(After a preparatory series of blogs, we now turn to proposing a response to the mental health crisis which has been our focus over the preceding weeks of this series.)
Fourth, our responsive solution must focus the right amount of effort or force at the necessary root cause factors or else little will change, at least to the extent we are hoping for. Sometimes, your child’s knotted shoelace needs a pointed object to be pressed at just the right place in order to pull out a loop that would otherwise be seemingly content with remaining entangled until the end of time. The present mental health of our society exists because the factors identified earlier continue to exert pressure on individuals and communities to hold them in place, if not tightening the mental health dysfunction knot. Until an appropriate countering force is pressed at the root of the problem, the mental health knot will continue to tighten under the influence of the worldly pressures.
Before spending time considering true and proper responses to the root issue we just finished describing, we will briefly review the world’s flawed responses. The world candidly exhibits its opinion of the nature of the mental health crisis by the solutions it offers. Other essays on this Whole Person Whole Life website have addressed or will address how our Tennessee legislators view the mental health crisis with their proposed solutions during the Special Session this past summer. Their proposals focused primarily on more money and more mental health professionals. They proposed hiring more mental health experts in schools and the community and paying for more mental health care with government money. They continue to look to governmentally based solutions working without regard to the underlying spiritual issues of those suffering.
Another example of the world’s approach comes from a recent opinion piece in The Tennessean by guest columnist Scott Pierce. There Mr. Pierce lamented that only 56% of psychiatrists accepted commercial insurance and expressed his belief that “The fundamental driver behind these stats” (referring to 1 million mental health diagnoses in Tennessee) “is inaccessibility to needed care. Simply put, there aren’t enough mental health providers. And most are concentrated in urban areas, often operating outside of the health insurance system.” His solution is to increase the reimbursement for mental health services to mental health professionals. Again, more money and more expert care. He goes further later in the article to express how Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance company is changing its case management of these patients to increase the compliance with medications. So, besides more money and more care, the problem needs more medications. (“Scott Pierce is executive vice president and chief operating officer of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.”) These worldly responses have not taken into consideration the myriad factors of society which clearly lies at the root of this crisis. They have definitely not considered the spiritual issues and goals discussed in prior installments of this series.
From these descriptions and from our own experience, we repeatedly see and hear from the world that the mental health crisis needs more money, more experts, more mental health providers, and more regulation of society by government legislation. Every last nuance of this comes wrapped in the worldview of materialism although it will often paint itself in the makeup of religion where the consensus of society still holds such supernatural views of the world. They use the religious heart hook by claiming their approach is what Jesus would do for the sufferers or that it is our calling as Christians. This flawed approach is what brought us to this point of a tangled shoestring, yet as is always the case, they keep pressing us to follow the same failed plan down the same doomed road promising that it will be different this time around. We have thrown more and more money into health care for decades without receiving a worthy return on such an ongoing hefty investment.
A Biblical response then stands out as our only hope against this backdrop of guaranteed failure of humanistic attempts at untangling the shoelaces. Rather than starting with programs aimed at changing behaviors and diagnoses like the worldly approach, a Biblical approach begins with the human spirit as it relates to the one who created it. No civil government can lead in this spiritual work, but instead must get out of the way and guard the boundaries of the two “institutions” which can do the real work. These institutions are the family and the church when they operate according to a covenantal framework and move towards the spiritual goals of “shalom” and “Eirene” as described in prior blog installments. For the family and the church to have space to work on untangling the knot of mental illness, the state should step back rather than forward. The fingers of the state will only get in the way of untangling the knot when it throws more money, more experts, more legislation, and more programs all tied to a faulty worldview at the crisis.
Once the government turns its hands away from the knot and towards giving the family and the church room to work, these God-ordained institutions must turn away from their own worldly patterns. Both must wash themselves of their unbiblical methods which currently resemble the world more than the Bible. While modern mankind can claim that it had advanced in terms of raising children and in terms of building a church, ultimately God’s original design still holds as the true instructional guide which leads to fruitful families and churches. These two God ordained institutions must work together in moving not only themselves, but the whole of society towards God’s design of “shalom” for mental health.
We start by looking at the misdirected approach currently at work in the family. In the setting of family from nuclear to extended, the world’s values have permeated and saturated the beliefs, the values, and the goals of family leaders and therefore refashioned the behavioral patterns and the actual individuals who result from these worldly fashioned families. Parents and other adults in the family often view and treat children differently than the Bible instructs. Many of these views are simply faulty extremes of otherwise Biblical values. For example, the admonition to protect the weak (Psalm 82:3; Proverbs 31:8-9; Isaiah 1:17) often becomes an overprotective indulgence in which children receive so much doting and coddling that they do not mature with their own fortitude to handle life. Having received every participation trophy possible, having been provided every entertainment as a child, having never been told “no”, and other similar overindulgences they frequently become adults who expect the rest of the world to baby them like their parents. They more quickly crumble under conflict. They often run from challenges. They complain that work is hard or wonder why someone expects them to earn their way.
These generational products just described grow up to be the young adults who value themselves so much that they do not even want children. Having children would hinder their own entertainment, travel, and lifestyle. While one can live a fulfilled life if God calls them to be single or God withholds children from a marriage, a married couple’s choice to choose their freedom and lifestyle over having children indicates a lack of understanding about how children are a blessing from God. This becomes an almost worse situation when such couples are blessed with children and the children are viewed either as a burden or become a surrogate to the parent’s own vicarious self-fulfillments. In the former situation, the parents continue to live their dreams while the child is sent to various other care providers so as to stay out of the way. In the latter, the child is pushed to perform in some way such as through academics, sports, or music so as to feed the parent’s pride and sense of accomplishment. The dysfunction of each consequent generation only deepens and moves further from a Biblical approach if nothing intervenes in this cycle.
Within these settings, the prevailing parenting advice of the world further misleads Christians in how to raise children. They are urged to socialize their children in schools so that their children can function in a global economy. They are encouraged to let their children have room to grow into their own adult lives by making their own life decisions. They are convinced that it is necessary and good to send their children away to learn on their own and be more heavily influenced by others of their own age. Each of these and other worldly values parading as good values, even couched in terms of being Godly values at times, lead away from a Godly design for families.
When the church does try to push back against the worldly advice, it sometimes swings the pendulum too far. By overemphasizing strictness and control, some have advocated for hyper-religiosity and legalistic submission which produces its own rotten fruits in families’ lives. Rather than resting in the simplicity of God’s instructions for parenting, they actually create another human-devised approach. Without mentioning names that have been in the news in the past 10-20 years, such supposedly Christian leaders gather a following around what they promote as guaranteed Godly parenting strategies. For the Christian families who attempt such approaches, they either suffer shame and guilt for not living up to the standard or produce resentful children who rebel against the control and legalism. For those watching from the world, they then have more fodder to throw at Christianity for this harmful false portrayal of Christian parenting.
From each of these inappropriate approaches to parenting and family, the resulting next generation is set up for mental health dysfunction. As mentioned earlier, some are set up to expect an easy life and frequently crumble when the world does not serve that easy life. For others, they are so hurt by the bad view that they cannot respond beyond the trauma of life nor look to parents for support. When their lives bring trials and storms, besides lacking internal fortitude, they do not have family support systems in which connected mothers and fathers provide a steadying force to the waves of life. As examples of this common unfavorable outcome, many statistics show that sons without good fathers in their lives struggle either with mental health or turn to lives of sinful behaviors that lead to adverse consequences. The National Center for Fathering describes real world consequences of children without fathers on their website. Likely with a little searching we also find similar statistics for the results of children without a motherly presence in their lives. These self-destructive patterns lead to more mental health dysfunction. By following a worldly pattern of parenting and family life in contrast to Biblical pattern, we are producing a society of individuals far more prone if not pushed towards mental illness.
(Having described the dismal situation created by the worldly approach of patterning family after a non-Biblical pattern, we move in the next installment to considering a better pattern for family life that can counter the mental health crisis.)
Bibliography:
Pierce, Scott. “Partnerships to Improve Tennesseans’ Access to Mental Health Care Are Critical | Opinion.” The Tennessean, 26 May 2023, www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2023/05/26/mental-health-improving-tennesseans-access-to-care-is-critical/70248377007/. Accessed 15 Sept. 2023.
“The Consequences of Fatherlessness.” National Center for Fathering, fathers.com/the-consequences-of-fatherlessness. Accessed 15 Sept. 2023.
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