A new petition is doing the rounds. A loving sister wants all mentally ill people in London, living on the streets, to be taken into mental hospitals and treated, because her own brother is on the streets. He is described as being bi-polar, schizophrenic, plus this and that category, all ‘supported’ by drug addiction. Beware!
Don’t let your heart drive any affiliation to this kind of plea.
A few people become mentally unbalanced through no fault of their own. Some merely copy what happens around them. But most so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are self-indulgences founded on godless behaviour and a natural result of living without God. This also goes for the ‘milder’ cases of depression, anxiety and fear etc.
There are two kinds of stress – one arising from being unwilling to respond properly to life’s challenges and resorting to a wide variety of so-called ‘neuroses’. Even Christians can fall to this deception. Instead of handing over their stress to God and living as they should, they adopt the ways of the world and allow depression etc, to rule their waking hours. Of course, unbelievers cannot do this... so we have psychiatrists!
The other kind of stress is what I loosely call ‘physical’. One example is living in circumstances of real danger, such as a war zone. This is when, despite hope and prayer, actual dangers and threats are constantly hanging over you. Or, a person is under threat of genuine anger and evil, again, nothing in the person causes it.
Last week I thought my wife, Diane (who has Alzheimer's, kidney failure and a heart condition), was suddenly being taken away from me.
She lay for two days motionless and I thought that ‘this was it’. I finally managed to get her downstairs because that’s where the toilet is, and we both slept on the two couches for several nights because she did not have the strength to get back up the stairs.
I had the shorter couch so she could have the opportunity to rest. This lasted all week until she slowly emerged from whatever caused her to be so affected. There was no point in contacting the ambulance service or our doctor, because I am more than aware of the consequences – her being taken into care and that she would be taken away from me – but no medical intervention. The stress of this was enormous and though she returned to what she was like before the incident, thank God, the stress came out almost immediately in myself in the form of conjunctivitis... I write this note with one eye firmly closed and swollen! So, stress can be evidenced not by mental imbalance but by physical symptoms. We can be badly affected by stress and not realise it, until a physical set of symptoms come along to verify that immense stress has occurred. This kind of stress happens without our knowledge, and is brought about by external issues, and not from within as a failure to respond to life responsibly. In my own case, I was literally waiting for my wife to die. It is a part of her condition, so there was no point in calling anyone... but the stress was there.
What I am saying then, is to be careful what demands your support and how understanding can often be marred by simply ignorance of the facts. The majority of ‘mental imbalances’ are caused by living godlessly or at least without God. They are one result of Adam’s sin passed on to all mankind. But there are also stresses no-one can avoid and which can strike you down just as well. One requires sympathy and the other does not. All who have an inability to live properly should be given initial help. But, if they ‘blow it’ by becoming ‘professionally mentally ill’, they have gone a step too far and cannot be helped in a godly way.