Mental illness and metaphysics

Mental illness is more common than ever in our society, and we have many institutions dedicated to treating it. We have psychiatric wards, outpatient clinics, and above all, pharmaceutical companies which provide the drugs which alter brain chemistry in various ways in order to allow the mentally ill to (sometimes) live a more normal life. The dominant view on mental illness is that it is caused by abnormalities in brain chemistry, and solutions are sought to address mental illness on this level. To be sure, this can be effective in many cases. A material cause is assumed, sought out, and a material solution is provided. But I must ask: is the material cause of an illness the only cause of the illness? It is the habit of human beings that when a cause which explains a phenomenon satisfactorily is found that no further explanation is deemed necessary. If the answer can be found in matter, then any explanation for an illness which may transcend materialism is simply discarded as unnecessary; the most obvious explanation has been found and suffices.

This tendency to select one explanation and to be satisfied by it is very human, but even in the material world, there is seldom just one cause for an occurance. Consider a pitcher on a mound in a baseball game who throws a curveball which is caught by the catcher. One may be asked: what is the cause of the ball being received by the catcher? One could say "The pitcher threw it" and leave it at that, but there are many causes for the pitcher having thrown it in the first place, and each one of those causes has its own set of causes, and what we find is that the pitcher throwing the ball is part of an interconnected web of causes made up of all things. It would be completely missing the bigger picture to say that the only reason the ball reached the catcher is because the pitcher threw it.

So if a mentally ill person has a "ball" called mental illness, it may be wise to ask: did someone or something throw that ball to them? One could say that the pitcher is a combination of hereditary factors, brain chemistry, and past behavior. But remember that the pitcher in the baseball game is the result of a nearly infinite combination of past causes, which begs the question: could the pitcher of material causes of mental illness being in the place to throw the ball of mental illness itself have metaphysical causes as well?

Some may scoff at the notion, but I must remind you that we live not in a world of cold, dead matter but a world with well documented cases of stigmata, saints with incorruptible corpses, and inexplicable cures to illnesses. These phenomena are well-documented, although there are those who would brush them aside and conceal them, and there are varying degrees of explanation as to why they occur. All metaphysical theorizing aside, there remains the fact that a metaphysical aspect to reality has made itself known in this world. If that be the case, then metaphysics can at the least be said to affect something in the infinite web of causation which would lead to any case of mental illness, albeit perhaps only as indirectly as something only distantly related to the actual manifestation of mental illness itself.

Cardinal Lozano Barragán of the Roman Catholic Church in an address on the World Day of the Sick said that "Therefore, once the mental illness has caused such a disorder as to take away from the mentally ill patient any responsibility for his actions -- qualifying them as separation from the divine will, as a sin -- the mental patient cannot separate from God."