Christianity and “Mental Illness”
A Brief Outline of a Personal Ordeal
For reasons which remain a mystery to me, I was insatiably curious in an anti-intellectualist household. I knew all the world capitals by age eight, was reading thousand page history tomes by age nine, was intuitively solving grade eleven and twelve math problems by the age of ten, and acquired a firm anti-monarchist and small-r republican political view by age nine. The anti-monarchist stance became psychologically uncomfortable while singing to and in honor of Queen Elizabeth at Centennial Stadium with Bobby Gimby in 1967.
I am a geek from birth.
This better than average intellect was accompanied with a youthful precocity which challenged a public school teacher over math issues in Grade 2 and the minister of a liberalizing Presbyterian church six months after my conversion (age 12). Like Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007), I soon developed a healthy disrespect for the opinions of authority figures after encountering so many lazy and silly responses from them.
Accompanying precocity was a perfectionism which reached pathological levels, such as leaving bite marks on my wrists whenever making mistakes while practicing the clarinet. Such perfectionism sometimes turns into an enduring and unforgiving distrust whenever others, especially authorities close to me, broke confidentialities and promises. But from a Christian perspective, it facilitated conversion as my ethical shortcomings and the seeming inability to do otherwise were made clearly evident to me.
I was raised in a lift-yourself-by-your-own-bootstraps conservative, but nominally Christian, household. Our parents, like many nominal Christians at the time, thought it prudent to send their children to Sunday School while not attending church themselves.
The closest church was Presbyterian, which turned out to be theologically liberal. There, however, remained a tiny remnant of orthodox believers, one of whom was my Grade 5 and 6 Sunday School teacher. Besides promoting Bible drills which I usually won, by virtue of an excessively competitive nature and the well-worn Bible given me which facilitated finding verses easy, I was exposed to a historical interpretation of the rise and fall of nations upon the basis of the composite morality of its populace. It is a contextual framework, albeit revised and refined from a simple morality play, that has well served a lifelong study of world history, one of the first of hundreds of artifacts of verification proof of the truth of the God of Scriptures.
However, I was not converted until four days after my twelve birthday in a Baptist summer camp, after which I enjoyed an all too brief year of spiritual enchantment.
Like John Bunyan, however, I encountered those passages on the unforgiveable sin just before my thirteenth birthday, abruptly ending that short year of spiritual enchantment. And like John Bunyan, I underwent a very long sojourn in Bunyan’s Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Now, at the end of this valley was another, called the Valley of the Shadow of Death; and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay through the midst of it. Now this valley is a very solitary place; the prophet Jeremiah thus describes it: "A wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, a land that no man" but a Christian "passeth through, and where no man dwelt."
Now here Christian was worse put to it than in his fight with Apollyon, as in the story you shall see . . . One thing I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it: just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many wicked words to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind. This put Christian more to it than anything he had met with before, even to think that he should now speak evil of Him that he had so much loved before. Yet, if he could have helped it, he would not have done it; but he had not the wisdom either to stop his ears, or to know from whence those wicked words came.1
The fear that one could lose one’s salvation over a single reckless word or deed became a conduit to all manner of unwelcome horrible thoughts, visions, and temptations which oppressed the mind. One of the first conundrums, I recall encountering, was the incongruence between the “unforgiveable sin” passages and 1 John 1:9, which lent to a year and a half of hounding temptations to test the logic until I told those tormenting voices to bugger off even if I cannot rationally reconcile that conundrum.
Over a period of 37 years, with four severe bouts, lasting three to five years at a time, I experienced something akin to that seen in A Brilliant Mind (2001), but much more similar to that of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Indeed, Bunyan’s ordeal, autobiographically recounted therein, suffices to give a detailed taste of my experience.
By the end of this ordeal, I was reduced to an animalistic existence, unable to retain a rational or semantic thought before it was immediately and constantly scoured away by a thousand concurrent voices. I endured a long dark night of the soul, a sense of divine abandonment, (perhaps as an immanent consequence of having had committed that unforgiveable sin, so I thought), and the flat effect of the psyche, unable to feel pleasure or pain due to the shell shock of constant noetic bombardment.
The counsels of the contemporary Evangelical church, both locally and at large, proved worthless, primarily because both main schools of thought within Evangelicalism operate under erroneous frameworks, one largely physiological (re: Christian Counseling), the other moralistic (re: Biblical Counseling).
Indeed, the church even became a stumbling block. For when I had concluded that I was to studiously ignore (“neglect”) the myriad concurrent voices, visions, even somatic sensations, (a counsel confirmed in an obscure letter by Jonathan Edwards to a Scottish divine),2 one pastor congenially declared most emphatically that I was most mistaken, extending the psychic hell for yet another three years. (For one must scrupulously and steadfastly ignore the waves without a tickle of doubt, else one will soon be succumbed under those waves.)
In order to finally overcome this ordeal into psychotic hell, many insights were required to be uncovered and operated upon. At the time, I described the resolution in terms of getting all one’s ducks in a row. Today, those logic boards with electric/electronic gates, which I saw at the Ontario Science Center, describe it best. For in order to overcome and escape, all the gates need to be closed. If but one gate remains open, one will not overcome and escape.
There were well over a dozen gates. Most of those gates of insight proved to be of a philosophical and psychological nature, gleaned from Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and illustrated and confirmed through natural theology. Moreover, in order to overcome, I had to defy and venture my whole being against the dogmas, which permeate and prevail within the Reformed wing of the contemporary Evangelical church, to which I was attached. Those errors and other deficiencies within Reformed theology proved to be pastoral impediments.
It is through this ordeal that I realized that the God of Scriptures is a philosopher and psychologist. There is a metaphysic implicit within Scriptures, although like Sophocles’ Antigone, such notions are presented in narrative form.
It is through this ordeal (and in inquiring afterwards into all the reasons why all wings of contemporary Evangelicalism proved to worthless in my ordeal) that I realized that the current philosophical premises, which were mostly of Greek, Roman, or Teutonic origin, are corrupting, crippling, and making the Christian Faith incoherent and incredible. Sustained spiritual revival first requires another Reformation, another radical correction and purification of doctrine, even at the subterranean level.
While at a qualia level, that which I suffered was more extreme than those of others, I had several advantages. At no time, (or, perhaps, on very rare occasions), did I believe the content of the phenomenalist intrusions. I viewed the instigators of these phenomenalist intrusions and their content as hostiles. Moreover, because I had accumulated and would continue to accumulate a knowledgeable trust in the contents of Scriptures, there existed a solid rock, external to the black box within which I was dwelling, upon which to latch.
Anything, external to the black box, grants some grounding, some lifebuoy, to those undergoing extreme degrees of psychosis. I mention this now because I experienced attempts by counselors and psychiatrists to discredit and deprive the mentally distressed from that external grounding, which would leave sufferers utterly adrift without some mooring.
The purpose of a larger work, currently in edit mode, is less a critique of existing notions and practices within Christian circles. Rather, it is to refute the Physicalist conception of mind and mental “illness” in favor of a Conceptual/Phenomenal conception of mind and mental distress. It is, furthermore, to correct, perhaps by way of expansion, the moralist approach by those calling themselves Biblical Counselors.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678, Ch. 4.
Jonathan Edwards, “Correspondence to Rev. Mr. Thomas Gillespie of Carnock, Scotland,” Sept. 4, 1747, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1, Edinburgh, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1834, [Reprinted 1995], [Web] https://ccel.org/ccel/edwards/works1/works1.i.xiv.html, pp. lxxxviii-lxxxix.