Monthly Archives: April 2017

Kintsukuroi Christians

Posted on by
Reply

When I was a kid growing up, there wasn’t much that my father couldn’t repair.

Dad was extremely gifted with his hands, a talent that I certainly didn’t inherit. He was able to take a problem, come up with a practical solution in his mind’s eye, then build it out of whatever scraps of wood, metal or plastic he could lay his hands on. It was the ultimate expression of frugality and recycling that comes from a limited income and four growing children.

Dad was also able to resurrect nearly everything that broke in our house. Plates, cups, teapots, toys, tools … it seemed there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be fixed by the careful application of Araldite.

Araldite, for those unfamiliar with it, is some sort of epoxy resin that, in the right hands, possesses mystical properties of adhesion. It would stick anything to anything.

Dad’s gift for repairing things with Araldite meant that a lot of our things were patched up. Some of our most loved possessions were the most cracked. Despite being glued together several times, each item was still functional. Maybe not as pretty as it may have once been, but still useful, and more importantly, still treasured. Each time the Araldite came out, it taught me that whilst all things have the capacity to be broken, they also have the capacity for redemption.

There’s an ancient Japanese tradition that shares the same principles. For more than 400 years, the Japanese people have practiced kintsukuroi. Kintsukuroi (pronounced ‘kint soo koo ree’) is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer, and the deep understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

The edges of the broken fragments are coated with the glue made from Japanese lacquer resin and are bonded back into place. The joints are rubbed with an adhesive until the surface is perfectly smooth again. After drying, more lacquer is applied. This process is repeated many times, and gold dust is also applied. In kintsukuroi, the gold lacquer accentuates the fracture lines, and the breakage is honoured as part of that piece’s history.
Mental illness is a mystery to most people, shrouded by mythology, stigma, gossip or Hollywood hype. It’s all around us, affecting a quarter of the population every year, but so often those with mental illness hide in plain sight. Mental illness doesn’t give you a limp, a lump, or a lag. It affects feelings and thoughts, our most latent personal inner world, the iceberg underneath the waters.

On the front line of medicine, I see people with mental health problems every day, but mental health problems don’t limit themselves to the doctor’s office. They’re spread throughout our everyday lives. If one in four people have a mental health problem of one form or another, then one in four Christians have a mental health problem of one form or another. If your church experience is anything like mine, you would shake hands with at least ten people from the front door to your seat. Statistically speaking, two or three of them will have a mental illness. Could you tell?

It’s a fair bet that most people wouldn’t know if someone in their church had a mental illness. Christians battling with mental illness learn to present a happy façade, or face the judgment if they don’t), so they either hide their inner pain, or just avoid church altogether.
Experiencing a mental illness also makes people feel permanently broken. They feel like they’re never going to be whole again, or good enough, or useful, or loved. They’re often treated that way by well-meaning but ill-informed church members whose idea’s and opinions on mental illness is out-of-date.

The truth is that Christians who have experienced mental ill-health are like a kintsukuroi pot.

Mental illness may break them, sure. But they don’t stay broken. The dark and difficult times, and their recovery from their illness is simply God putting lacquer on their broken pieces, putting them back together, and rubbing gold dust into their cracks.
We are all kintsukuroi Christians – we’re more beautiful and more honoured than we were before, because of our brokenness, and our recovery.

I’m pleased to announce that my book, Kintsukuroi Christians, is now available. I’ve written this book to try and bring together the best of the medical and spiritual.
Unfortunately, good scientific information often bypasses the church. The church is typically misled by Christian ‘experts’ that preach a view of mental health based on a skewed or outdated understanding of mental illness and cognitive neuroscience. I want to present a guide to mental illness and recovery that’s easy for Christians to digest, adopting the best spiritual AND scientific perspective.

In the book, I look at some scientific basics. Our mental world is based on the physical world. Our mind is a function of the brain, just like breathing is a function of our lungs. Just as we can’t properly understand our breathing without understanding our lungs, so it is that if we’re going to understand our thinking and our minds, we are going to have to understand the way our brain works. So the first part of this book will be an unpacking of the neurobiology of thought.

We’ll also look at what promotes good mental health. Then we’ll look at what causes mental illness, specifically looking at the most common mental health disorders. I will only look at some of the most common disorders to demonstrate some general principles of psychiatric illnesses and treatments. This book won’t be an encyclopaedia, and it doesn’t need to be. I hope to provide a framework so that common and uncommon mental health disorders can be better understood. I also discuss suicide, which is sadly more common than most people realise, and is rarely discussed.

I know mental illness is difficult, and we often look at ourselves or others as though the brokenness is abhorrent, ugly and deforming.
My hope is that through Kintsukuroi Christians, you’ll see the broken pieces are mended with gold, and realise that having or recovering from a mental illness doesn’t render someone useless or broken, but that God turns our mental brokenness into beauty.

Kintsukuroi Christians is available to purchase from good Christian bookstores around the world including:

Kooyong = https://www.koorong.com/search/product/kintsukuroi-christians-christopher-pitt/9780994596895.jhtml

Amazon US = https://www.amazon.com/Kintsukuroi-Christians-TURNING-MENTAL-BROKENNESS/dp/0994596898/

Amazon UK = https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kintsukuroi-Christians-TURNING-MENTAL-BROKENNESS/dp/0994596898/

Smashwords = https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/720425

~~

Mental illness can be challenging. Sometimes learning about mental illness can bring up difficult feelings or emotions, either things that you’ve been through yourself, or because you develop a better understanding of what a loved one is going through or has been through. Sometimes old issues that have been suppressed or not properly dealt with can bubble up to the surface. If at any point you feel distressed, I strongly encourage you to talk to your local doctor, psychologist, or pastor. If the feelings are so overwhelming that you need to talk to someone quickly, then please don’t delay, but reach out to a crisis service in your country

In Australia
Lifeline 13 11 14, or
BeyondBlue
Call 1300 22 4636
Daily web chat (between 3pm–12am) and email (with a response provided within 24 hours)  https://www.beyondblue.org.au/about-us/contact-us.

USA = National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

New Zealand = Lifeline Aotearoa 24/7 Helpline 0800 543 354

UK = Samaritans (24 hour help line) 116 123

For other countries, Your Life Counts maintains a list of crisis services across a number of countries: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines.

Hollywood knows more about cognitive neuroscience than Dr Caroline Leaf

Posted on by
Reply

Anyone ever watched the Will Smith movie, “Concussion”?

The movie is based on the true story of Dr Bennet Omalu who is a Nigerian-born pathologist (a pathologist is a forensic specialist who is able to determine the cause of a person’s disease and death).  Dr Omalu became curious as to why otherwise healthy middle-aged men were displaying changes to their behaviour and memory before dying at a young age.

What he found was changes to the brain of these NFL players similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s Disease.  The recurrent physical head trauma sustained by those football players was resulting in abnormal proteins in their brain cells.  The abnormal proteins resulted in the destruction of those brain cells.  As a result of the destruction of those brain cells, the thinking and behaviour of those players changed.

After initially denying the link, the NFL was forced to change their policy on repetitive head trauma under the weight of the avalanche of confirmatory data that followed in support of Dr Omalu’s findings and it’s been reported that “as of the summer of 2015, more than 5,000 former players were involved in a consolidated lawsuit, with a settlement figure of $765 million deemed insufficient by a judge”.

But good news for the NFL … self-titled cognitive neuroscientist Dr Caroline Leaf reassures us that “Your mind controls your brain.  Your brain does not control your mind.”

Maybe she can act for the NFL as their star witness.

But if I were her, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.  After all, it’s not like she’s able to mount particularly strong logical arguments.  Today she wrote on Facebook, “It’s important to remember that our thinking changes the structure of our brains because our minds are separate from our brains.”

How is the mind going to control the brain if they’re separate?  Suggesting that one thing controls another carries the implication that they are intrinsically linked.  If your hands are separated from the steering wheel of your car, are you in control of your car?

The other reason why Dr Leaf won’t be getting a call from Roger Goodell any time soon is because she isn’t really an expert on cognitive neuroscience as much as she’s convinced the Christian church otherwise.

Oh, and then there’s that minor detail that even Hollywood knows more about cognitive neuroscience than she does.  The whole point of “Concussion” is that brain damage results in disordered thinking which is the exact opposite of what Dr Leaf is trying to claim, and it’s hard to withstand any real scrutiny when your hypothesis has been trumped by a Hollywood screenplay.

The mind is a function of the brain, it does not control the brain.  The fact that Dr Leaf can not or will not bow to the weight of the undeniable scientific evidence means that she is either delusional, ignorant or utterly obstinate.  The fact that the western church is still willing to deify Dr Leaf in spite of these qualities is a stain on the reputation of the church and a blight on it’s witness to a world which only needs to look to Hollywood to find more credible information than what’s coming from Dr Leaf’s pulpit.

Black is the new black – Mental illness touches more of us than we realise (or want to admit)

Posted on by
Reply

I rarely get sick.

I say this while superstitiously touching my wooden desk to try and avoid putting the mockers on myself.  Thankfully, I have a fairly robust immune system and, after years or working in hospital paediatrics and general practice, and having been sneezed at or coughed on multiple times a day, I have been exposed to just about every variation of the cold virus and influenza possible.

Even for those of us with an immune system as solid as a prize bull, we still get sick every now and then.  We all get upper respiratory viruses so commonly that we just consider it a normal part of life.  Most people will take some paracetamol or ibuprofen and keep going.  Some people will go to their GP, and while a most will (… should …) come away some simple reassurance, occasionally some will need a prescription medication for a nastier bacterial infection.  An even smaller percentage will need admission to hospital because of a much more severe infection.

I read an interesting blog this week on Psychology Today by Dr David Rettew.  Its provocative title was, “Is Mental Illness the Rule Rather Than the Exception?”

The blog discussed the study being carried on in Dunedin which has been following a cohort of a thousand people for the last thirty-five years.  This particular study looked for common factors that were shared by those people who had never been affected by a certifiable psychiatric disorder.  What was interesting was that only seventeen percent of the people in that cohort had NOT been affected by a mental illness at some point in that thirty-five-year time frame.

Now for the average Australian, there are some obvious kiwi jokes going begging here (like, I’d be depressed too if I had to live in New Zealand, or how can someone tell if a sheep is really depressed or not, etc. etc.).  All jokes aside, seventeen percent of people not affected … that’s a remarkable figure.  In researching my latest book (soon to be released …) I had come across the figure of fifty percent of people had a lifetime prevalence of any mental illness.  That’s one in every two, and chances are that if you weren’t the person affected, you would know someone who was affected, but the Dunedin figures are even higher.  If you can accurately extrapolate them, four out of every five people will be affected by mental illness at some point in their lives.

The inevitable response from modern psychiatry’s critics is entirely predictable – there will be claims that the DSM5 is simply making diseases out of normal human life experiences, that our humanity is being pathologised and over-medicated for the benefit of big Pharma.

But as Rettew points out in a separate blog post, something may be such a common occurrence as to be considered part of the normal human experience but it can still be a pathology.  The common cold is so common that it’s a normal part of life, but it’s still a disease.

Whether four out of every five people will be affected by mental illness or one out of two, whatever the number, the idea that most of our population will be afflicted with a mental illness at some point in their lives isn’t necessarily a negative thing.  As Rettew also discusses, we don’t arbitrarily change the definitions of physical illnesses to match how many people we think should suffer from them, and neither should we arbitrarily change the diagnostic boundaries of mental illness so less people appear mentally unwell.

We need to accept that, at times, people will be functionally impaired to varying degrees because of mental illness just like people will be functionally impaired by physical illness.  We need to treat mental illness with the same respect as we would physical illness.

In the same way that not all physical illnesses require medication, neither do all mental illnesses.  By and large, most mental illnesses that people suffer from will be short lived and self-limiting, the psychiatric equivalent of having a cold.  Some people will need treatment for their mental illness, but usually this takes the form of structured behavioural therapy like ACT or CBT.  Occasionally, people will need to take a medication and very occasionally, some people will need to be hospitalised because of their mental illness.

For too long, mental illness has been viewed from an extreme perspective – mental illness is uncommon and severe. The nuances of mental illness have been lost or ignored in the white noise of ignorance and sanctimony.  The lack of subtlety and understanding has failed us as a community.  When treated early, mental illness has a much better prognosis, but the stigma, fear and misunderstanding perpetuated by the all-or-nothing approach has left a lot of people without treatment and therefore with worse outcomes overall.

If people were to realise that most of us will be touched by mental illness at some point, then perhaps there would be more understanding and less judgement, something that would lead to less suffering because of mental illness.

That would only be a good thing.

~~~~~

If you think you might be affected by mental illness or if you would like to know more, see your local GP, family physician or psychologist.  On line information can be found at many reputable sites including Beyond Blue – https://www.beyondblue.org.au