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!