Michael R. Emlet

“Hippocrates’s adage remains true for us today: “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”1 Both proponents and skeptics of psychiatric classification should agree on one thing: we are wonderfully and distressingly complex creatures. This should humble us and promote dependence on God as we seek to understand and provide help within a biblical framework to those who are especially troubled.”
― Michael R. Emlet, Descriptions and Prescriptions: A Biblical Perspective on Psychiatric Diagnoses and Medications

“Fourth, along these same lines, some diagnoses remind us of a more central role of the body in a person’s struggle. Psychiatric diagnoses remind us that we are embodied souls. We know this clearly from Scripture! But functionally speaking, we sometimes over-spiritualize troubles with emotions and thoughts. When you consider the spectrum of psychiatric diagnoses, it is clear that years of research demonstrate that some diagnoses may have a stronger genetic (inherited) component of causation than others. These include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorder, and perhaps more severe and recalcitrant forms of depression (melancholia), anxiety, and OCD.2 Another way of saying this is that although psychiatric diagnoses are descriptions and not full-fledged explanations, it doesn’t mean that a given diagnosis or symptom holds no explanatory clues at all. Not all psychiatric diagnoses should be viewed equally. Some do indeed have long-standing recognition in medical and psychiatric history, occur transculturally, and therefore are not merely modern, Western “creations” that highlight patterns of deviant or sinful behavior, as critics would say. Observations that have held up among various”
― Michael R. Emlet, Descriptions and Prescriptions: A Biblical Perspective on Psychiatric Diagnoses and Medications