“Get up or get out,” she said. Pastor George’s wife had her own anxiety to contend with as she watched her husband marinate in his body odors and depression. It had been months since he preferred staying in bed to talking to others, going to work, or even eating. He had dropped 30 pounds in two months because food stopped having as much taste for him, and he just didn’t want to get up to eat. His interest was so low; low like the bottom of an iceberg. He had still managed to go to work about 70% of the time. They saw him functional, suited up and most of those days, he did not smell as he was able to force himself to shower. That is who they saw. But there were those days that were suspect, even for work. A sheen of unwashed skin cells reflected yellowish in the light, where oils had collected like on the vent over a grill. Pastor George was slipping and his wife was witness. Finally, he stopped going to work for two weeks. In his bed most of the day and night, Pastor George was not getting better.

“Get up or get out.” She was afraid for him. He had refused treatment to date other than talk therapy on and off. She, being a registered nurse knew, this was medical, and here, despite his faith and his counsel. She even had work history on the psychiatry wards where succored the catatonic, melancholic, and the extremely ill and she knew. Pastor George, well, he was not getting better. He denied morbid thoughts, but she was afraid. She couldn’t get the police to get him on a 5150 because he denied being a danger to himself – i.e., actively suicidal. He was not danger to others. And he had a home – i.e., did not have unclear living condition. So, she said to him, “Get up or get out.”

Pastor George found himself driving to the local emergency room to check himself into the psychiatric inpatient hospital. He never thought this would be him.

It is a messy journey that takes us inpatient. Messy for the patient. Messy for the family. There is no clean, tidy path for anyone. Why? Because you cannot give what you don’t have. How can you pick up your trash, shower, pay bills, be kind to your spouse or children when your brain is not well? Your bank is overdrawn. You got nada to give. There is a trail of ash and scat behind you all the way. And likewise, how can your family navigate that journey? They cannot control you. They cannot read your mind. They just see the losses, one after another. Bills coming due. Routines, completely caput. Personality changes. There is no energy in the room and the back-and-forth pulse of what normal relationship’s mojo does just stops. It is one direction now that the energy flows and the family cannot make sense of that. The kids cannot for sure. Everyone is afraid. Pretty soon, others at home get depressed too. It is contagious. A virus that face masks do not protect from. No. The family and patient have a messy time of it before anyone makes it to the hospital.

When Pastor George got admitted, he did not come out for two weeks. What could his wife say? “Gone fishing?” Or does she say the truth? It is messy.

In these situations, the disease comes and no one is at “fault.” There are some cancers, for example, like when this laureled person, no bad habits, who flossed twice a day, grows an ugly foreign body inside. There is no good reason. Baffling. Where is the self-care then? I see self care in these situations in the form of survival when that is the place you are at. Depression kills, as cancer, as a car crash. My cousin is going through cancer now and he is in the place of trying to die well. It is so horrible. I barely remember when he fled the war. I was a pudgy, maybe four-year-old when he came to live with us. And of course, I remember him through my life. He stayed, becoming an emergency medicine physician, and then with his MBA, a hospital administrator to whom hospitals in trouble, on the brink of closing, would hire. He would develop a life saving plan for them. He is brilliant. And more recently I see him, soliloquizing about how cancer became his blessing because it brought him back to being dependent on God and not on himself. There is a brightness. He has hope. His steroid bloated cheeks, swollen body, and weakness are a good place he thinks for God to be strong.

My cousin has always been a very loud man. Big voice. Big body. Big laugh. Enormous heart. Huge faith. One of the funniest guys I’ve ever known. I remember him laughing, tears coming down his dramatically whiskered Lebanese face, as my other cousin rolled down the moguls trying to learn how to downhill ski on a black diamond mountain. So much hair. And he is saying his goodbyes. I really hate this.

Depression in fact can be this bad. Where self care means, try to breath.

Today’s post is a nod toward the messiness of it all. The way that mental illness destroys the best laid plans and happens because you are human. We try so hard to gain knowledge, hoping it will protect us from evil. Others choose to live and let live, sort of like parallel play to life. “Don’t make eye contact and life won’t single you out.” Others try to get on the “right team,” the God-group, or the athlete-verse, or the academic fact finders in science. But depression, and other mental illnesses, like my cousin’s cancer, can be much like the tornado on Grandma’s Iowan farm, uncontrolled, damaging, and something of a natural disaster. It’s messy for everyone and knowing that we can possibly give ourselves, each of us grace. As God does. Giving good, what we do not deserve. And mercy, not getting what we do deserve through it all.

Update on Pastor George. He is well, treatment adherent with his duloxetine, and now back to work. His experience through his major depression has, in his opinion, helped him understand the suffering of others. I like that too. His message has evolved and included more about how God grieves with us when we suffer, how we are never alone through it and how to cling to God as God clings to us. “It is messy”, he says, “this human condition we are in.”

Self care tip: Self care when you are that ill can be as basic as trying to breath. Be gracious with yourself and show mercy.

Question: Have you ever suffered and felt your job was just to get through it? How did you do it? Please tell us your story.

Mariposa, named by her lepidopterist mother, was a beautiful person who lived a little broken. She felt alone, lacking connection and resonance with the people she wanted it most from. It was a feeling that pursued her whole life, like a shade whose ghostly presence chilled her ability to feel emotional warmth. But at the same time, she said, “My family is so wonderful. Each of them. I know they love me. I know it in my head but every time I go toward them with intention and fullness, I then feel gutted. Hulled out. I feel alone.”

This is not unique to Mariposa. You may also struggle with loneliness, despite living in abundance. But somehow the connection that your relationships offer naturally do not satiate emotionally.

I remember a Greek myth about Erysichthon, who in his hubris and desire, chopped down the goddess Demeter’s sacred oak. Inevitably, as in most Greek myths, human acts out, deity angers, deity punishes, human forever suffers particularly tailored horror. Demeter cursed Eryschithon with an endless bottomless hunger that drove him toward more intake until he ate his own flesh. Ew. Do we do that emotionally, toward terminal self sabotage? The very desire for connection ends up being our isolation.

Mariposa however did not entirely see her role in the perpetuation of this. She vaguely suspected, but whenever she spoke about it, somehow it circled back to the various problems of her nuclear members. Blame was a trim to all her dressed-up conversations about loneliness.

Not to draw this out, Mariposa was able to link the intensity of her longing to attachment history. A parent who was transactional. A lifelong tendency to attach intensely to a very few elite members of her inner circle. Repeatedly “touching in” for reassurance was a pattern that never really tapped back. Again, alone. She and Erysichthon, surrounded by abundance, yet never in full resonance. Never satiated. A tragedy.

The paradox of experiencing being emotionally starved while surrounded by genuine love was an inner incongruence she was trying to resolve to be kind to herself, but also an act of love to those she loved in truth. Taking care of yourself is the best way, after all to take care of others.

A therapist she spoke to about this used to work with her using the Psalms as something of a CBT tool. He advised her to read them, use each verse as a spot check, reflect, meditate, and pray over it. He reasoned that God, the ultimate source and giver of love and connection would be where to start again so to speak. She did some of this but not routinely, as CBT intends, considering that the hope is to reroute the automatic thoughts of the brain. And I think if her counselor had been clearer on the need for routine, and explained the idea behind cognitive restructuring, she might have gotten effective help earlier in her life for this. This was a lovely harmony between faith and science.

Marvelously, Mariposa, in this progress, recognized the limits of control. Even saying that some of what continued to distance her from others was a subtle tug of war to control them. “I get it that when I blame them, I am still trying to control them a little bit. The blame is another outfit for that.”

Wow. That was a wow moment for me, hearing her say that. And I realized she is almost there! Like Paul in his defense before Governor Festus, King Agrippa said, “You have almost persuaded me!” So close! I wondered in my amazement, would she get there?

Mariposa’s ongoing pursuit of reassurance kept her attention fixed on what is missing. “I live in so much abundance, Dr. Quijada! I am really blessed! They do love me.” A strain from Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto in C minor sounded off. “And they are so wonderful.” Oh, lonely hearts of ours! The central cognitive distortion was not “I have nothing,” but “what I am receiving doesn’t count because it’s not enough or is not offered in the form I most desire.”

There is a prayer I have been given in my own life, “Lord help me love the way that I am loved.” Because Love surrounds us. Even we could say that Love has won. Conquered evil. And is in so much abundance that we are told, we can get from Jesus with whom like living water, we will never be thirsty again. But we live as if there just is not enough. Or that we need to be loved a different way. And the truth is that there is so much love for “Me”, for each of us, and not a deficit. In fact, evil has been completely defeated. But we live as though the wanting of it will devour us from the inside out.

How much of this is biological? Hm. Well emotions and behaviors do come from brain, or so I have heard, wink. And so, we dance. It is all the above. There are brain illnesses which result in a sense of profound loneliness and when treated, amazingly the perception disappears or at least diminishes greatly and the world looks differently. This is different or at least a distant relative of what Mariposa was going through. She did not demonstrate brain health pathology, rather she demonstrated pathology in her coping skills. When she was triggered, or one could say received a brain stimulus, her neurons fired down pathways that had become bear and deer trails in the wild woods of her brain. These paths became pathways of least resistance for her thoughts. Or like water slipping into a groove, they traveled there over and over again. Easily. And getting them to go a different route, such as toward automatic thoughts of gratitude, it would take a lot of work. It would take routine, and walking sticks, and good shoes.

Amazingly, Mariposa came to this herself by the end of our discussion. Super impressed, I was, “Wow. Thank you.” In receipt of her humility, vulnerability, and courage, I just said wow.

In my own life, I turned and told my own nucleus about my own tendencies toward blame and it was hilarious. Everyone seemed to know about it except me. They just looked at me, like, “And?” They were already there. Quite anticlimactic. Could I blame them?

Self Care Tip: Go toward the amazing freedom that gratitude brings.

Question:  Are you still trying to control what you can’t control through the pathways of blame? Please speak! We need to hear from you!  Keep on!

In our prior post we spoke about basic concrete blocks of this blog – self care from a biological level, and biases that once understood might no longer keep us from doing that.

But what else? 

As I evolve in my practice of medicine, and as a person—and (I can’t really call myself a writer because I don’t do it enough, but sure)—as a writer, I’m wanting to do more here. This blog is becoming more about God, but at the same time, not less about those biology cornerstones. We in these fields have put an artificial separation between psychiatry and God and that is not being a Friend to Yourself. I would like to flesh that idea out more too in time.

I see the coming together of God and psychiatry as the natural direction of healing and wellbeing.

I want to explore the relationship between our medical, biological selves and God. And vice versa. I want to take away that fake divider between them, or else we treat parts of ourselves as though they belong to different people. Ironically even as I write this, I feel like it’s my own biology that keeps me from being able to say this right!

Towards being more clear, I am not suggesting we trade medicine for faith. We’ve already done enough damage by treating mental illnesses as spiritual failures instead of medical conditions. My hope isn’t to replace biology with God. It’s to stop pretending they live in separate worlds.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you already know how strongly I believe psychiatric illnesses are real medical illnesses deserving real medical treatment. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how emotions and behaviors come from the brain. Biology matters.

What I’m suggesting now is not less medicine. It’s widening the wedge – a bigger picture. Understanding biology doesn’t make God less relevant, and acknowledging God doesn’t make biology less true. They were never separate in the first place.

You have read the occasional post here about God and psychiatry. More voices in that are needed because because because. Those conversations too often have asked people to choose between God and medicine when they were never meant to compete. We have spent generations talking about these subjects separately, as if we put a blank page between them marking their different constitutions – a page to separate different books or paradigms.

But I realize that this blog is going to go through some more awkward stages, (When has it not you say?) as we, you the reader and commenter, and me tapping away at a keyboard, figure some of this stuff out. Because we have not really found our voice in this yet, even though we talk about it so often. And you will be on the receiving end of poorly formed thoughts and disjointed logic.

But it is something I have been wanting to expand into for a long time but have not done well for many reasons. One being that it is just not traditionally done in the world of psychiatry and is discrediting in many circles. Yet the deeper I dive into life and practice, the harder it gets to pretend those are not one story.

Oh well. I’m old now and not that hot of an item. This may be one of my ways of “starting to wear purple”.  

…I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

(That poem is so so good! But you may have to be a woman in menopause to understand…)

Anywho…

It is sort of like the Bible. The Bible used to be from spoken word, passed down from one person’s voice to another person’s ear. Then people like Moses, David, and Joshua wrote it down. And before Gutenberg and before “us” it was on rolls of what not, papyrus maybe when available. And through the ages, committees, King James, prayer, and The Holy Spirit, eventually brought it together in what we call the Bible. And when the Bible shaped up, it was mistakenly divided into two parts, known as an Old Testament, and a New Testament. The Bible, however, is one story. One book. Not two. And the whole story is about Jesus and his unbroken covenant (promise and relationship) that God made with us.

In science, like the Bible, over time, we started separating one area of study from another. A rough example is the study of the stars. It once included math, physics, religious studies and more. Astronomy used to encompass many disciplines. On quite low light pollution nights it became an app called “Stellarium” for me. (Fantastic app btw if you are a superficial admirer of the skies like I am.) What was once one broad way of understanding the heavens eventually became something far more specialized. Likewise, biology became a college major and discipline, separated from English and philosophy. And in mental health, critical changes developed, like assuming someone hearing voices was possessed by the devil, changed to recognizing what we came to call schizophrenia (from Greek “schizo” as in “to split”, and phrēn “mind”). We learned to recognize disease within the brain, an enormous, huge, humane advance. But somewhere along the way, we also asked fewer spiritual questions alongside the biological ones.

To say it more plainly, we moved from mostly spiritual explanations to mostly biological ones. Hearing voices might be a brain illness called schizophrenia, or it might be that you are smoking weed or have a brain tumor. Those are medical questions, and they matter. But they do not exclude spiritual questions, nor exhaust all to know about a person. Human beings are biological, psychological, social, and spiritual is inside all of that. We started to believe that we could get more control over emotions and behaviors by learning about the brain and pharmaceuticals. We discovered something profoundly true. But it is not the whole truth. It does not make us our own God. Nor does God have dividers between anything he made unless we say, “No”. That is free will and God still fights to make sure each of us have it.

Biology explains real things.

Spirituality addresses real things.

Neither exhausts what it means to be human.

You see?!  You see how awkward I am!? Gah!

Give me a minute. I’m going to do my best and try to be more courageous when I write. Because these conversations are worth having. And I’m going to try to not start quacking like a duck while I do it.

Self-care tip: When you are struggling, don’t ask, “Is this physical or spiritual?” Address both. Together.

Question: Do you think science and faith belong in the same conversation? Why or why not? Please tell us your story! Courage! Keep on!

(I had intended to send this before the July 12th post. So don’t be thrown off by the type saying how long it’s been since I wrote. I didn’t post it because I wanted to work on it more. But I’m just posting anyway. Smile. Good luck! )

It’s been a minute, Blog-verse, since we spoke. I’m sorry for losing gravity. I’ve missed this space.

…Does gravity lose me or do I lose gravity? I’ll ask all the debris eternally orbiting in space. Maybe they know.

We’re going through a remodel right now and that’s my excuse. I hear the groans. You get me. We decided to do this in part because we are officially “emp·ty nest·ers”. I never liked that name. Who came up with that anyway? It has the same melancholy sigh as, “the wind came out of the cloud by night”, (Edgar Allan Poe’s final poem, “Annabel Lee,” published in 1849), …something much loved once lived here and now the absence with an echo sounds out. Couldn’t we have called this something a bit sexier, “Like even though you are going through menopause, and you keep asking yourself if ‘that’ or ‘this’ means you are getting dementia, you are still alive?” I think that’s catchy.

Coming home to a remodel every day has not been energizing. Nor inspiring. I am reminded of an old woman in crocheted slippers who scuttles around her house smelling faintly of powdery pharmaceuticals and incontinence, picking up one piece of lint at a time, moving a teacup from one tiny patch of exposed countertop to another, then to the sofa, only to spot another thread on the floor and start the whole scuttle over again.

I’m beginning to suspect I’ve become her.

It has however been fertile ground to process character, ergo, mine. My husband and I have been partners in all of this. And are we done? We are not. …Maybe that’s why K’s prayer landed where it did.

But I’m here with you today.

I wanted to share about this morning’s phone call with one of my girlfriends. Let us call her “K”, because like a Sesame Street episode she popped up into my day and taught me all sorts of things.

One was about Abraham.

We were enjoying our spontaneous encounter when she prayed that we could be like Abraham, who brought his son to an altar, surrendering him to God.

Why? because he knew the promise. And he knew who made the promise.

More back story. Here’s the short version of basically several chapters in Genesis. There was a promise God made to Abraham. Abraham was an old man at the time. He and his wife didn’t have any kids and in those days, that meant a lot, including wealth, legacy, and life meaning.

Abraham was so old, that his machine was shooting cobwebs rather than sperm. And then God came to him and said that he would make him the father of so many decedents that they would outnumber the stars and the sands on the seashore. And Abraham believed him, cobwebs and all.

“And Abraham believed….” Gen 15:6

That has been following me around all day. (Thanks for that, K.)

Maybe that’s what steadies someone living in an empty, but yet still tossed, space. I don’t have certainty. (Where’s my salt? When are the tilers coming? The gas is disconnected from the stove. Let’s just get Jilberto’s.) I do, however, have certainty about the One who spoke the promise. Even way back when to Abraham. And then to me. And it steadies me as my kids leave and make their choices and they are such wonderful humans but you know…

And what I would do for another and then another time to brush her soft long hair. And to share space while he sings with his guitar and she plays the viola in harmony. And to listen to her talk about social justice at the dinner table. Well, it’s a lot for Mommas. (That’s what they call me). Mt. Moriah looms. And I feel like I’ve been climbing up it with my kids, not understanding how I could obey God to let them go, and at the same time, God be able to keep his promises. But I am. Not to some world of chaos, or a term we use, “the Universe”, or any wide unknown space out there. Rather step by step, I go toward that place on top of the mountain with a Guide.

I give them to God.

To someone I know.

To someone I am in covenant with.

I’m not saying I’ve gotten the same promise as Abraham, many nations and all that. But there have been promises made.

And I am all in.

For me right now, it’s my kids.

For you, it may be something different.

Whatever it is, I don’t think surrender means giving what we love over to empty space. It means placing it into the hands of Someone we know. Someone who has proven themselves. Someone with whom we are in covenant.

And then, be all in.

Self-Care Tip: Take one thing you’re wound up about—a relationship, a choice coming up, a fear—and practice giving it over. Release what you love because you trust the One receiving it.

Question: What would it look like to entrust it—not to the unknown—but to the God you know?

I was recently reminded when with one of my patients—let’s call her Emily—that one of the greatest losses in anxiety isn’t simply peace.

It’s freedom.

One of the hardest things about anxiety is that when treatment works, it works so well that you begin to forget what life was like before. That, in turn, can make taking medication long-term more difficult.

Early in our visit, Emily said, “It feels good when you’re on it, that you forget what you’re like when you’re off of it. I feel like, ‘I don’t need this,’ but I know from experience, I feel great. I don’t need this, and then I go off, and then I have, like, a panic attack.”

Panic is part of it. But there is something else that anxiety anxiously steals. It changes your perspective on the world around you.

It is a subtle change in your freedom to think.

Your thoughts stop being free before you even realize they’ve been taken over.

They start being controlled by the anxiety rather than by the free part of your identity.

When I asked her what that felt like, she said:

“Basically, when I’m anxious, everything’s skewed, and I’ll have a thought, and I try to tell myself, ‘This isn’t a real thought. This isn’t real. This is my anxiety,’ but my brain keeps swimming around it.”

This is so so common in people struggling with taking meds. Who actually wants to?!  And it’s not only self-stigma impacting how people feel. Because look who’s telling you that? It’s your own brain. But patients are also struggling with what anxiety has convinced them is true about themselves and about the world.

The thoughts are not invited. They come without invitation. And because they come without invitation, they are not under voluntary control.

That means anxiety begins choosing for you before you have the freedom to choose.

The consequence is much larger than feeling nervous. It impacts joy. It changes the way you spend time with other people. It impacts everything.

It affects your capacity to connect with the world. It isolates you. It shapes your choices about how you intersect with the people around you. Invitations get rejected. Opportunities start narrowing. Loved ones become more of an attachment blanket than a relationship.

In a way, it changes your personality.

More accurately, it changes the story you tell about yourself.  That’s the story we are really talking about.

I said, “If you were to write, ‘Emily is a woman in her early thirties who is expecting her first child, and she…’ that story would become different. The identity you would describe yourself as would become someone shaped by anxiety rather than someone who is free to choose.”

That distinction matters.

It also matters when we begin talking about treatment during pregnancy.

The conversation cannot simply be, “Is the medication safe?”

Medication decisions during pregnancy need to be discussed together with your obstetrician because there are really two questions. One is the safety profile of the medication on the fetus. The other is the cost of untreated illness on you and your fetus.

I hesitate to call any medication “safe” because people define that word differently. What I can say is that some medications are among the most commonly used during pregnancy.

I can also tell you what is not safe for your baby: you not being well.

Even during pregnancy, studies have shown that untreated anxiety and depression affect the developing fetus. When these risks are weighed together, the benefits of treatment are often greater than the risks of leaving psychiatric illness untreated.

Near the end of our visit, our conversation shifted and Emily smiled.

“Have I ever told you that I have two older sisters? They’re both on Zoloft, 50 milligrams, and my dad is too. So, like, I don’t know if it’s, like, my destiny.”

“From a biological standpoint, we call that genetic loading. You are a creature created by your genetic design. You did not come from nowhere.”

“And maybe my baby will be on Zoloft too.”

I smiled.

“Maybe.”

I asked her one final question, “How would you feel if your child was on Zoloft? Would you feel like they shouldn’t be?”

“No, not at all.”

“Would you give them grace and not yourself? Would you be like, ‘Get on that yesterday,’ if they needed it?”

“One hundred percent.”

I smiled again.

“Maybe the question isn’t whether you deserve treatment. Maybe the question is whether you deserve the freedom to be yourself.”

Maybe that’s what self-care really is.

Not becoming someone different.

But caring for your biology enough that you’re free to become yourself again.

Questions: In what ways has anxiety, or other difficult emotions and behaviors, changed the story you tell yourself about who you are? How have they reduced your freedom?

Self-care tip: Caring for your biology is one way of caring for your freedom.

Hello Blog-verse!

I’ve been wanting to recenter myself on what this blog is about. In brief, it is supposed to be about self-care from a biological standpoint and, from there, a branching out into the psychosocial paradigms. This means that it is a stance on what our agency is when thinking about it medically, from a physician’s point of view. That means someone who goes through full medical training, including a college degree, four years of medical school, a period of primary care training in general medicine, and then completing four years of psychiatric specialty training.

For me, this included a fellowship in “Prime Psychiatry,” which is medical psychiatry—as in psychiatry for those who are suffering primarily, at the time of the encounter with me, from a primary medical illness, such as being inpatient in the ICU for pneumonia. In this psychiatry consult scenario, the patient may be seeing me for crying jags and a work up for depression while going through the life threatening medical illness. That is a different perspective on psychiatric illness than someone whose training is different, such as from a psychology or social work background.

We look at emotions and behaviors somewhat differently because our training in understanding mental illness begins from a different starting point. Medicine first asks, “What is happening biologically?” I.e., the brain as an organ, disease processes, medications, hormones, sleep, inflammation, pain, and the countless ways the body influences the mind. That is where this blog tries to begin. But it doesn’t end there.

Psychology and social work often begin by asking, “What experiences, relationships, thoughts, and environments are shaping this person’s life?” Both perspectives are valuable, but they naturally emphasize different aspects of the same human experience. I am in danger of oversimplifying this and misrepresenting, which I apologize for.

Human beings are never just biology. We are also shaped by our relationships, beliefs, losses, trauma, purpose, and the stories we tell ourselves. Understanding ourselves well requires attention to both.

In training for psychiatry, we also cover many of the therapies taught in the various schools of counseling, and likewise, they cover neuroscience. But our pivot point in medicine is always going to be from a biological level. Nor do we spend anywhere near as much time on the many schools of thought devoted to talk therapy.

That doesn’t mean the biological explanation is always the answer. Far from it. But in psychiatry it is our nidus. From there, we broaden our view to include a person’s relationships, developmental history, coping patterns, personality, beliefs, culture, trauma, purpose, environment, and so forth. The goal is never to reduce someone to a diagnosis or a collection of neurotransmitters. Rather, it is to understand how biology and life experiences continually shape one another.

What is funny about me, and I don’t know if this is true about other psychiatrists, is that I often find myself on this blog talking most about coping issues and psychological perspectives, and I’m not sure I need to improve that. So, it makes me think I need to come clean about what I really love doing here at Friend to Yourself.

One of my agendas seems to be washing up in the tide of time and experience: trying to help others understand the role of psychiatry and detangle the social perspectives of where emotions and behaviors come from and the way those perspectives help or harm access to benefits and medical care.

So much of my practice is spent helping people understand why medication is appropriate when there is a medical illness, and why emotional and behavioral pathology may reflect illness rather than a “poor choice,” “weakness of character,” or “lack of surrender to God.”

That is an extraordinarily difficult idea.

The idea is that pathological emotions and behaviors are symptoms of an underlying disease process at the cellular level from which they arise. I.e., emotions and behaviors come from a body organ, the brain. If the place where emotions and behaviors are generated from is well, there are emotions and behaviors that are well. And vice versa.

Much like when my eyesight is bad, it means that the cells, somewhere from wherever that vision comes from in the human head, aren’t working right. They should be treated medically, such as with prescription eyeglasses—a medical prescription for a medical condition. Eyeglasses don’t heal the underlying biology, of course. They compensate for it. But we don’t moralize needing glasses; we recognize that when vision is impaired, we seek a medical solution for a medical problem.

This just isn’t easy for almost anybody to understand.

The drive to think we have control over our emotions and behaviors, i.e., our identity, is so very, very high. But emotions and behaviors start somewhere. They are birthed and formulated amongst a slurry of neurotransmitters, ions, gated channels, DNA, and so much more. From there, they take shape and grow into what we finally see in a smile, feel as an impulse, experience in tears and laughter, and even recognize as affection.

Why do we so easily believe that more hard work on “my part”—through hours of talk therapy, an exercise of prayer beads, or giving ourselves a tune-up with a wrench and hand tools—should be able to fix it? We don’t do this to someone with nearsightedness but we do it with psychiatric illness.

Many medical practitioners struggle with this. Psychiatry occupies a peculiar place in medicine because our symptoms (pathological emotions and behaviors) are experienced as our identity, much more so than in other specialties. That makes it much easier to mistake disease for personality. Other medical practitioners may inadvertently counsel patients to “work on it” in one way or another through a behavior or thought change rather than directing them to a medical treatment for a medical disease. This turns the treatment of psychiatric illness mistakenly away from medical treatment and toward volitional control, as though emotions and behaviors were under the same conscious control we have when operating a joystick or shifting the gears of a manual transmission.

It’s super unfortunate because it’s hard enough for people to understand this, let alone when their clinical providers give them inaccurate medical information.

So, this blog has become, in part, a place where I try to do just that, moving from one dial setting to another, one color on the spectrum to another, and so forth. There just are not enough voices-and-volume out there explaining this.

It is still about how to be a friend to yourself from a biological standpoint, but less directly than I thought it would be when setting out. We are doing it, but a little more circuitously, in that we have to get into and through all the reasons—the many, many reasons—we don’t understand that emotions and behaviors come from the brain, which is just as much a part of the human body as a kidney or a liver or an eyeball. To care for ourselves when we are medically ill in these ways, we need medical treatment.

To be a friend to yourself from a biological perspective, we first stop blaming ourselves for what we don’t fully control consciously: our emotions and behaviors. We grow our understanding of, and modify our actions accordingly, to the fact that the brain is an organ and is the only place from which we experience ourselves.

It is the only place from which come our perceptions of what is true, of reality, of the way we identify ourselves, and of those around us.

Even though I’ve often said emotions and behaviors come from the brain, it could be said, rather, that they come from neurotransmitters, cells, DNA, hormones, immune signaling, relationships, trauma, nutrition, and sleep, if that makes it clearer. Because they do. They all converge in brain function.

The brain is an organ, but it is also the place where we experience being human.

That acknowledges the profound influence of relationships, beliefs, faith, purpose, and culture, all of which continually affect and shape the brain, from which emotions and behaviors arise in this lovely biopsychosocial person we call “Me.”

Let us, therefore, end by saying, “this blog is about”… learning to undersand ourselves compassionately by recognizing that biolgy and lived experience continually shape one another. It doesn’t abandon biology—it explains why biology matters without reducing people to biology.

What else is this blog about? Hm. I’ll work on that. There is more that constitutes our voice here for sure. Smile.

Self-Care Tip: Treat your brain like any other organ.

Question: Have you mistaken a symptom for a personal failure? Please tell us your story! We need to hear you.