The Need For Psychiatry Over Counseling

More conventional forms of counseling and psychological therapy have their places in the arsenal to be used against mental health problems, but there are circumstances that call for the medications and other physical treatments of psychiatry.  It is useless to seek psychological counseling when there is no pleasure, motivation, or perhaps emotion of any kind to stir up with conversation and strategic planning.  The unfortunate reality is that this is insufficient to spark one or all of these emotions when there is no psychological fire to give fuel to.  In these cases, psychiatry and the medication-based approaches that it stands on are not just the superior way to tackle mental health issues, but also the only ones likely to succeed.

Because mental health issues of many kinds are so widely misunderstood, it can be difficult for people struggling with them to be open about them with others, and it can be even more difficult to seek out psychiatric help as opposed to milder, potentially unhelpful treatments.  Just as rationalism and true Christianity are liberating in so many other ways, the two, especially combined, can transform the depth to which a person understands the potential nuances of their mental health and liberate them from failing to seek adequate psychiatric help due to social judgments that arise due to choosing assumptions over reason and introspection.

If God made aspects of the human body and mind to have specific correlations, there would be reason for Christians to celebrate the medications and physical treatments of psychiatry rather than shun them!  In fact, it would be at least borderline heretical to oppose exploiting these correlations for the sake of lessening or completely curing whatever mental health issues could be affected like this--including depression, psychosis, anxiety, emotional numbness, and anhedonia in all of their forms.  Succumbing to lasting mental illnesses that have nothing whatsoever to do with the health of one's relationship with God and others is one of the most gratuitously destructive courses of action one could possibly take.

As someone who has at times struggled intensely with a very specific, seemingly rare mental health problem other than my situational depression, which has only surfaced during an extended existential crisis and a later relational abandonment by a cherished friend, I know both intellectually and experientially that there are mental conditions that psychiatry is more equipped to address than prayer or any sort of conversation-based therapy.  Medications/drugs, treatments like increasingly safe forms of electroconvulsive therapy, and other physical solutions are always possibilities that only become more likely to not have catastrophic side effects as the health applications of neuroscience progress.

Psychiatry is not always needed over something less involved like counseling.  Indeed, if someone has depression stemming from a fixable relationship problem, talking to the person in question and resolving the issue might remove the depression completely.  It is just that some conditions are not in this category whatsoever.  Sometimes a far more potent approach is needed if any sort of change is to even be slightly sparked in the first place.  Psychiatric approaches are objectively the best way to handle mental health issues of this kind--short of some very improbable improvement coming without any kind of direct action, these approaches are the only promising way for a person to rid themselves of an affliction or make it manageable as they work to eradicate it.