Bipolar Today

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MLive had an interesting article yesterday about the relationship between therapy and religious belief. On the one hand, they argue, there has been a historical tension between religious belief and psychology, as the latter has tended to see religious faith as harmful to psychological health and the result of various neuroses. On the flip side, some religious groups have said people with mental illnesses should, “Trust the Lord and throw away their meds”. Who started this is a secondary question, but the result has been that religious people have not received treatment that integrates their religious belief. The article details some of the ways in which religious practice is being integrated therapeutically, from prayer to meditation to religious plans of life.

Commentary

There can be something of an impasse when a therapist and his or her patient don’t share the same beliefs. On the one hand, the therapist may genuinely believe that the belief is harmful. On the other hand, so many religious practices involve centering the mind, providing discipline and beliefs about the future that can provide hope. Of course, it matters if they are true, but it also, in part, does not. Unless a physician sees his or her role as getting rid of these beliefs, which will just cause friction with most patients, one should look at the traditions to see where is useful. However, this involves understanding to beliefs, not simply having a superficial understanding of them.

Let me give a specific example from my own experience. Several years ago, I was having difficulty with guilt. My therapist at the time said, flat out, that he thought that this was the result of my religious beliefs (despite excessive guilt being a diagnostic criterion of major depressive episodes that are a part of bipolar disorder). This left me in an impossible situation. I can’t just change my beliefs because someone tells me to, even if I were to objectively agree that it was better, and my therapist had just made it clear that abandoning my beliefs was a condition of him being able/willing to help me with my guilt.

However, had he known the Catholic tradition better, he would never have needed to create this impasse. Two Catholic doctrines are relevant here. First, we are not punished by God for our sins in this life. Second, Catholicism teaches that we can be rather easily forgiven for all of our sins. We shouldn’t then feel guilty for sins for which we have been forgiven. The sense that I was being punished and the sense that I had committed unforgiven sins weren’t even consistent with my own religious beliefs, but he didn’t know that. Had he known the doctrinal resources in Catholicism for overcoming excessive guilt, he could have helped me without reaching that impasse. Instead, it was my own reading that helped me through this cognitive impasse, and my excessive guilt is gone, not only without abandoning my beliefs, but by coming to be in better conformity with them.

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