What is the outcome of therapy?

Having more than a passing acquaintance with the mental health industry, I speak with more familiarity than I ever wanted to the disappointment out there for those with mental illness, in emotional distress, and in with psychological wounds.  A diagnosis is hardly the answer.  It helps with the medical billing but it does not cure the patient.  Diagnostic codes seem of the greatest importance to the medical establishment for it is the key to what kind of therapy and what kind of meds get covered.  But it does not seem that all of this promise is actually curing people.

We think that diagnostic codes and the path through the medical maze we have constructed has a real track record when it comes to the mental health industry.  Does it?  We have more meds available than ever before but are those meds dealing with symptoms or actually treating causes?  We have more kinds of mental health resources to choose from -- including online providers to non-profits -- than ever before.  But the therapeutic arm of it all seems only there to bridge a crisis and not exactly to address the root of the problem.  In the hospital ER, the most important question is whether or not the patient still seems to be an urgent threat to themselves or anyone else.  If that standard is met, it is highly likely the individual will be sent home with a promise to find help with their current or a new provider.  That often seems like the entire mental health industry -- bridging one crisis after another without actually fixing anything.  I know I am being harsh but this is from the prospective of an insider.  The avenues of hope for those I have dealt with most intimately were helped not by government or an agency of a health care provider but by non-traditional sources understaffed and underfunded but often doing incredible work.  Actually fixing the problems or simply helping the wounded to be the walking wounded and not littering up the ERs of this world.

Therein lies the problem for a church with offers a religious version of therapy.  Therein lies the problem for a God who offers therapy.  Therein lies the problem of a therapeutic deism that replaces Christ and Him crucified.  We have turned God into a vendor for our mental health industry, a God who is willing to listen to us, encourage us to make peace with our demons, be true to ourselves accepting who we are with all our warts, and smile our way through the crap as if it were all good.  But the one thing that this God cannot do is actually save us, fix what ails us, and offer us something more than a reconciliation we have with what is wrong with us and around us.  Imagine pretending that sin is not sin or death is not death.  Is that all this therapeutic deity can offer us?  

This God is, as Anthony Esolen reminds us, a smiley face deity who smiles with us through it all but has no legs to run to us or arms to lift us up.  An emoji God who is little more than a cute picture.  We need more than this kind of false god.  We need a real God who can offer real help.  We don't need a God to address symptoms but one who can reach into the core of what is wrong and offer us a remedy, a rescue, and a real redemption.  That is why we got a God who came in flesh to have real arms and real legs to do something more than smile away the days of disappointment and despair.  The therapeutic part of this is in reality no therapy at all and it just might appeal to us because we would rather have our hands held and be told lies than to hear the truth that saves.