“For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?”
(1 Cor. 2:11a, NKJV)
Before we continue our discussion about the spiritual handling of depression, it is perhaps firstly important to distinguish between three broad approaches when it comes to depression: psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual.
Psychiatrists deal with depression on mostly a medical level, diagnosing chemical imbalances in the brain, and possible related mental pathologies and the treatment thereof. It is largely chemical in nature.
Psychologists deal with depression within the terrain of the social sciences and humanities, and use various types of psychological therapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy. The goal of this therapy is gaining insight into one’s thought processes, and changing those thoughts, along with acquiring a new attitude towards one’s life and problems. Because spiritual counselling (often without this theoretical foundation) is to a large extent also based on cognitive behavioural therapy it might be good to briefly outline the four steps of this therapy. (This is my simplified summary, based on the following texts: Judith S. Beck: Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond; Keith S. Dobson: Cognitive Therapy: Theories of Psychotherapy; Windy Dryden & Michael Neenan: Cognitive Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques.):
- The therapist points out the correlation between negative thoughts and beliefs, the emotions that lead to it, and the accompanying behaviour that stems forth from it.
- The therapist teaches the patient to be aware of negative thoughts or the existence of a distorted perspective on (and events in) reality.
- If such thoughts or unwanted reactions start influencing the events of one’s everyday life, the patient needs to identity it as dysfunctional.
- Based on his newly acquired insight the patient must now decide to think and act differently than before.
Dr. Edmund Bourne’s book The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook won the Benjamin Franklin Book Award in 1995 for an exceptional contribution to psychology. After the book’s publication the writer and researcher of the book himself went through the deepest levels of anxiety neurosis, despite his specialist knowledge on the matter. This lead to him writing Healing Fear, published in 1998, in which he points out the good qualities and uses of cognitive behavioural therapy, but then also discusses the limitations of this most-often-used psychological approach. Bourne makes it very clear that something is clearly missing in today’s psychology. In the following teaching we look at what that might be.
- Selah: Explain to someone the difference between psychiatric diagnosis, psychological therapy, and Spirit-led therapy.
- Read: 25-26.
- Memorise: 25:2.
- For a more in-depth understanding: Read any of the books mentioned in the teaching.
