Did you know that there are studies that show that talking to a friend is just as effective a treatment as talking to a trained psychologist?
Did you know that a review of several studies shows that only 8% of patient improvement during counseling can be attributed to any component of the therapy itself?
Did you know, in the field of psychology, there is a professional term called the “deterioration effect,” whereby therapy causes people to have a worsened condition ‘comparable to people who do not receive such treatment?’
Did you know that there is psychology literature that demonstrates that 3-10% of people become worse after psychotherapy?
There are also surveys that show, that in pre-delinquent boys, more frequent visits by case workers resulted in higher levels of criminal offences.
Did you know that publication fraud is rampant in medical, psychological and pharma research, much more so than in comparable fields?
What is even worse, is that in the academic field in general, reproducibility studies have clearly demonstrated that 65% to as high as 90% of studies cannot be replicated if different researchers attempt to do so. (2011, Glenn Begley.)
Not only is psychology a pseudoscience, but its bedfellow, psychiatry, is worse than that: it is an insidious, destructive field of practice that regularly commissions men and women to a pharmacological prison.
As someone who has suffered from anxiety in my early 20s, I also went to see psychologists and shrinks. I did exactly as I was supposed to. I was given drugs that did more harm than good. Sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day. Being passed from one doctor to another. Becoming dependent on the drugs, and addicted, which led to a 20 year battle with various addictions. And there are many like me.
There are numbers of people commit suicide and harm others after taking antidepressants. Almost every mass shooter was being treated by a shrink and on anti-depressants. You can hardly name one who wasn’t.
The fact is that psychologists are working off the wrong template of man. They don’t understand man.
Their version of man is a schematic that can only be found on paper, in textbooks, and taught in classrooms, but cannot be found in the real world. Their false idea of man is not a living, breathing soul, but rather a naïve and exuberant modelling of man as they wish him to be.
In this same respect, I’ve often thought of the bible and its many books and assembled literatures as a kind of diagnostic on the soul of man. It opens up man’s psyche, exposes it to us in all of its inglorious violence, and then proffers the solution, which is a hard commitment to what is right and true.
This is the only thing that can make a man whole. Man needs this higher purpose. Without it, he is merely just a machine made of flesh. A living soul cannot live as a machine, as a fleshbot, without developing pathology and side effects. Without incurring anxiety and depression and self-loathing.
Before a man can be healthy, he must first come to terms with his sickness, which is embedded within him, literally a circulatory part of himself. There must be a self-diagnosis. Only then can he begin to treat himself.
Christ said as much.
One must recognize that oneself is bad, is sinful, is wrong in many ways. This is the first step of acceptance. Then one repents and turns in a new direction, toward a new light.
The bible is violent, sometimes ugly, sometimes scatological, because man is exactly that: full of sin, moral errancy, ugliness and pain.
The human condition is sinfulness, through and through. The treatment for the condition is an accurate diagnosis, followed by a program of service and charity. It is not to make up for one’s faults, because our evils are often unforgivable offences. It is to redirect our passions toward goodness, toward the light. We accept, and then maneuver the flow of our passions toward the light.
We do not and cannot dam up our passions, or put a lid on our sins. No dam wall can hold strong under that immense amount of pressure.
Christianity does not offer repression. This is important.
Christianity offers solutions to problems that modern society, with its soul-destroying cultural practices, have introduced. It does this by bringing us back, closer to our natural, original, ancient habitats. We practice prayer again. We practice religion again under the stars. We become family-focused. We become community-focused. Danger may even be reintroduced to our lives, in the form of persecutions. We become human again, and by doing so, heal ourselves of the poisonous cultural toxins introduced by the modern secularists. We live as God intended us to live, and many of the personal problems associated with modern society subside in impact.
We can talk to God, but yet so many of choose to talk to a shrink or even ourselves. It seems absurd to ignore the creator in such a way, but we do it to our own demise.
Therefore, the greatest psychological treatment on man is found in the bible.
The alternative is barely better than a placebo. Almost everyone who has a positive testimony from taking these drugs would have had the same testimony if you had given them sugar pills.
People indeed have a right to be wary of the whole profession. When I was in college, from what I saw, the brightest minds were taking math and science, while those who couldn’t hack the material settled for psychology or human resources.
Even worse are the multitudes of studies that the godless quote as if they were chapter and verse. Most of these are prepared by university students, and when reproducibility tests have been attempted on these studies, astonishing figures play out– whereby 60+% of these studies could not be reproduced, as mentioned earlier.
Think about that the next time an overeducated atheist arrogantly posts a psychology study on a web forum, as if he had proven something.
What they don’t tell you is that there is a Christian drug and alcohol treatment center in Texas that is pulling off 70% cure rates, compared to secular cure rates, which are under 10%.
People have every right to be wary of the secular priesthood.
I’m sure there is a time and place for modern psychological treatment, but for the vast majority of men, it should be a last resort. Religion, faith, prayer, communion with the saints– these should be first guard treatments.
Citations:
Daniele Fanelli (2009)
6-https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048670903107559
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048670903107559