In Search of a Better Cure for Mental Illness

You may have heard that a so-called “mental health parity” bill was attached to the financial bailout package that passed into law last week. The bill affects more than one-third of Americans, and requires insurance coverage for most mental health conditions to be substantially equal to coverage provided for physical illnesses.

Of course, this is a positive step and a victory for a dedicated group of legislators and advocacy groups that fought for the changes. But the fact that it covers just over a third of Americans shows the sad state of health coverage in the world’s richest nation. Companies with 50 or fewer employees are exempt from providing the parity coverage and most people with privately acquired insurance are unlikely to see much benefit due to large deductibles. Or, to say it another way, their coverage for mental illness will be just as flawed as their coverage for physical illness.

I’ve had personal experience with severe mental illness and I’m not convinced this bill will make a giant difference. When we needed help in my family, we couldn’t get it at any price, despite good insurance coverage. Everyone in the medical establishment who we asked for help turned their backs until a final crisis arose. Which leads me to believe that simply requiring such care be covered is no guarantee effective care will be delivered. Even after treatment, I was left wondering whether a non-medical remedy might have been better than doctors experimenting with pharmaceuticals.

Anyone who has suffered from chronic disease knows that if you don’t manage your own treatment, the medical/health insurance industry won’t do it for you -- at least not well. When it comes to mental illness this is doubly true. It’s hard to describe the dark shroud severe mental illness can throw over an individual or a household, except to say it is worse than impending death. Many sufferers long for death or seek it out, and when the treatment involves incarceration in a mental health facility, the treatment can make the suffering worse. Depending on doctors and nurses -- even dedicated practitioners -- to do their jobs is often not enough.

Mental illness is not new to modern times, although there seems to be consensus that the numbers are growing. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four Americans will experience some form of mental illness. Many of the sick people Jesus cured suffered from what the Bible calls “demon possession,” a phrase most modern scholars view as an ancient description of mental illness. I know some people still believe in the presence of supernatural entities on earth -- angels and demons alike -- and I can’t prove them wrong. I do know that time and again Jesus was able to provide relief.

Modern psychiatrists insist mental illness is a biological condition. They will tell you, and I’m quoting here, “if an organ like the heart or kidney was ill, we wouldn’t talk to it, we’d medicate it. The brain also is an organ. If it is ill, we take the same approach.” In other words, they use drugs to restore what we think of as normal function. I’m not saying that’s a bad idea; in fact I’ve seen it work. But I have to wonder why, despite improved treatment options, the number of mentally ill keeps rising.

Jesus once told a parable of a demon expelled from a person that returns to find its former “house” swept clean and put in order, but empty. After the demon was removed, nothing good was put in its place. And so the demon moves right back in. Had the demon come back to a house filled with God’s spirit, the demon would have found his former house a most unwelcome residence.

Why was it that demons, or mental illness, fled at the sight of Jesus and the sound of his voice? Could it be that his presence was so filled with God’s spiritual power that all doubt, fear and despair were chased away? Could it be he was able to convey such a sense of joy that confidence in the goodness of life was restored?

Christianity was once a faith filled with spiritual consciousness. But when the scientific age induced Christian thinkers to substitute salvation formulas for salvation power, spirituality as a discernable life force began to whither. Jesus once described being “born again” with metaphors of faith and feeling. We know the wind is real, he said, even though we can’t say where it comes from or where it goes. But in the modern era we began to substitute simple formulaic statements for intuitions of spiritual truth. To be born again became nothing more than a matter of signing on to a group of specific beliefs.

That is all nice and tidy -- like the house the demon reoccupied -- and easier to explain to others, but it lacks the potency of a spiritual power that fills every corner of your being with a light that washes out all darkness. Night can’t prevail when the sun is at its zenith, just as “demons” couldn’t survive in the light of Jesus’ love.

To offer a metaphor of my own, the difference between knowing God through belief statements and knowing God through spiritual rebirth is like the difference between describing sexual arousal and feeling it. The first is an academic exercise while the second overwhelms. Can someone filled to overflowing with the bright joy of God’s spirit also suffer the darkness of depression? Perhaps so, but it’s my guess that it would be rare.