“May Not Be Curable?” Really, Adrian Warnock?

Posted May 3, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: Christians and Psychotropics: An Uneasy Exchange, The Nervous Breakdown

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Striatum; part of the basal ganglia; neura...

Here is my response to a series begun by Adrian Warnock at Patheos, who will be hosting a Patheos-wide conversation on Mental Illness. It is very distressing to read this sort of hopeless prognostications by one of the Church’s leading spokespersons of the Charismatic Renewal. I note that he is “a trained psychiatrist”:

“Mental illness may not be curable, but often does respond well to medical treatment.” What bleak words!  I’d like to share a more hopeful narrative, one of complete recovery from psychosis. But first, let me push back on the idea that ‘medical treatments are effective’ — can you  offer supporting evidence?

The truth is,  you are actually better off living as a schizophrenic in a third world country without medical treatment, as your outcome of recovery without relapse is far better, according to two World Health Organization studies. These found 63.7% of the patients in the poor countries were doing fairly well at the end of two years. In contrast, only  36.9% of the patients in the U.S. and six other developed countries were doing fairly well at the end of two years. The researchers concluded that “being in a developed country was a strong predictor of not attaining a complete remission.” In the developing countries, only 15.9% of patients were continuously maintained on neuroleptics, compared to 61% of patients in the U.S. and other developed countries.

And study after study conducted since the 70′s support this underreported fact, that patients do far better without psych drugs. There may be short term immediate effects, but there are greater relapse incidences. This has been demonstrated by the Vermont Longitudinal Study, the Rappoport study, and for example, this  study by Martin Harrow, in which NIMH-funded researchers followed the long-term outcomes of schizophrenia patients, and they found that at the end of 15 years, 40% of the schizophrenia patients who had stopped taking antipsychotics were recovered, versus 5% of those who had stayed on the drugs. Long-term outcomes for patients with “other psychotic disorders” were also much better for those off the drugs than for those who stayed on the medications.

You can find  links to these studies and the other information about them, here: http://www.madinamerica.com/2011/11/antipsychotic-drugs-and-chronic-illness/ Many of the contributors to that site, which is a wonderful resource for cutting edge science and encouraging words for those who struggle, have made the same conclusion as Dr. Jonathan Cole, the author of the ’77 NIMH study who titled his report, “Is the Cure Worse  Than the Disease?.”

For  those very scientific reasons, I would be very reluctant to be part of a church support group that “had a partnership with non-Christian psychiatrists”, particularly if they were promoting psychotropic drugs. But I have found there are spiritual reasons to reject psychiatry’s  chemical remedies, as well.

Because, like Amy Simpson, I too grew up with a mother who was Schizoaffective (a combination of bipolar and schizophrenia),  and I myself had a post-partum psychotic break. My mother came to know the Lord before she died, and also had to withdraw from her psych drugs because of  treatments for emphysema. Her social worker was astonished at the calmness and lucidity she enjoyed without the mind-numbing effects of carbamazepine — she truly had the ‘peace that passes understanding’.  And  I also recovered fully from my own nervous breakdown, and from a lifetime battle with crippling anxiety — all without medication. I refuse both the stigma and the diagnoses, and proudly proclaim that there is great hope   for those fighting  for this kind of a dignified life.

Many of us who have recovered reject the accepted narrative  that we have a crippling chemical imbalance in our brains that dooms us to a lifetime of substandard living, and a dependance on drugs. We recognize these disorders are more than brain diseases, they are also spiritual crises. Jesus can and does heal those with “mental illness”. I am one of the captives he has set free:  http://thenface2face.wordpress.com/good-news-about-psychosis-recovery-i-did-it-using-no-bad-drugs/

“Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Posted April 27, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: C.H. Spurgeon's Poetry Slam, Comfort for the Anxious and Depressed

Tags: , ,

English: The Song of Songs (1853) by Gustave M...

(Song of Solomon 2:10)

He is risen,
I am risen in Him,
why then should I
cling to the dust?
From lower loves,

desires, pursuits,
and aspirations, I
would rise
towards Him.
He calls me

by the sweet title
of “My love,”

He calls me.
“Come away” has no
harsh sound in it
to my ear, for
what is there to hold me

in this wilderness of
vanity and sin?
O my Lord, would that
I could come away,
but I am taken–among the thorns!

and cannot escape
from them as I would.
I would, if it were
possible, have neither
eyes, nor ears, nor heart for sin.

You call me to yourself
by saying “Come away,”
and this is a melodious
call indeed. To come to you
is to come home from exile,

to come to land out of the
raging storm,
to come to rest after long labor,

My Lord, Save Me  From the Maze o' Shadows  an...

My Lord, Save Me From the Maze o’ Shadows and Songs….. (Photo credit: -RejiK)

to come to the goal of my desires
and the summit of my wishes.

But Lord, how
can a stone rise,
how can a lump of clay
come away from
the horrible pit?

O raise me, draw me.
Your grace can do it.
Send forth your Holy Spirit
to kindle sacred flames
of love in my heart,

and I will continue
to rise until
I leave life and time
behind me,
and indeed come away.

( Adapted  from Spurgeon’s  “Morning by Morning” — 4/25)

Legions’ Brain Was Actually ‘On Fire’ or, ‘Where Have All the Demons Gone’?

Posted April 24, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: Christians and Psychotropics: An Uneasy Exchange, The Nervous Breakdown

Tags: , , , ,

Medieval book illustration of Christ Exorcisin...

It seems evil spirits have gone and hidden themselves these days under medical and psychiatric diagnoses. Because the fascinating etiology of poor Legion’s brain disease  was discovered in 2004 –  we now know Legion’s true name, and it was definitely ‘many’, look  at all the words used to describe the auto-immune disease he likely had: ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’.  But because even Dr. Luke would have been really confused when collating this history later,  our Lord preferred to call it a demon and perform an exorcism instead — well, at least that’s how I imagine we’ll see this interpretive puzzle explained to us.  But unlike our modern theologians, Luke wasn’t perturbed by these rather medieval causes of psychic or bodily pain, as in the case of the patient with scoliosis in Luke 13:11-16. He, inspired by the Holy Spirit, called it a demon:

“…and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all…ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” It is so interesting to me that her curved spine was an organic disorder with a medical etiology, but the underlying cause was spiritual oppression. Jesus calls her a ‘daughter of Abraham’, too — an indication she was a believer!

And in Matthew 17:15, the Greek word used describes the epileptic boy as a ‘lunatic’– a medical belief that epileptic seizures were affected by the phases of the moon,  a theory as outdated now as the recently discarded ‘chemical imbalance’ explanation for brain disorders –- but, notice Jesus doesn’t  use ancient medical terminology, and  doesn’t diagnose the young man with a ‘moon imbalance’, but again frees the sufferer of an organic disease from a demonic spirit.

Matthew Henry comments on this passage, “There was also something in the malady which rendered the cure difficult. The extraordinary power of Satan must not discourage our faith, but quicken us to more earnestness in praying to God for the increase of it. Do we wonder to see Satan’s bodily possession of this young man from a child, when we see his spiritual possession of every son of Adam from the fall!”

No, I am not suggesting that every parent of a epileptic kid is showing a lack of earnestness in faith when giving their child Depakote. I am not anti any effective medication by any means.  But uncomfortable questions are raised when the contrast is so stark between the biblical narrative and the scientific explanations we are offfered of even a classic case of  demonic possession — as the rare encephalitis of the brain mentioned above. In this interview one woman describes the florid psychosis, guttural speech, violent, inapproriate behavior and seizures that occurred when she had, in her doctor’s words a  “Brain on Fire“, due to  a rare case of that auto-immune disease, ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’, I linked to above. In an NPR interview, she says

“When you think about the symptoms — in my case alone, this grandiosity, this violence. In a lot of children, you see hypersexuality. Even my grunts and these guttural sounds that came from me sounded superhuman to someone who might be inclined to think that way. … When you see videos of people — in fact, when I see videos of myself — demonic possession is not far from your mind. It wasn’t far from [ her boyfriend's] mind when he first saw that seizure. And I’ve talked to many people who’ve had this disease, and one woman I spoke to actually asked for a priest because she said, ‘The devil is inside of me. I need it out.’ A little girl was grunting — they had a monitor in her room — and she was grunting so unnaturally that her parents looked at each other and said, ‘Is she, is she possessed?’ They actually said that about a little girl. You can see throughout history why people would believe this.”

No one would be lacking faith in giving steroids for this disorder, and it would be foolish to refuse the common grace of cutting edge neurological research, and effective remedies. She was rightly infused with plasma and healed within months, rather than dosed with Haldol and  hidden away in a locked psych ward, which she acknowledges would have been her fate had she suffered her illness a mere five years earlier.  Now, let me think, what is the better choice? Effective therapies or a straightjacketed life?  So hard to choose, right?  But I do think these treatments make it much easier for us to ignore or minimize the spiritual components that Jesus makes very clear in the passages I highlight. How do we reconcile the biblical narrative with the medical accounts?  That is our real “lack of faith” — our unbelief , manifested in our unwillingness to examine the spiritual etiology of some diagnosable mental disorders.

Can it be that the wily deceiver can mask his evil work with physical symptoms that present as chronic diseases, particularly the idiopathic cases like scoliosis and cryptogenic epilepsy — and until classic ‘demonic possession’s  actual cause was recently discovered in 2004, ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’? That our Enemy can induce a body to generate these harmful antibodies that attack the NMDA receptors and manifest this disease, just as he gets nerve cells going rogue with seizure disorders, and the bones of the spine to curve in scoliosis? Because Jesus clearly names some of these organic body disorders  demonic. Will we be as presumptuous as Peter, and seek to correct Jesus’ understanding of the nature of the beings he has created?

The fact that scripture makes these spiritual connections clear makes us very uncomfortable, and some of us wish these passages were not in the Bible. I worked in special ed with autistic children, some of whom presented exactly like the lunatic. That is when I began to ask these hard questions, and no one has ever satisfied my queries — except the Vineyard pastors in the churches we attended, who at least acknowledged the difficulties, and some were praying for greater faith in dealing with them. Sam Storms has said of these kinds of intractable cases, “Some are not healed because the demonic cause of the affliction has not been addressed. Please do not jump to unwarranted conclusions. I am not suggesting that all physical disease is demonically induced. It is interesting, is it not, that in Paul’s case God used “a messenger of Satan” to inflict the thorn?”  I agree with his assessments here, but in my repeated queries about the lack of attention the Reformed community pays to this matter, I have only been ignored. Do they believe the Enemy has ceased prowling around and oppressing, because tongues and the prophetic  have ceased?

If the Reformed community want to seriously reach out to confused Charismatics, your theologians need to seriously grapple with these scriptures too, and stop ignoring them, or publishing equally confused answers like Kevin DeYoung’s response to the evil of the Tuscon shootings, in the blogpost, “God’s Gift of Moral Language”.  He first declares about the shooter: “no doubt Loughner is messed up, crazy, off his rocker, and out to lunch. It seems that he’s needed help for a long time.”  But at the end he mourns a world that thinks only in these therapeutic categories:

The world, and to a large extent the church, has lost the ability to speak in moral categories. We have preferences instead of character. We have values instead of virtue. We have no God of holiness, and we have no Satan.  We have break-downs, crack-ups, psychoses, maladjustments, and inner turmoil.  But we do not have repugnant evil as the Bible has it. And this loss makes the world a more dangerous place. For the words may disappear, but the reality does not.

I agree with Mr. De Young, the church has lost the ability to speak in that category, but he overlooked has this important one — the  demonological.  The words, ‘demonic’ have largely disappeared from Reformed websites . Check out this Theopedia  homepage, where there is not a single entry listed for ‘Satan’ or ‘Demons’  to be found in the vast encyclopedia of topics! But the reality of a demonic presence in the world has not disappeared, and so the extinction of that category indeed, “makes the world a more dangerous place.”

For when Legion comes, crying piteously and running naked  through our  graveyards, cutting himself with stones as he demands, “What have you to do with me?”, will we ask him his name? Of course  we like it better when he answers, ‘Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis’ — so neat and tidily settled!–but  when he says, ” Legion!”  will we respond like Jesus, with a stern “come out of him!” or do we identify him as a paranoid schizophrenic,  a danger to himself who is then forced into emergency treatment with neuroleptics? And a diagnosis of a lifetime disorder hopelessly intractable, and difficult  to treat without a course of many different drugs, each responding to the other’s iatrogenic effect?

Why is the church so afraid of asking Legion his name?

 

This One Escaped Limbo

Posted April 16, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: Christians and Psychotropics: An Uneasy Exchange, The Nervous Breakdown

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
DSM Logo

DSM Logo (Photo credit: – jre -)

I have had an interesting series of comments posted at the Gospel Coalition blog article ” Suicide, Mental Illness, Depression, and the Church”,  but most of them  were left hanging in moderation limbo.  Just as the DSM performs as a gatekeeper of information and money for Mental Health Professionals, so the TGC weblog has been a narrow funnel for information to Christians of articles critical of Psychiatry –  which was largely the substance of my censored comments.  I know the moderators’ motives were protective of sensitivities raised by the suicide of Rick Warren’s son, and they were being careful of laying blame. I get it.  I am so sorry about the death of Rick Warren’s son!  I continue to pray for that family. Every parent of a child at risk knows the dread sometimes of opening the door with breath held, terrified of what they will find in their kid’s room. I have known that fear.  But the condescending attitude of some Mental Health Professionals on that site  was also inappropriate . Today’s attempt to respond  to one especially patronizing comment was finally approved. I think I would have had a real tantrum at them if they did not, so I am glad for my children’s sake they finally printed my rant,  again at this site here.

I would like to add that I have no problem with neurogenesis, except if this new paradigm for research prompted even more drug treatments that would prove as useless and harmful as their SSRI’s and atypical antipsychotics. Especially if they make children their guinea pigs, the way the explosion of diagnoses for bi-polar disorder and ADHD,  and off-label prescription writing has done.

I think I am reasonably informed and educated. I learned all about tardive dyskinesia and akathesia watching the side effects of these meds in my own children. They educated me about the incestuous relationship between Big Pharma and Psychiatry. My biggest regret is the emergency holds I placed on my children that forced them on drugs that gave them these crippling grimaces and unbearable restlessness. All the adverse effects that place them at higher risk for suicide. That is why I am so afraid to open doors sometimes, for what horrors I might find inside.

So spare me your patronizing attitude, Mr. Mental Health Professional! I would rather you penned a letter like this one by Dr. Mickey Nardo, who regrets not speaking out more forcefully against Big Pharma’s pernicious influence on his field, and spends his days since his resignation in protest from the APA combing the medical literature for faulty studies, like this gem he discovered about Dr. Robert Gibbons, who in his zeal  to reverse the black box warnings for increased suicidality from SSRI’s  especially among youth who consume them, he redacted data.  Google “Anatomy of a Deciet” at 1 Boring Old Man, … A must read for anyone giving their kid Prozac still. Or Respiridol. Or Zoloft. But especially Paxil, given the NAACP’s refusal to print a retraction concerning the ghostwrtitten- -by-GlaxoSmithKline  Study 329, that falsely claimed Paxil performed better than placebo and hid its adverse effects. Maybe it’s not too late to join one of these class action lawsuits.

Here’s Dr. Nardo’s eloquent letter:

“I think it’s time for the body of Psychiatry to look back on the last thirty years, particularly the last twenty, and acknowledge that there has been a lot of just outright wrong: producing and accepting lousy science; signing on to lousy science produced by others; colluding with the Pharmaceutical Industry in recommendations and prescriptions; corruption involving ghost-writing, guest authoring, conflicts of interest, direct drug promotion, downplaying or ignoring adverse effects. And then there were some really big sins – TMAP comes to mind. It’s a great big collective blemish, maybe more like an open festering wound. And yet I can’t really seem to talk about it without laying the blame elsewhere – PHARMA, Managed Care, KOLs, Neuroscientists, Psychopharmacologists, the Analysts [before I became one], the DSM committees, the APA. And it’s hard to say I’m sorry to patients harmed, without quickly adding, “but I didn’t do that with my patients.”

Even though that last comment is true in so far as I know it, it still doesn’t help with a background discomfort that lingers, transcending any disavowals that pass through my mind.” More here: http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/02/20/no-further-comment/

How I wish we had Dr. Nardo’s compassionate care for our daughters when they were spinning out of control, instead of the greedy quacks we had, like the one who charged our family that is living on the edge of bankruptcy– because of their failed therapies — $100 for a missed appointment, because of a bus mis-schedule. The last appointment we made with him! We wasted so much on Psychiatry’s mess of potage, all of it was wasted, all  of our meager time and treasure that was invested in it is less than worthless now. And sadly,  we wasted much of our children’s great talents.

A Broken-Up Piece from “The Bruised Reed”

Posted March 25, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: Comfort for the Anxious and Depressed

Tags: , ,

Some are reluctant to do good because they feel their hearts rebelling,
and duties turn out badly. We should not avoid good actions
because of weaknesses attending them. Christ looks more
at the good in them which he means to cherish
than the ill in them which he means to abolish
. ..
Though sin clings to what we do, yet let us do it, since
we have to deal with so good a Lord, and the more strife we meet with,
the more acceptance we shall have. Christ loves to taste
of the good fruits that come from us, even though
they will always be flavored with our old nature.

A Christian complains he cannot pray. “Oh, I am troubled
with so many distracting thoughts, and never more than now!”
But has he put into your heart a desire to pray? Then he will hear
the desires of his own Spirit in you. “We do not know
what to pray for as we ought” (nor how to do anything
else as we ought), but the Spirit helps
in our weakness with “groanings too deep for words”
which are not hid from God. “My sighing is not hidden from you”
God can pick sense out of a confused prayer.
These desires cry louder in his ears than your sins.

Sometimes a Christian has such confused thoughts
that he can say nothing but, as a child, cries, “O Father”,
not able to express what he needs, like Moses at the Red Sea.

These stirrings of spirit touch the heart of God and melt him
into compassion towards us, when they come from the Spirit
of adoption, and from a striving to be better.
“Oh, but is it possible”, thinks the troubled heart,
“that so holy a God should accept such a prayer?”
Yes, he will accept that which is his own,
and pardon that which is ours.

Jonah prayed in the fish’s belly, being burdened with the guilt of sin,
yet God heard him. Let not, therefore, weaknesses discourage us.
James takes away this objection . Some might object,
“If I were as holy as Elijah, then my prayers might be regarded.”
“But,” says he, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours.”
He had his passions as well as we, or do we think that God heard him
because he was without fault? Surely not. But look at the promises:
Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver you”
“Ask, and it shall be given to you” and others like these.

God accepts our prayers, though weak, because we are his own children,
and they come from his own Spirit; because they are
according to his own will; and because they are offered
in Christ’s mediation,and he takes them,
and mingles them with his own incense
There is never a holy sigh, never a tear we shed, which is lost.
And as every grace increases by exercising it,
so does the grace of prayer. By prayer we learn to pray.
So, likewise, we should avoid a spirit of discouragement
in all other holy duties, since we have so gracious a Saviour.

Pray as we are able, hear as we are able,
strive as we are able, do as we are able,
according to the measure of grace received. God in Christ
will cast a gracious eye upon that which is his own.
Would Paul do nothing because he could not do the good that he would?
No, he “pressed on toward the goal”.
Let us not be cruel to ourselves when Christ is so gracious.
There is a certain meekness of spirit in which we give thanks to God
for any ability at all, and rest quiet with the measure of grace received,
seeing it is God’s good pleasure it should be so. He gives the will
and the deed, but this doesn’t keep us from further endeavors.

But when, with faithful endeavor, we come short
of what we would be, and short of what others are,
then know for our comfort, Christ will not quench
the flickering flame, and that sincerity and truth,
with effort towards growth, is our perfection.
What God says of Jeroboam’s son is comforting,
“He only shall come to the grave, because in him there is found
something pleasing to the LORD, the God of Israel”
though only “some good thing”.

Lord, I believe”
with a weak faith, yet with faith;

English: Richard Sibbes (1577-1635)

love you with a faint love, yet with love;
endeavor in a feeble manner, yet endeavor.

A little fire is fire, though it smokes.
Since you have taken me into your covenant
to be yours from being an enemy,
will you cast me off for these weaknesses,
which, as they displease you, so
are they
the grief of my own heart?

By Richard Sibbes,  the complete text  here

HT: Tim Challies

The Rough Fight of Love, Spurgeon March 12

Posted March 12, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: C.H. Spurgeon's Poetry Slam, Comfort for the Anxious and Depressed

Tags: , , , ,

Deposition. Heures d'Étienne Chevalier, enlumi...

Would you be a feather-bed
warrior, instead of bearing
the rough fight of love?

He who dares the most,
shall win the most;
and if rough be your path of love,

tread it boldly,
still loving your neighbours
through thick and thin.

Heap coals of fire
on their heads
and if they be hard to please,

seek not to please them,
but to please your Master;
and remember if they spurn your love,

your Master has not spurned it,
and your deed is as acceptable
to Him as if it had been acceptable to them.

Love your neighbour,
for in so doing you are
following the footsteps of Christ.

Be Bold to Believe: Charles Spurgeon’s Spoken Word, February 23

Posted February 23, 2013 by Karen Butler
Categories: C.H. Spurgeon's Poetry Slam, Comfort for the Anxious and Depressed

Tags: , , ,

I will never leave thee.”—Hebrews 13:5.

Be bold to believe, for He has said,
“I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”
In this promise, God gives to His people everything.

“I will never leave you.”
Then no attribute of God
can cease to be engaged for us.

Is He mighty?
He will show Himself strong
on the behalf of them that trust Him.

Is He love?
Then with lovingkindness
will He have mercy upon us.

Whatever attributes
may compose
the character of Deity,

every one of them to its fullest
extent shall be engaged on our side.
To put everything in one,

there is nothing you can want,
there is nothing you can ask for,
there is nothing you can need in time or in eternity,

there is nothing living, nothing dying,
there is nothing in this world,
nothing in the next world,

there is nothing now,
nothing at the resurrection-morning,
nothing in heaven which is not contained in this text—

“I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”


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