We have already seen that we have all been born as members of a fallen race, and as such we are subject to the effects of sin in our spirit, soul and body. In addition, because sin has entered this world, we also have a sinful nature that Scripture often calls “the flesh.” Scripture uses this expression to describe man’s sinful self that cannot please God. (This is also explained more fully in the section on “The Nature of Man.”) In the New Testament, especially in Paul’s epistles, it refers to man’s moral condition without God and the principle of self-will that governs the actions of the natural man. When our sinful nature, “the flesh,” is allowed to act, it can certainly contribute to and sometimes be the main factor in mental illness.
When sin is allowed in our lives, it is at once more serious, for it brings our responsibility before God into the picture. This is clearly seen in the case of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, whose mental illness was allowed of God because of his pride. Such sin is obviously different from a tendency to mental illness that is inherited, for it involves what Scripture calls “the sin which doth so easily beset us” (Hebrews 12:1). While there is no doubt that the tendency to these besetting sins is often passed on in families, yet we must draw a distinction between that which is the result of sin and that which is sin itself. The tendency to a particular type of behavior is clearly an infirmity, the result of sin, but bad behavior is sin itself. Sinful thought patterns and bad behavior can precipitate mental illness, and here it is definitely a spiritual problem. There is, however, encouragement in dealing with it, for as believers we can know deliverance from sin because the Lord Jesus has died to sin. We will say more on this subject when we discuss treatment.
For example, suppressed anger which is kept in the heart can bring on depression, and the depression will not lift until this is recognized and dealt with. Many stories about this could be told. A man walked into the room of a friend who had fallen into depression again and again, so as to need hospitalization, and bluntly asked, “Okay, what are you angry about this time?” It worked. The patient blurted it out and began to recover. Another example is given by E. C. Hadley in his book, You Can Have a Happy Life. He comments:
“We may not be fully conscious of the fact that sin and self-will are the cause of our anxious fears. It is so easy to deceive ourselves and make ourselves believe that someone or something else is responsible. However, we will never get rid of our fears or have any real peace until we admit the truth and get things right with God.
“A young lady, brought up in a Christian home, began to do things that her conscience condemned. Unwilling to admit them and confess them to God, she began to persuade herself first that God didn’t care, and then that there was no God. For several years she claimed to be an atheist. But the sin in her life gradually developed into anxiety and fear.
“She finally felt as if she were losing her mind and ended up in a mental hospital. Many remedies were tried, but no relief came until she faced the fact that she was trying to rule God out of her life. Once she confessed her sins and surrendered to God, she was able to leave the hospital with her anxieties and fears gone, and her mind clear.”
Sometimes we try to blame bad behavior on some physical cause, such as an abnormality of the brain. One such case involved a prominent politician who was holding a press conference. Here is the account of what happened, written by someone who heard him:
“This anti-drug politician had been a Teflon man through his two terms of office. Although he had faced constant legal charges, none of them stuck. Embezzlement, selling political favors, drug use — he was always accused but never found guilty. Now he had been caught in the act of buying and using illegal drugs. It was all on tape. How was he going to get out of it this time?
“As he was moving toward the podium, a reporter called out, ‘Why did you do it? Why did you lie to us all these years?’
“His response was immediate. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘My brain was messed up. It was my brain that did it. My disease did it!’ There wasn’t a hint of remorse — only indignation that someone would ask such a question.”
This man was assuredly not mentally ill in the real sense of the word, but rather he was excusing his sinful behavior by saying that he was not responsible because his brain was supposedly messed up!
We are all familiar with the well-known case of Judas Iscariot, a disciple of the Lord Jesus who betrayed Him for the money involved. When the Lord Jesus did not use His divine power to escape but rather allowed Himself to be arrested, it is recorded that Judas returned the money and then committed suicide. No doubt he was sorry for what he had done, but his sorrow was rather for the consequences of his sin than for the sin itself. Scripture tells us that “godly sorrow worketh repentance ... but the sorrow of the world worketh death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Poor Judas felt such remorse that he “went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). Such was the awful result of sin allowed in his life!
So far we have mentioned some examples of mental illness where willful sin was the primary cause of the problem. However, willful sin can be a serious factor in mental illness that has its primary origin in sin as the effect of the fall of man. The predisposition to mental illness may be inherited, but the outward manifestations of such tendencies may be the result of sin allowed in one’s life. A propensity toward mental illness that would otherwise remain dormant can be brought out by willful sin. Episodes of mental illness are sometimes a specific reaction to severe anxiety arising from inability to meet the demands of adult adjustment. Such a difficulty may have its roots in a permissive upbringing, where there was a lack of the necessary discipline to shape the individual properly. A medical doctor (a believer) who treated a large number of college students made this observation:
“Children who have never been conditioned by some frustrations during the first fifteen years of life will not be very fit to meet the demands of adult living without experiencing unusual stress.”
Dr. Douglas Kelly, the chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg trials, made the statement that we have raised “a generation of children who have not been taught the discipline required for getting along with the world. ... We have been overenthusiastic in our refusal to teach control lest we traumatize.” If he made this statement more than fifty years ago, what would he say today? Children who have been disciplined mentally and physically to work, to accept restrictions on their behavior, and to direct their emotions and energies outward instead of inward will not be nearly as likely to develop mental illness, even if they have been predisposed to it by heredity. We will say more about this subject when we consider circumstances and the effect of sin from without.
In our discussion of the scope of mental illness, we have mentioned personality disorders and how sin has sometimes distorted the “makeup” of the individual so that his patterns of behavior deviate markedly from others. Sad to say, this effect of sin on one’s personality sometimes leads to willful sin, where the individual becomes angry at not being accepted as normal. Instead of admitting the problem and seeking help in dealing with it, he lashes out at others. He may deny that he has a problem, choosing rather to regard himself as normal and others as abnormal. Such people are doomed to lead most unhappy lives until they face the problem, admit it, and seek the Lord’s help. In other cases, the individual is genetically predisposed to his bad personality structure, but then his will takes that tendency and allows it to act in open sin. This is particularly true in the serious disorder sometimes called the antisocial or “psychopathic” personality. Left to themselves, such individuals often end up living a life of crime, unless the grace of God reaches them and saves them.
Addictions, too, are part of this aspect of mental illness, in that they are connected with an inherited tendency which is then allowed to flourish to the point where it becomes sin. Because this is such a large subject, we will reserve it for a more thorough discussion later in this book.
The question of willful sin also brings us to a discussion of our moral responsibility in mental illness.