how people work and how they can be helped. We are affected by our past patterns in relationships to repeat. But each of these approaches also brings a worldview with it that does not esteem God’s will or care about God’s word.

 “for example, CBT brings with it a conviction about us needing adequate levels of self esteem to flourish.”

“similarly, the realise your potential theme that exists in person centred counselling is a dominant theme in contemporary culture. Yet the Bible teaches that while we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made… we are also enslaved by sin… and any encouragement I feel myself can quickly become the basis for indulging my simple desires”

So Christians may benefit from one or more of these talking therapies. And yet they may also find it wise to talk with a Christian friend about what they are doing and learning, to be alert to ways that the therapy they are receiving may be shaping them away from God’s truth. The path Helen and Steve suggest is more complicated than simple rejection or simple acceptance, but one that helps us navigate a complex area with wisdom.