Stay in the crucible

“Patient Q,” known to me through a case study I was asked to proofread for grammar, is a 16-year-old high school girl with a history of family sexual abuse, exposure to community violence, mood dysregulation, a fifth grade suicide attempt, violent ideation, chronic lateness to school, impulsivity, high-risk behaviors, alcohol and marijuana use, rapid and intense mood shifts, and a provisional diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Current prescribed medications are Prozak, Abilify, and Lamictal. (The case study notes that Prozak and Abilify both “carry FDA black box warnings for increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in adolescents.”)

Author recommendations for treatment of Patient Q include weekly psychiatric appointments, coordinated development of a safety plan, routine monitoring, regular screening, tools to help the patient identify precursors and build alternative coping strategies, and personal and professional support contacts.

Or … what about this alternative view, which came to me on a sleepless bed while mulling over the case study: Q is in the trouble she is in today because: (1) life is hard; (2) she made some bad choices; (3) these choices made her troubles worse; (4) so she made more bad choices, compounding her troubles; (5) she was born in the 21st century.

The 21st-century West is a place where the normal human struggles of a thousand generations of young people are suddenly seen as a pathology to be labeled, treated, and numbed with meds, courtesy of a wildly lucrative pharmaceutical industry that entices into a dark labyrinth from which few ever escape.

Alternative recommendations for helping Q include showing her from the Bible that there is a God in heaven who loves her. He knows her to the depths because He formed her in the womb. He binds up broken hearts. He offers hope and a future, giving meaning to temporary sufferings. He forgives sins so that we can start again with a clean conscience. He proffers trustworthy rules for living, that we may escape our moribund, self-sabotaging ways.

How about just starting off with getting Q a good night’s sleep, and time away from her environment to sit quietly and think?

Around the same time I read Patient Q’s case, I happened upon a new release (2025) titled Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, Laura Delano’s testimony detailing her 14-year journey and eventual breakup with psychiatry after having been put on the psych med hamster wheel by well-meaning parents at age 13.

A widespread misimpression (that Big Pharma is in no hurry to correct) is the mythology that mental sufferings are caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. In fact, no such biomarkers have been found. Delano decided in the end that she would rather feel the pain and be alive than dull the pain and not:

“I had spent most of my life assuming that discomfort was a problem to be fixed, numbed, or run away from. … The more my brain healed from pharmaceutical trauma, the more clearly I recognized all that I had lost, all that I had missed out on, all the possible pathways that a psychiatrized young adulthood had prevented me from entertaining. … I’ve been off my meds for nearly six years now and I have never felt more alive, more connected to myself, more capable.”

Like Delano, Q has been bamboozled and razzle-dazzled by the jargon of professional pathology to the point (noted in the case study) that she even has adopted their lingo, applying to herself the clinical terms of the experts. Jesus, in contrast, says: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

My own personal testimony is that I was insufferable in college days, deeply depressed and obsessively haranguing friends about the meaninglessness of life in a random universe of time plus chance. Why get an education? I protested. Why get a job? Why have children? … Why get out of bed?

They grew weary of my one-track-mindedness and tactfully suggested there are other things to talk about, like boys and parties. I daresay if I had walked into a shrink’s office in the mental state I was in, I would have come out with a diagnosis and a script for an SSRI.

But God bless the child who does not short-circuit the struggle but elects to stay in the crucible, enduring the heat, trusting in the process, until meaning is forged and growth is attained. For we and Q are not a list of symptoms but His much-loved children, meant to thrive.