First the bad news
Thousands of babies are born every day into a world filled with bad news. The term bad news has become a colloquialism to describe our era.
Why is there so much bad news? It’s simple. The bad news that occurs in the larger scale is only the multiplication of what is occurring on individual level. The power that makes for bad news is sin.
Now, The Even Worse News
A common contemporary response to this bad news is to deny it or try to explain it away. Perhaps the most prevalent means of escaping blame is by classifying every human failing as some kind of a disease. Drunkards and drug addicts can check into clinics for treatment of their “chemical dependencies.“ Children who habitually defy authority can escape condemnation by being labeled “hyperactive“ or having ADD (attention deficit disorder). Gluttons are no longer blameworthy; they suffer from an eating disorder. Even the man who throws away his family’s livelihood to pay for prostitutes is supposed to be an object of compassionate understanding; he is “addicted to sex.”
An FBI agent was fired after he embezzled two thousand dollars, then gambled it away in a single afternoon at a casino. Later he sued, arguing that his gambling addiction was a disability, so his firing was an act of illegal discrimination. He won the case! Moreover, his therapy for the gambling addiction had to be funded under his employer‘s health care insurance, just as if he had been suffering from appendicitis or an ingrown toenail.
These days everything wrong with humanity is likely to be explained as an illness. What we used to call sin is more easily diagnosed as whole array of disabilities. All kinds of immorality and evil conduct are now identified as symptoms of this or that psychological illness. Criminal behavior, various perverse passions, and every imaginable addiction have all been made excusable by the crusade to label them medical afflictions. Even commonplace problems, such as emotional weakness, depression, and anxiety, are also almost universally defined as quasi-medical, rather than spiritual, afflictions.
The American Psychiatric Association publishes a thick book to help therapists in the diagnosis of these new diseases. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-III-R, as it is popularly labeled – lists the following “disorders”:
Conduct Disorder – “a persistent pattern of conduct in which the basic rights of others and major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated.“
Oppositional Defiant Disorder – “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior.“
Histrionic Personality Disorder – “a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.“
Antisocial personality disorder – “a pattern of irresponsible and antisocial behavior beginning in childhood or early adolescence and continuing into adulthood.“
And there are dozens more like that. Multitudes of parents, influenced by such diagnoses, refuse to punish their children for misbehavior. Instead, they seek therapy for ODD, or HDP, or whatever new diagnosis fits the unruly child’s behavior.
In the words of one author, the disease model approach to human behavior has so overwhelmed us as a society that we have gone haywire. We want to pass laws to excuse compulsive gamblers when they embezzle money to gamble and to force insurance companies to pay to treat them. We want to treat people who can’t find love and who instead, (when they are women) go after dopey, superficial men or (when they are men) pursue endless sexual liaisons without finding true happiness. And we want to call all these things, and many, many more – addictions.
What is this new addiction industry meant to accomplish? More and more addictions are being discovered, and new addicts are being identified, until all of us will be locked into our own little addictive worlds with other addicts like ourselves, defined by the special interests of our neuroses. What a repugnant world to imagine as well as a hopeless one to reside in. Meanwhile, all the addictions we define are increasing.
Worse yet, the number of people who suffer from such newly identified “sicknesses” is increasing even faster. The therapy industry is clearly not solving the problem of what Scripture calls sin. Instead it merely convinces multitudes that they are desperately sick and therefore not really responsible for their wrong behavior. It gives them permission to think of themselves as patients, not malefactors. And it encourages them to undergo extensive-and expensive-treatment that last for years, or better yet, for a lifetime. These new diseases, it seems, are ailments from which no one is ever expected to recover completely.
The sin-as-disease model has proved to be a boom to the multibillion-dollar counseling industry, and the shift toward a long-term or even permanent therapy promises a bright economic future for professional therapists. One psychologist who has analyzed this trend suggests there is a clear strategy to the way therapists market their services:
1. Continue the psychologization of life;
2. Make problems out of difficulties and spread the alarm;
3. Make it acceptable to have the problem and be unable to resolve it on one’s own;
4. Offer salvation [psychological, not spiritual].
Recovery, the codeword for programs modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, is explicitly marketed as a lifelong program. We’ve grown accustomed to the image of a person who has been sober for forty years standing up in an AA meeting and saying, “I am Bill and I’m an alcoholic.” Now all “addicts” are using the same approach – including sex addicts, gambling addicts, nicotine addicts, anger addicts, wife-beating addicts, child-molesting addicts, debt addicts, self-abuse addicts, envy addicts, failure addicts, overeating addicts, or whatever. People suffering from such maladies are taught to speak of themselves as “recovering,” never “recovered.” Those who dare to think of themselves as delivered from their affliction are told they are living in denial.
Perhaps the Wrong Prescription?
Disease-model therapy therefore feeds the very problem it is suppose to treat. It alleviates any sense of guilt, while making people feel they are victims, helplessly bound for life to their affliction. Is it any wonder that such a diagnosis so often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Congratulations for reading this far! I know this post started slow but it is laying an integral foundation for you to discover your Essential Purpose. I seldom hear from my readers but that’s OK as my writing is therapy for me, and much cheaper than seeing a counselor! Merlin writing now. I purposely began this blog post without an introduction to the author. Rest assured I am not the author of what you just read, although my study of scriptures, You Tubes, articles and many books the past 17 months clearly causes me to resonate with the above content. Something just doesn’t quite add up or intimately resonate within my spirit in our efforts to facilitate either a client’s return to a productive fulfilled life via the disease – model therapy, OR as touted in coaching, far surpass their former lack luster achievements and disappointments.
And I do believe this author is effectively chipping away at the slag covering the recently botched “welds” of our attempts to the institute disease – model therapy and perhaps, even the accepted and proven coaching techniques, especially in the church today and the culture beyond. When considering the eternal impact on these “humans in distress,” the somber words of warnings from Scripture fall heavily on all believers as we are all called to lead, guide and feed souls in “preaching the word being prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction.” II Tim 4:2.
We indeed are interacting daily on holy ground, and if we are in synch scripturally, there is not a more rewarding investment of our time and energy possible anywhere. You certainly brought nothing into this world except your spiritual endowment at birth and upon your spiritual maturation, your empowerment by the Spirit and your leadership to encourage other’s to invest their time and energy as wisely, or more so than you, is the only investment capital guaranteed to reach eternity either before or after you do! Think about that as you ponder the short sightedness of all your material investments here. Then think about the relationships in which you’ve been entrusted to teach as the song “Trust and Obey” says so well. Google it and read the words.
More from the anonymous author next time. If you found this insightful, tell others to read it and subscribe.
Blessings in fulfilling all of your eternal pursuits>>>>> merlin