It doesn’t matter if you are a Mormon, Baptist, Methodist, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, or any other belief or non-belief, this page is one you should read in its entirety.
And in 2024 in the United States and many other parts of the world, your political view likely is going to apply these days.
Healthcare providers use a book titled, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Each time this book is updated it is given a new number. We are now number 5. You will find Diagnostic and Statistical Manual referred to as the DSM and usually followed by a number. In this article I will be referring to DSM 4 and DSM 5.
The DSM is used to provide the healthcare provider with a diagnostic code number that is often used for insurance purposes.
When the DSM 4 was published, a new mental illness was added to the book. This gave the healthcare provider an opportunity to diagnose a new mental illness and have insurance pay for treatment. I found out about this in 1999, thought it was strange to add this as a mental illness, but my goal was to research for better was to taper off psychotropic medication and nothing else. In 2022 something came to me, and I felt the need to research this further and the story begins.
The next area in quotation is take from the American Psychiatric Association
“In 1994, DSM-IV included a new V code entitled “Religious or Spiritual Problem”: V62.89: This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of other spiritual values which may not necessarily be related to an organized church or religious institution. In this chapter we present a typology for religious problems and a separate one for spiritual problems. These typologies are based on systematic and ongoing literature reviews of PubMed (Medline) and Psyclnfo as well as theology and anthropology reference databases to identify case studies and other research as well as clinical articles that address religious and spiritual problems. In the latter part of this chapter, we also discuss the co-occurrence of religious and spiritual problems with mental disorders, provide general guidelines for treatment of religious and spiritual problems, and conclude with suggestions for DSM-V. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)”
In 1994, when the DSM IV was published, psychiatry and the mental health professionals entered your church with authority. Reread the above section within the quotations closely. If you have never read this before and you did not react in any manner, you need to read it once again.
Let’s say; you have a new parishioner, and they are getting to know Jesus and in that process, they still struggle with their old belief system. They are fighting this transformation into accepting Jesus as their Savior. This is now a mental disorder.
Let’s say; a person has been a Missouri Synod Lutheran all of their life, their parents were Lutheran, and their grandparents were Lutheran. The person went to an Assembly of God Church and decided that church would best fit their wants and needs. A bit of self-doubt struggle ensues, their parents were told about this possible move to another church and the person is now being treated as an outcast, as though the devil is in that church. This torments the person; they are struggling with this change because they want their parents to accept the change. This is now a mental disorder.
You may want to reread once again the section within the quotations and think of other scenarios you have run into in the past that would fit this diagnostic criterion…
Substitute Lutheran with Muslim, Jew, agnostic or whatever and it does not change the story.
How did finding Jesus or anything else become a mental disorder?
This had to come from somewhere, from someone right? It did not magically appear in the DSM IV.
David Lukoff, Ph.D. was a co-author of this new section found in DSM IV. Just who is David Lukoff, Ph.D.? I will use his own words to describe who he is and his past. These quotes come from an online course David developed for healthcare professionals. Healthcare providers can receive CEU’s for doing his online course, DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems A course book by David Lukoff, Ph.D.
“For the first time, there is acknowledgment of distressing religious and spiritual experiences as nonpathological problems.”
Let’s continue with the introduction of DSM-IV Religious and Spiritual Problems A course book by David Lukoff, Ph.D.
“Co-author of the new category, David Lukoff, Ph.D., has prepared a course book (presented here) designed to teach mental health professionals about the process of its acceptance, its definition, various types of religious and spiritual problems, differential diagnosis, and treatment of these problems.
Alien encounters are included in this course book because such extraordinary events function for some individuals as transcendent experiences.”
“My interest in spirituality and mental health dates back to 1971, when I spent 2 months in a spiritual crisis–convinced that I was a reincarnation of Buddha and Christ with anmessianic mission to save the world.
In my clinical practice as a psychologist and my work with the Spiritual Emergence Network for the past 25 years, I have often found myself face-to-face with individuals with the same beliefs. By giving me a rare opportunity to go through the complete cycle and phenomenology of a naturally- resolving psychotic episode, my spiritual emergency was a valuable clinical experience as well as a spiritual awakening! In 1994 my work in this area came to fruition when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) included a category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem (V62.89) of which I was a co-author. My personal objective in developing this course is to help people survive the perils of the spiritual path and reap the benefits of a consciously lived spiritual life.”
“The mental health field has a heritage of 100 years of ignoring and pathologizing spiritual experiences and religion. Freud promoted this view in several of his works, such as in Future of an Illusion wherein he pathologized religion as: A system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else…but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Freud also promoted this view in Civilization and Its Discontents, where he reduced the “oceanic experience” of mystics to “infantile helplessness” and a “regression to primary narcissism.” The 1976 report Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disturbance [1] by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) followed Freud’s lead in defining religion as a regression, an escape, a projection upon the world of a primitive infantile state.”
“Albert Ellis,PhD is the creator of Rational Emotive Therapy, the forerunner of cognitive modification approaches now widely used in cognitive-behavioral therapies. In a recent (2001) interview,
Ellis stated:
Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously, there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes…But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs.”
“In addition to his bias against spirituality as a constructive element in health, in many other of his writings he has also derided religion:
The elegant therapeutic solution to emotional problems is quite unreligious …The less religious they [patients] are, the more emotionally healthy they will tend to be”
“BF Skinner,PhD, the psychologist who pioneered understanding of behavior modification principles that are the other half of cognitive-behavioral therapies, did not publish a single word on the topic of spirituality. He approached humans as stimulus response boxes with varying behaviors that depend on environmental contingencies. Skinner’s psychology gave no attention to inner experience, which does leave out a lot of what makes people human beings. However, Skinner’s implicit views on religion can be gleaned from the novel he wrote about a Utopian community, Walden Two.
In this novel, one member describes religion as:
an explanatory fiction, of a miracle-working mind… superstitious behavior perpetuated by an intermittent reinforcement schedule. These founders’ views on religion and spirituality have had a profound influence on the clinical approach to this issue. M. Scott Peck, MD, author of The Road Less Traveled, highlighted the disastrous clinical consequences for all the mental health professions: Traditional neglect of the issue of spirituality has led to five broad areas of failure: occasional devastating misdiagnosis; not in frequent mistreatment; an increasingly poor reputation; inadequate research and theory; and a limitation of psychiatrists’ own personal development. As a result, research on both psychopathology and mental health has largely ignored religion. Larson et al. Systematic analysis of research on religious variables in four major psychiatric journals, 1978-1982”
What do you take away from the course book introduction by David Lukoff? Is he objective with this thinking? Take a few moments and decide if David has preconceived ideas based upon his own experience of thinking he was the reincarnation of Buda and Christ.
It was nice of David to disclose his previous views on himself. Possibly, David feels doing so is a disclosure of personal interest with his writing. Taken from David’s website, spiritualcompetency.com – “I started a meditation practice and attended retreats with Lamas and Zen Masters, trained in qigong and aikido, and studied Medicine Wheel teachings and ceremonies with Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota Medicine Man. This experience also led me to decide to become a psychologist.”
There is not one mention of God, Jesus or The Holy Spirit in David’s writing I could find. David seems to be well versed in other types of non-religious spiritual matters.
What else was happening around the time of DSM IV being published?
What is happening in your own congregation?
In 2014, news reported; 70% of the population in the United States was taking either, an antidepressant, anti-anxiety medication, an antipsychotic medication or a pain medication. Since Covid, the number of people taking psychotropic medication has increased dramatically from what it was in 2014.
Since 1999, my websites have received well over 19 million visitors. With that has come millions of emails asking for advice, support or simply leaving a comment about their experience with a psychotropic medication. Two types of emails hit me the hardest over the years and I wish I could say it was only one or two emails.
Pastors would tell me their stories. How they no longer feel God coming to them to give instructions on their next sermon. How they have lost touch with God altogether. They no longer have a connection with God. These same pastors would email me back again once they were off their psychotropic about 45 days and tell me, “They are now back, and God is again in their daily life.”
Parishioners would tell me how they began to not feel God in their life. His word was now vacant for them. They eventually began moving back further and further in church until they finally reached the back row. Eventually they would sneak out the back before service was over, until eventually not attending church at all.
The pastors and parishioners all had one thing in common. Once they were off the medication their lives returned to how it once was with their church and God. Usually, somewhere about halfway off the medication they could once again experience and feel God in their life.
Over the past 26 years assisting people off psychotropic medication, this had to be one of my saddest experiences, hearing from pastors losing their touch with God.
It might be easy to tell by my writing, I am a Christian. I write from that viewpoint. However, it does not matter if you are Jewish, atheist, Muslim or any other belief or non-belief, the moment you begin to question your belief and mention that to a healthcare provider, you can be diagnosed as mentally ill.
Conspiracy theorists could have a heyday with this. I prefer to just look at facts. A psychotic was able to influence the American Psychiatric Association and have added to their sacred book, DSM, a new mental disorder, to match his own mental disorder.
This “doctor” was able to crack open pandoras box by getting this as a mental disorder.
After our presidential election in 2024, it makes me wonder when we will see another new mental disorder. The Liberal Disorder or the Trump Derangement Disorder and have healthcare providers label you as such and prescribe an antipsychotic medication.
One more story. In 2022, I was speaking with a friend, and I told them about the information I had just found on the doctor David. Surprisingly, my friend told me this – I used to be one of the people in my large Texas church you would come down to for prayer. I prayed with the people that came to me and the anti-anxiety medication I was on had me so out of touch with everything, I knew I was not praying for them but for myself. I needed help but I did not feel like I could talk with church leadership because most of them were also taking some psychiatric medication.
We can easily cast several stones here. They should have said something, removed themself from the position or any number of things, but this is the real world.
Jim Harper