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Guest, Join Papa Zoom today for some uplifting biblical encouragement! --> Daily Verses
Mental health
- Thread starter Chassidy
- Start date
Try
HEALTH AND FITNESS
or
CHRISTIAN TALK AND ADVICE
Other members here do use those 2 Forums when they need to interact. The Lounge MIGHT work.
You'll know better after you've been here a while.
Again welcome.
Pretty good leap from 2018 to 2023 but almost seamless.Kidron
Why did you leave?
Come back!
Kidron is big on OSAS and about good works not being necessary.
So we don't agree on these 2 important topics.
But I've known him for 8 years, even on other forums that I don't visit anymore, so I do like him and am sorry he left.
I still find it interesting how we can tell a person's personality just from posts.
We are each so unique.
Highway54
Member
I don't seem to suffer with it, but I feel the peace and contentment that comes from serving Jehovah assists greatly. But it seems like we have a high number of those who do suffer from it in the congregation. Society tends to drug up those who have worse cases of it, but it seems like to me they make it worse by doing so. Put forth time and effort in what brings you happiness. Good friends are extremely hard to find, but if you can find one, they are the best source to provide comfort for those who suffer from depression, etc.
Christ_empowered
Member
By God’s grace I’ve recovered as much from so called treatment as I have from any underlying affliction….
That does not sound good at all . What congregation is this you are referring to ?
Christ_empowered
Member
I think 
he means the forum…
he means the forum…
Riven
Member
Highway54
Member
The congregated people of God Hawk
Why does it seem that way to you ? Where are the congregated people at you are observing ?
Highway54
Member
They are from every tribe, nation, peoples, and tongue Hawk Rev 5:9,10. If you believe like I do that we are deep into the last day period of satans world, then you realize that Mat 24:14 is nearly fulfilled, thus God's people would be visible throughout the earth, at least their message would be available in virtually most every country at this time.
Are you really asking who are God's people Hawk? The Bible identifies them beyond any doubt sir, and I would be glad to show the scriptural identity if you wish.
When I was in my early twenties (I'm nearing sixty now), I went through a season of very awful and serious psychological distress. It all began with a prayer, actually. I had left home for studies at university and there encountered an antagonism toward my faith that I'd never known. Everybody in a teaching position seemed to think Christianity was a great evil, a collection of anachronistic myths and primitive beliefs that harmed more than helped, a faith of fools. I was not prepared for such sophisticated, angry and widespread opposition to my worldview and I came quickly to a crisis of belief. The biggest problem for me was that God was just an idea, a theological proposition, a perspective to defend, not a Person I knew directly and encountered on a daily basis. I did not have an "abundant life" in Christ that the Bible said I could have. Instead, I was a "coat-tail" Christian, a believer in Jesus mainly because of my upbringing. In the "storm" of opposition to my faith, such a weak, tepid connection to God wasn't going to endure.
So, I prayed. I prayed that God would "show up," that He would "make Himself real to me," that He would be more than just a religious idea. I prayed with all the earnestness and sincerity I could muster, from my heart pleading with God to "be real." I assumed that when He was ready, God would give me some kind of spiritual epiphany, a warm, fuzzy, butterflies-and-rainbows moment with Himself that would forever change me and make me unshakably certain of Him.
Didn't happen. At all. Instead, the very opposite occurred. Instead of warmth, and light, and joy, God "took me to the woodshed." (This is an old way of saying, "God disciplined me.") And how! The morning after my cry to God to "show up," I descended into a place of inner darkness that, in time, drove me to the edge of suicide - and kept me there - for over two years. I suffered with insomnia, deep anxiety (including cluster panic-attacks many times a day), obsessive-compulsive thinking, and profound depression. Overlaid upon all this was a constant and severe demonic attack: evil thoughts and impulses rising and swirling about within my mind, frightening me terribly and making me think I had had some sort of psychotic break with reality. It was so exhausting! And acutely isolating. I felt that if anyone knew what was going on inside of me, they'd be horrified and have me committed to a psychiatric facility, or exorcised (or both).
What I didn't understand at the time was that, from early childhood, God had filled my life with Himself, with His truth, His love, His provision, through a crowd of fellow Christians, communicating Himself to me for two decades in sermons, in prayer meetings, in pot-luck suppers, worship services and Christmas pageants, in Sunday School lessons and Bible Camp adventures; He'd showed me Himself in the godly living of many Christians, in the faith and teaching of my own parents, in His constant material supply for my family, and so on. God had given me "the carrot" of the blessings of Christian living but I had not responded in faith and love in any serious way toward Him. And so, He answered my prayer with "the stick."
God knew He could not move me properly with positive things, as He had tried for nearly twenty years to do. Only difficulty and pain would shift one such as I, who, in the midst of God's blessings, had grown complacent and careless toward Him. And so, because God loves me, He took my earnest prayer entirely seriously and answered it with both the best - and the worst - response, doing what He had to do, painful for me thought it was, to move me into proper relationship with Himself. It was the most awful experience of my life - which is saying something, because I've had some other extremely painful, long-term conditions I've had to endure as I've aged.
In God's great kindness, He used a fellow believer to point me to the truth of what He was doing in my darkness and suffering. Realizing my inner turmoil wasn't just some "chemical imbalance," some "mental disease" over which I had no control and thus no responsibility to rectify, I began to seek God's route to peace and rest in Himself. And I found it - though I traveled a long and frightening path to the freedom that was in Himself. I didn't use stultifying drugs, or have regular sessions with a therapist; I didn't resign myself to perennial psychological misery; I didn't adopt the view that my problems were entirely physical. Instead, I saw in God's word that peace, inner stability, freedom from fear and despair, were all effects of knowing Him well and that the absence of these things in my life was simply a testament to how bad the relationship between us was.
Believing that when God said peace and rest could be found in Him, and desperate to be free of the horrible darkness that had bound me in fear and despair, I began to pursue Him as I never had before. I devoured His word, memorizing it, studying it, and, by faith, living in it. His word, in my mind and heart, was the light God said it would be, shining upon the many, many lies I'd told myself about myself, about God, and about the nature and purpose of my existence. (Psalms 1; Psalms 119, Matthew 4:4; 2 Timothy 3:16-17, 1 Peter 2:2) As God exposed and rooted out these lies, teaching me to stand by faith upon His Truth, I came progressively free of the inner darkness that had been crushing me. I became a man of the word of God, bringing every thought into obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5), increasingly rejecting the worldliness and fleshliness that had crept into my thinking and living, anchoring myself more and more in what God said was true of me, of Himself and of the world around me. As I did these things, I drew near to God and He drew near to me (James 4:8), coming into focus, so to speak, in a way He never had before, the Holy Spirit in tandem with the word of God fundamentally re-ordering my very worldly, self-centered thought-life and hierarchy of priorities and values.
Among the very many incredibly precious things God taught me in this season of darkness and suffering, was the truth that, at bottom, my fear, obsessions and despair were all the "fruit" of a spiritual problem, they were tokens of things badly awry between me and God, not merely symptoms of a disease, mere physiological ailments. God says nothing in His word about how to set a broken bone, or how to perform brain surgery, or remove an inflamed appendix, but He speaks to our psychological state, to our inner peace and stability, to our joy and contentedness, over and over again in His word, saying that He is the remedy for our anxieties, our unhappiness, our obsessions, our psychological prisons that we build for ourselves, and for the oppression of the devil. Thank God I believed Him and, following His path to peace and rest, came entirely free of the anxiety, obsessiveness and depression that had pushed me to the edge of suicide. What He did for me, He can do for you!
Matthew 11:28-30
28 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
29 "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.
30 "For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
2 Timothy 1:7
7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.
Romans 8:15
15 For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"
John 14:27
27 "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.
Philippians 4:6-7
6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Isaiah 26:3-4
3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
4 Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
So, I prayed. I prayed that God would "show up," that He would "make Himself real to me," that He would be more than just a religious idea. I prayed with all the earnestness and sincerity I could muster, from my heart pleading with God to "be real." I assumed that when He was ready, God would give me some kind of spiritual epiphany, a warm, fuzzy, butterflies-and-rainbows moment with Himself that would forever change me and make me unshakably certain of Him.
Didn't happen. At all. Instead, the very opposite occurred. Instead of warmth, and light, and joy, God "took me to the woodshed." (This is an old way of saying, "God disciplined me.") And how! The morning after my cry to God to "show up," I descended into a place of inner darkness that, in time, drove me to the edge of suicide - and kept me there - for over two years. I suffered with insomnia, deep anxiety (including cluster panic-attacks many times a day), obsessive-compulsive thinking, and profound depression. Overlaid upon all this was a constant and severe demonic attack: evil thoughts and impulses rising and swirling about within my mind, frightening me terribly and making me think I had had some sort of psychotic break with reality. It was so exhausting! And acutely isolating. I felt that if anyone knew what was going on inside of me, they'd be horrified and have me committed to a psychiatric facility, or exorcised (or both).
What I didn't understand at the time was that, from early childhood, God had filled my life with Himself, with His truth, His love, His provision, through a crowd of fellow Christians, communicating Himself to me for two decades in sermons, in prayer meetings, in pot-luck suppers, worship services and Christmas pageants, in Sunday School lessons and Bible Camp adventures; He'd showed me Himself in the godly living of many Christians, in the faith and teaching of my own parents, in His constant material supply for my family, and so on. God had given me "the carrot" of the blessings of Christian living but I had not responded in faith and love in any serious way toward Him. And so, He answered my prayer with "the stick."
God knew He could not move me properly with positive things, as He had tried for nearly twenty years to do. Only difficulty and pain would shift one such as I, who, in the midst of God's blessings, had grown complacent and careless toward Him. And so, because God loves me, He took my earnest prayer entirely seriously and answered it with both the best - and the worst - response, doing what He had to do, painful for me thought it was, to move me into proper relationship with Himself. It was the most awful experience of my life - which is saying something, because I've had some other extremely painful, long-term conditions I've had to endure as I've aged.
In God's great kindness, He used a fellow believer to point me to the truth of what He was doing in my darkness and suffering. Realizing my inner turmoil wasn't just some "chemical imbalance," some "mental disease" over which I had no control and thus no responsibility to rectify, I began to seek God's route to peace and rest in Himself. And I found it - though I traveled a long and frightening path to the freedom that was in Himself. I didn't use stultifying drugs, or have regular sessions with a therapist; I didn't resign myself to perennial psychological misery; I didn't adopt the view that my problems were entirely physical. Instead, I saw in God's word that peace, inner stability, freedom from fear and despair, were all effects of knowing Him well and that the absence of these things in my life was simply a testament to how bad the relationship between us was.
Believing that when God said peace and rest could be found in Him, and desperate to be free of the horrible darkness that had bound me in fear and despair, I began to pursue Him as I never had before. I devoured His word, memorizing it, studying it, and, by faith, living in it. His word, in my mind and heart, was the light God said it would be, shining upon the many, many lies I'd told myself about myself, about God, and about the nature and purpose of my existence. (Psalms 1; Psalms 119, Matthew 4:4; 2 Timothy 3:16-17, 1 Peter 2:2) As God exposed and rooted out these lies, teaching me to stand by faith upon His Truth, I came progressively free of the inner darkness that had been crushing me. I became a man of the word of God, bringing every thought into obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5), increasingly rejecting the worldliness and fleshliness that had crept into my thinking and living, anchoring myself more and more in what God said was true of me, of Himself and of the world around me. As I did these things, I drew near to God and He drew near to me (James 4:8), coming into focus, so to speak, in a way He never had before, the Holy Spirit in tandem with the word of God fundamentally re-ordering my very worldly, self-centered thought-life and hierarchy of priorities and values.
Among the very many incredibly precious things God taught me in this season of darkness and suffering, was the truth that, at bottom, my fear, obsessions and despair were all the "fruit" of a spiritual problem, they were tokens of things badly awry between me and God, not merely symptoms of a disease, mere physiological ailments. God says nothing in His word about how to set a broken bone, or how to perform brain surgery, or remove an inflamed appendix, but He speaks to our psychological state, to our inner peace and stability, to our joy and contentedness, over and over again in His word, saying that He is the remedy for our anxieties, our unhappiness, our obsessions, our psychological prisons that we build for ourselves, and for the oppression of the devil. Thank God I believed Him and, following His path to peace and rest, came entirely free of the anxiety, obsessiveness and depression that had pushed me to the edge of suicide. What He did for me, He can do for you!
Matthew 11:28-30
28 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
29 "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.
30 "For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
2 Timothy 1:7
7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.
Romans 8:15
15 For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"
John 14:27
27 "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.
Philippians 4:6-7
6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Isaiah 26:3-4
3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
4 Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
Christ_empowered
Member
My experiences with the mental health industry came before my conversion. I discovered the myth of mental illness a book written by psychiatrist dr.Thomas szasz in the 60s. Psychiatry and psychology are basically modern religions that flourish as traditional religions fade. Psychiatry is slavery accompanied by deliberately inflicted brain damage. Given my experience as a patient…
I agreed and continue to agree with szaszs analysis and conclusions.
An issue in my walk with Jesus has been realizing that I’m probably stuck with the labels but the world is full of lies and darkness anyway.
I agreed and continue to agree with szaszs analysis and conclusions.
An issue in my walk with Jesus has been realizing that I’m probably stuck with the labels but the world is full of lies and darkness anyway.
I believe you are quoting a Bible verse. I will see if I can look it up.
eddif