The Mind Or the Soul

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed Allan Horwitz's book, "DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible", which claims that 'DSM', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is a 'social creation', as in: what real science is behind it? It turns out--surprise, surprise-- none! Unlike medicine, physics, math, etc. which are subject to objective verification, 'mental illness' is whatever the shrinks say it is--and that seems why the book's title reads, 'psychiatry's Bible': a holy book for a secular profession comprised by a majority of atheists. And just as the Bible changes, with both homosexuality and heterosexual adultery punishable by death by stoning in the Old Testament but in the New Testament Jesus turns that completely around by mandating forgiveness, so too not so long ago the DSM deemed being gay a mental illness. Science based medicine/surgery has done wonders in treating the body's illnesses but mental illness seems to be surging in spite of all the drugs available. My guess is because--as I experienced 50 years ago, you cannot heal the mind without healing the soul. Of course if you do not think you have a soul that sounds like nonsense--I thought that way as a young agnostic, until I tried to end the living hell of a major clinical depression where you largely stop sleeping, eating, emoting until your nerves are shot and believing death meant extinction, you throw yourself into a river--and then you discover (remember actually it seems) you have a 3rd mind besides the conscious and unconscious versions: a consciousness that unlike the brain is endless, immortal. I had a good shrink after I left the psych ward [and a series of electroshock treatments], a good man who helped me greatly not by drugs, which I refused to take, but by talking with me and caring about me. I told him about my near-death experience but he had in college adopted atheism as his 'religion' [and it is a faith,a matter of belief, as logic says God can no more be disproved than proven] and so I suppose he thought I had hallucinated [for a part of it I might wish he were right]. I know to this day it was not he who 'healed' me, in as much as I've never had another depression in the 1/2 century since. No, it was God, or whatever you wish to call the Being/Presence/Force that permeates the universe. We are ALL, without exception, broken beings, neurotic, selfish, sinful, lost, call it what you will. Seeking God may be the only way to heal a broken soul.