bump for later
I also find that playing soulful blues guitar on my telecaster at obscene volumes for several hours a day to be very therapeutic as well.
And now that I think of it hunting seems to be quite cathartic too.
But nothing, and I mean NOTHING is more joyful and liberating than the presence of the Holy Spirit brought on by prayer, answered prayer and/or a good worship service.
There is TRUTH TO IT!
My neighbor was feeling depressed for understandable reasons - family fighting over estate money - very ugly legal fight going on ... she went to her doctor and she prescribed an antidepressant. Her doctor was thorough and warned her about side effects.
She got the prescription filled and re-read the side effects and took a pill. She was prescribed either Paxil or Prozac - forget which. Anyway she’s sitting there watching TV when the word SUICIDE flashed in her mind. She ignored it but it kept coming back - more intensely. Sine she KNEW this was a possible side effect she simply dealt with it and fought off the idea of suicide.
These drugs are NO GOOD. They mess with the chemicals in your brain ... it’s a chemical bandage that is UNPREDICTEBLE and doesn’t solve the ROOT PROBLEM.
There is TRUTH TO IT!
My neighbor was feeling depressed for understandable reasons - family fighting over estate money - very ugly legal fight going on ... she went to her doctor and she prescribed an antidepressant. Her doctor was thorough and warned her about side effects.
She got the prescription filled and re-read the side effects and took a pill. She was prescribed either Paxil or Prozac - forget which. Anyway she’s sitting there watching TV when the word SUICIDE flashed in her mind. She ignored it but it kept coming back - more intensely. Sine she KNEW this was a possible side effect she simply dealt with it and fought off the idea of suicide.
These drugs are NO GOOD. They mess with the chemicals in your brain ... it’s a chemical bandage that is UNPREDICTEBLE and doesn’t solve the ROOT PROBLEM.
I understand some of the article, but they lost me when they started talking about a spiritual problem.
My mom has always been a very devout Christian. She has a real personal relationship with Christ. She is not perfect, but she tries.
Well, my mom is also a manic depressive. She went crazy after my grandma died and my dad almost died. Her personality totally switched, and she was a danger to herself and to others.
My dad had to have her committed. She started taking lithium, and she got better. She only has tried to get off the lithium once, and she started going crazy again.
My mom is now 76 years old, and is very active in her church. She also has an antigue shop. She’s not perfect, but she is so much better thanks to the lithium.
I do think people go on anti-depressants too quickly, and they just might need talk therapy (or time) to make them feel better. However, some medications really do help.
review
The main reason these people commit violent acts is that they were crazy to start with. The reason so many commit violent acts shortly after starting on a new medication is that evidence of increasingly disturbed behavior was what prompted the initiation or change of medication.
While I think that cultural trends have a lot to do with the prevalence of mild mental illness, I think the only connection between cultural trends and the apparent increasing prevalence of severe mental illness with violence is that we no longer forcibly prevent obviously disturbed people from committing crimes. Fifty years ago, the vast majority of the people we now read about committing horrific crimes while clearly very mentally ill would have been permanently locked up in secure mental institutions long before they had a chance to carry out these acts. Now, political correctness dictates that these people be allowed to remain in charge of their own day to day lives. They are sent to doctors who give them a prescription and send them home. They go home and have babies, in many cases passing on a genetically based mental defect to the children and multiplying the scale of the problem, and in all cases providing readily accessible and defenseless victims.
Take Andrea Yates. a woman who had shown severely disturbed behavior for years, to the extent of carving the numbers 666 into her scalp, and opining that it would be better for her children to die while they were still young and innocent and would go to heaven, because she was a bad mother and if they continued living with her they would become bad and have to go to hell. Do you really think that in the 1950s someone like this would have been allowed to live outside an institution and have unsupervised responsibility for 5 young children? And the family being very religious sure didn’t help that situation.
Then there are the boys who perpetrated the massacre at Columbine. Fifty years ago, their dress and behavior in the months leading up to the crime would have gotten them locked up in a secure “reform school”. Now they’re allowed to continue “expressing themselves”, given some pills, and sent off to a normal high school every day. Did the pills cause the massacre? Did failure to take the boys to church every Sunday cause the massacre? No, the massacre was caused by the stubborn refusal of courts, school officials, and parents to lock up two boys who obviously needed to be locked up for their own and everybody else’s good.
The mix of seriously mentally ill people and religion is often disastrous. Many schizophrenics are attracted to religious ideas, and then elaborate on teachings from outside sources by adding information the imaginary voices are giving them. They often have supreme confidence in what they’re doing, because they’re sure they’re following orders from God. Steering seriously mentally ill people away from doctors and pharmaceuticals, and towards religious institutions as an alternative, is likely to get equally bad results. Mentally healthy people and mildly mentally ill people find ways to make religion use it as a positive force in their lives. Severely mentally ill people don’t, for the same reasons they don’t make good use of all the other positive things the world has to offer.
Great post, SkyPilot. Thanks!
My FIL is schizophrenic. Without his medications he hears voices and will sit in the corner and actively converse with them. He will also grow extremely paranoid and irrational. When he is on his medication he appears more or less normal, but is very lethargic and not terribly intellectually acute.
Given the choices, I know that he and his family prefer the latter.
So many people all over the world are mentally ill because “leftist politics” and all of the “political correctness” that still exists in the world keeps getting much worse everyday. Liberalism (although they now prefer to be called “Progressives”) is still a dangerous mental disorder!
KEYWORDS: disorders; marines; mentalillness; psychiatry; religion
Whoever did that is really freaking cute...
It is a most thought provoking article, very much in the manner of many of the WND articles previously published.
Having said that, with all due respect, I must call Bravo Sierra on the forgiveness part of the article.
Prior to Jesus and the easy forgiveness policy Jesus instituted, forgiveness required three things:
1. Restitution.
2. A public apology to the wronged by the offender.
3. The apology had to be sincere.
Allowing the above to be bypassed removes personal responsibility for one’s sins. For example, the widows and orphans one stole from do not any longer have to “be made whole again”.
IMHO, not good.
The various groups benefitting from drugging and absolving of responsibility are essentially Liberals in that they allow sins without acceptance and restitution.
Sin and one really does have the original three responsibilities. Allegedly, the Creator said so.
Be that as it may, the societal impacts of departing from the burdens of being an adult human, responsible for one’s actions, have been many and negative.
Negative, unless one is one of the ‘Liberalism enablers’ literally cashing in on one form of Liberalism or another - in which case Liberalism pays.
Personally, I prefer my Commandments and my Constitution as written. The Commandments need no “interpretation” and observing them CAN occur in an undrugged state.
Fascinating. This article prompted a quite lengthy introspection.
One thing they all had in common...they were not right prior to starting the medication.
thanks, bfl