Читать книгу Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton - Страница 8

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

—John 10:101

A FEW YEARS AGO, I ATTENDED A LECTURE ON THE POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS between religion and mental health given by an eminent professor of psychiatry. He opened his lecture with an intriguing, if somewhat disconcerting, statement: “I only have fifteen minutes to see a patient, and I spend the whole of that time looking at the computer screen trying to work out the patient’s blood levels and checking the efficiency of the patient’s meds.” The rest of the lecture was excellent, but I couldn’t get past that opening statement. As a former mental health nurse, I understand the pressures of a busy, understaffed, and often underfunded health-care system. Nevertheless, that the psychiatrist decided to spend all of the paltry fifteen minutes of each patient’s visit looking at a computer screen is telling.

A person’s biological functioning is certainly important. If one assumes that mental health experiences can be primarily or even fully understood and explained in biological terms, then scrutinizing a person’s blood levels for chemical imbalances and checking the impact of medication on blood cell count make sense. However, human beings are not simply a conglomerate of chemical interactions. Humans are persons, living beings who have histories, feelings, experiences, and hopes, and who desire to live well. Living well is not determined by the functioning of our biological processes apart from our individual social, interpersonal, and spiritual experiences. Similarly, understanding the biological dimensions of mental health experiences may turn out to be helpful, but it is unlikely to solve problems that emerge from poverty, loneliness, war trauma, and abuse. It is also unlikely to tell us much about what it means to live with and to experience these things scientists describe as “symptoms.” If you don’t know what these symptoms actually mean for an individual, it is difficult to know what you are trying to control and what a “good outcome” might look like. If you have only fifteen minutes with a patient, you don’t need rich, thick experiential descriptions. Thin ones will do just fine. Time is an issue, but the problem of time reflects deeper issues.