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As a mentally ill person, I agree with you. And I think it may differ from person to person as to what percentage of their illness is spiritual in nature and what percentage is physical. Right now, I am taking medication that is working well for me. And the physical aspects of it were very clear; my brain cells were not noticing the serotonin in my brain properly. The meds make the serotonin stick around longer, which makes it easier to notice. It has been fascinating to me just how much of a physical issue it was.

In the past, I have experienced emotional un-wellness that I undertook a spiritual practice to "fix". It worked, it worked well, and it worked immediately, but it's not something I would recommend to others because of its nature, and because what I was experiencing was very specific.

It really depends on the nature of the illness. Sometimes mental illness can stem from or incorporate a person's faith in such a way that involving the faith in the treatment plan would seem counter-productive. If someone feels they must pray 20 times a day or their family will die, praying more does not seem like a good solution. wink

In any event, people, see a doctor if you are sick. By all means see your priest/whoever as well.

As an aside, I recommend the book "Bedlam: London and its Mad" by Catherine Arnold, on the changing views of mental illness throughout the centuries. It's interesting to think that even though we've come so far, we still know so little about the brain, and even about how the medications we take work.

I think all of my mental illnesses have been varying degrees of mental and spiritual sickness through my life, maybe with the exception of my stutter. That's just a weird annoying thing I deal with.

When I had my car accident in May, the driving phobia I thought I had a handle on grew out of control. I spend a lot of time thinking about crashes. It's disordered thought, I don't want it and I don't know how to make it stop. I'm resistant about going to a psych about it, because I think that this thing that tortures me is also keeping me safe. That's the demon that's trying to get me.

When I was at the height of my depression 10 years ago, I was experiencing daily auditory hallucinations. It got so bad at at one point that I tried to beat them out of my head and wound up in the hospital for a few days. I rejected God for putting me through the whole experience and became a witch in an attempt to gain control over my life. This I view as a psychological event rather than a metaphysical one. My life was out of control, so my brain created an alternate problem to focus on while things got fixed. Witchcraft seemed like as good a choice as any at the time to try and insert some structure in my life. In fact, I now believe that God knew exactly what was going on from the beginning, because I don't think it would have occurred to me to give Christ another try had I not tried and failed at adhering to another faith first.

Yeah, Ophelia, your phobia of cars after an accident actually sounds like pretty textbook PTSD. I lived with PTSD undiagnosed and untreated for years and years, until it finally got so bad that I ended up in hospital because of uncontrollable panic attacks four times in as many weeks, and I had to finally admit that this was something that was interfering considerably with my quality of life.

And PTSD is a disorder that I think is very easy to underestimate how out-of-control it can really be, largely because it is caused by traumatic event(s). I know that I felt like admitting that I needed help in managing my symptoms was some sort of admission of failure, that I was letting them (the people who committed the acts against me that are the root of my PTSD) win and continue to control my life.

But the reality is that it is mental illness, and as such, it's not really controlled by conscious thought or willpower. And there is no shame in admitting that it is something that interferes with your daily life, and that you may need some help dealing with it.

I know that a combination of psychotherapy and relatively minimal medication has helped me a lot, however resistant I may have been to it in the beginning. I had to "audition" three psychiatrists before I found one I really liked and who I was confident could help me, but words cannot express how thankful I am to have found him.

Of course, the epiphany that psychiatric care might be the answer to your problems is a realisation that you need to have yourself, and no amount of me (or anyone else) singing the praises of therapy is going to convince you of something you're vehemently against. If I had a penny for every time someone recommended that I seek out therapy before I actually did, I'd be...well, at least much less poor.

I've actually had auditory (and visual) hallucinations for years, but I've been diagnosed with HPPD (Hallucinogenic Persistent Perception Disorder), so...that's why that is. My baseline reality is basically a mediocre acid trip. You've heard of people who take a lot of hallucinogens getting "perma-tripped"? Well, there is actually some truth to that myth, although it's usually blown pretty out of proportion. Some people, after doing copious amounts of psychotropic drugs (namely DXM, LSD, and MDMA, I believe are the worst culprits) never quite "come down" all the way. It actually sounds a lot more terrifying than it is. It's generally something that happens gradually, so I wasn't even aware of it until the symptoms became pronounced enough, and when they did...well, I'd had plenty of practise functioning while a whole lot more effed up, so I adjusted pretty quickly. The only thing that gets a little iffy sometimes is driving at night, because I see halos around stationary lights and experience moving lights as light trails, so figuring out which solid objects are where can get a little dicey. It gets a lot worse when I'm sleep deprived and/or when I don't have my glasses. I just try to avoid driving after dark as much as possible, but I can do it if I have to.

Fear of driving/being in cars is actually pretty common. My mother has never had a driving license precisely for that reason (although she herself has never been in an auto accident; her parents were both killed in one, though).

And I mean...when you actually stop to think about it, it is kind of scary. It's probably the most dangerous thing that most people do on a daily basis. It has just become so ingrained in most people's routine that they really don't stop to think about it.

I've always been pretty okay when driving, but I've only been in one real accident, and it was because I'd put off getting new brakes for so long that they just stopped working all together, right in the middle of rush hour, so...I kind of drove into a pole intentionally because it was the only way I could stop. It probably would have been scarier if it was some freak accident, but since it was directly related to my poor auto maintenance, it didn't have much of a lasting impact on me. Well, I learned an important lesson about the necessity of brake service, but I wasn't hurt.

I used to get really anxious when I was a passenger in a car, but I think that's just me being a control freak. My ex-boyfriend sort of beat it out of me. Being in a car he's driving is a wonderful exercise in accepting and coming to terms with your own mortality. lol

I take it there isn't great public transit in your area?

That's exactly why I said most people cannot always pray the crazy away. I do not doubt that you, as well as many others, have indeed found completely spiritual, non-medical remedies to psychiatric afflictions, but if this was something that held true all the time, or even most of the time, I think there would probably be a great deal more empirical evidence to support it.

That said, I do not deny that in some individual cases, prayer alone has indeed been the answer. Something you'll hopefully come to learn about me is that I always try to avoid making blanket generalisations.

Personally, nothing made me feel more damaged, broken, and forsaken than when, as an adolescent, I would pray for my psyche to be "fixed" day in and day out, and every morning waking up to discover that God hadn't fixed me.

There's a saying that my mother likes to say (I'm pretty sure she didn't actually come up with it, but since I don't know who did, I can only attribute it to her) that roughly translates: God always hears our prayers, and He always answers them. The answers He gives us just aren't always the answers we're looking for.

Now, as an adult with a less incomplete worldview, as well as one who has had some time and life experience to grow and mature within my faith, I understand what my mother said, and I think it's very true. God is not a vending machine where you insert a prayer and out pops the thing you asked for. God has a perspective that we cannot even begin to fathom, and what we want or even think we need often isn't what God has in store for us.

I understand this now (well, I understand it about as well as is reasonable to expect), but I really didn't understand that as an adolescent. As an adolescent, I was convinced that if only God would fix the parts of me that were broken, just give my psyche a little tune-up, then there would be nothing standing in the way of me being a good Christian and making all my dreams come true for the glory of God. But no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how much I tried to devote myself to Christ in thoughts an actions, God did not fix me. I felt as if I had deep, festering wounds on my soul that could never heal. I came to the conclusion that God had forsaken me, and that I was not worth saving. Even the all-loving God who offered salvation to all who seek it had deemed me unsaveable (is that even a word?).

Clearly, I've long since matured beyond my angsty, melodramatic belief that God hates me. While I cannot profess to know God's "master plan" (or whatever you want to call it) and exactly where I fit into it, I do genuinely believe that everything in my life, including (maybe even especially) my worst, most painful experiences, have happened for a reason. I firmly believe that my most horrific life experiences have had an overall positive effect on me as a man and me as a Christian.

Anyway, I think I strayed from the main topic a little, but my main point is just that while I do not doubt the validity in people recovering from both physical and psychiatric problems through prayer alone, I think the assumption that everyone can pray away the crazy is potentially very damaging. Especially in dealing with the mentally ill, who throughout history have been misunderstood, ridiculed, ostracised, abused, even lynched, it's very easy to be made to feel as if you're defective when struggling with mental illness. Thankfully, this is becoming less and less the case, but there is still a considerable stigma attached to mental illness. Many can't help but feel that if children were more like, say, automobiles, a mentally ill child would be about on par with a car that has a manufacturing defect, and would be taken back to the dealership and exchanged for one that's not defective.

And so to tell these people, who probably already feel defective and of inferior humanity, that all they need to do is accept Jesus and pray and they'll be normal...I see that doing more harm than good. I mean, if it worked with a 100% success rate, then voila, problem solved! But the reality is that for many people living with mental illness, it's not going to be that simple. And when people who probably already feel like defective freaks can't just pray away their crazy...well, the profound feeling of hopelessness that I experienced in that situation is a feeling I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Not only did it rip whatever meagre self esteem I'd had to shreds, it really damaged my relationship with God. I didn't stop believing in God, but I was certain that He had stopped believing in me.

I do not doubt or deny the power of prayer. I think that prayer is an important part of daily life, and dealing with mental illness is no exception. My main point, or words of caution relating to spiritual remedies for psychiatric problems is simply to never assume that a mentally ill person deserves to be mentally ill. Maybe in some instances they do, and their illness is indeed a punishment from God, but we, as human beings, cannot know one way or the other. Any treatment, be it medical or spiritual, should not hold the patient responsible for their illness, or their inability and/or difficulty to make a full recovery.

My head is all over the place right now, so I'm going to stop here, hopefully before it becomes too readily apparent that I am, truly, a bona fide crazy person. lol