Why so many Americans today are 'mentally ill'

David Kupelian has a lengthy but if you're a Christian it's a very interesting article on the "mental illness" epidemic we're seeing these days.

But is it really mental illness? Or is it something spiritual, like buried guilt and un-dealt with character (sin?) issues?

Are you a normal boy who doesn't really like shutting up and sitting at a desk for six hours a day listening to some boring teacher? You may have "attention deficit disorder." Are you an angry volcano inside? Then you suffer from "intermittent explosive disorder." Do you get drunk to deal with your problems? That used to be considered a moral failing, a character weakness, a failure to face your problems with courage and honesty. Now, of course, it's a disease called "alcoholism."

Today, everything is physiological and genetic and treated with drugs. Nothing is your fault. You're an innocent victim.

Furthermore, many of us like it that way. We like the idea that whatever is wrong with us is an organic disorder, that there's no sin, no weakness, no deficit of character on our part. Our egos love that, it comforts us.

Kupelian also talks about the trend of throwing a drug at every problem or negative feeling that comes along. He shares part of a letter from a Christian woman who had been using psychiatric drugs to run away from some issues where God was trying to work on her.

She added: "In the beginning, the drug was good, because it enabled me to think rationally and come out of my basement. If I had used that rational thinking to get a grip on the sin that was pulling me down into depression, I could have dealt with it biblically, and been off the drug in short order. But I did not. I became dependent on those pills and was gradually numbed to the seriousness of my sin. By God’s grace, I came to the recognition that this drug could be stunting my spiritual growth, and that turned out to be exactly the case."

Several years ago, before I became a drunk, I became very angry with God because I believed he had mistreated me. The error had actually been mine, but rather than face the fact that I had been wrong, I kept clinging to my anger and belief that God just liked to see me squirm, that he got a kick out of watching me suffer. That anger eventually became too much to deal with unaided, and I turned to the booze to help deaden my conscience. The only problem was, the longer my original sin problem went un-dealt with, the more booze it took to deaden the hurt.

It wasn't until I finally couldn't sink any deeper into despair and faced the fact that I had been wrong, that I received God's forgiveness, and though the habitual impulse of turning to the bottle was there for a while, God took away that need to medicate. I still have ups and downs, times where I get angry, confused, frustrated or hurt. But I now run to God instead of from God when that happens, and I get a lot more solace from Him than I ever did from the bottle.

We'd all be a lot better off if we dealt with our problems honestly and frankly. Unfortunately our society makes it easy to avoid that with "good times" images of alcohol use, and prescription pill-popping cure-alls.

Meanwhile, as Kupelian points out, such an escapist approach leads to more and more danger to those who "medicate" their consciences, and to those around them.

It's time we quit trying to escape our character (sin?) issues, and time we quit encouraging others to do it. It isn't smart, and it isn't loving.