Mental Health and Critical Thinking

Like many I have had mental health problems throughout much of my life. My mental health challenges or weaknesses include anxiety, depression, low self-esteem (self-berating, self-annoyance, feeling inadequate and incompetent), obsessive-compulsive traits, emotional neediness, and insomnia. Such psychic disturbances are experienced by all at some time or other – they are part of the natural response to inevitable setbacks in life. Whether or not anxiety, depression, etc. constitute mental illness depends on their severity, frequency, and persistence. Although everyone will experience some anxiety, depression, and so on, some will be more predisposed by a combination of genes and childhood training to have psychic problems in an acute or chronic form.

There are a number of aids people employ in order to maintain mental health or alleviate or cope with mental illness, or weakness (flaws, dysfunction). These aids include: physical exercise; creative activity – art, music, writing; meditation, Tai Chi, yoga; attention to diet; medication; religion; talk therapy – which may involve developing emotional awareness of self and others, and exposing oneself to discomfort and response modification. In addition, there are social factors, not so much within the agent’s control, which greatly help mental well-being, self-confidence, resilience, and mood, e.g. money, leisure, security, friends, having a good job, finding a romantic partner, social appreciation and status.

As part of my mental health regimen I have tried all of these aids except religion. (I have studied, explored, and tried to understand religions but never been a believer or practitioner.) Buying into an authority figure (or institution) who purports to have the definite answers – beyond questioning, intersubjective evidence and testing, clarifying terms – brings comfort and meaning to most human beings. Personally, though, I think it healthier individually and socially, and more noble, to learn to accept some uncertainty, not knowing, differences in belief, priorities, preferences, and perspective. Submitting to a religion, authority figure, institution or guru provides a security blanket but why not learn to deal with life without one, without simplistic, dogmatic rules? Instead of giving way to the tribe/herd/guru-follower mentality why not develop careful, open, critical thinking even though this involves work and discomfort?

Letting go of the self, merging oneself with beauty, goodness, kindness, justice, universal love, connexion with all things is a beneficial practice. Such an attitude, however, is different from dogmatically embracing beliefs and rules asserted by some human being as self-proclaimed agent of God or Divine revelation, or as a guru whose alleged insights are beyond logical or conceptual thought, or the need for evidence and questioning.

Even if it were empirically established that those who believed in, say, the Greek Orthodox faith, (or Jungianism, say), were significantly happier than those who did not would this be sufficient for becoming a member of the Greek Orthodox Church (or a Jungian)? If it could be empirically established that you personally would be happier if you became a member of the Greek Orthodox Church (or a Jungian) would this be sufficient ground for learning to suppress open, critical thinking and inculcating wholehearted (unshakeable, unfalsifiable) belief? If you would be happier given a lobotomy would you have one?