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Title: Healing of the Mind

Author: Pat Brooks

Date: 1981

Publisher: New Puritan Library

ISBN: 0-932050-00-X

Length: 141 pages plus index and ad pages

Quote: “[T]he powers of darkness have kept the children of God from knowing of their full inheritance in Christ...The inexhaustible supply of power, authority and joy deposited in their names by Jesus Christ is unknown to thou­sands.”

Healing of the Mind is not, as its title may suggest, associated with the “inner healing movement” of its period. Brooks has a different approach to inner healing...I almost typed “unique,” although it’s not unique; it’s from an earlier historical period than Ruth Carter Stapleton’s Inner Healing or the dozens of “Christian psychology” books that came later in the 1980s. A different socioeconomic background, too. This small, cheap paperback, printed for free distribution at small, store-front-type churches, is addressed to people whose problems seem to involve demons.

Right...so that’s not most of the people I know. However, in the 1970s, even as we insisted that The Exorcist had been merely a metaphor, society became aware that several drugs (legal and illegal) have effects on the brain that are most easily described in terms of living with demons. Medication prescribed for deadly diseases had effects similar to experiments with LSD and pills. Some survivors of this type of brain injury make up the stereotypical, obvious homeless population; some are able to live near-normal lives. And what Pat Brooks had to offer was one way some of these people have been able to cope.

For those of us who’ve not had much trouble with demons lately, Pat Brooks’ way of spiritual life is not especially attractive. For people living with physical psychoses, it’s a best-case outcome. Improving physical health may help, or not. Unwelcome thoughts may keep returning. There may be a permanent mood disorder; life may be, at best, a cross to bear. What Brooks can offer is a way to banish the really nasty “demonic” thoughts, impulses, and delusions.

Are there real evil spirits that enjoy and exploit the effects of brain damage? Do the demons have any personal existence outside the damaged brain? Who knows, but some of the things the voices in these people’s heads say certainly support the claim of satanic involvement. No matter how much psychology you’ve read or how rational and skeptical you feel about demons, psychotic patients do have a way of saying things that make everyone wonder. What the Bible says about any independent existence these spirits may have is ambiguous and metaphoric. The best psychological study of “human evil” on the market begins with brief histories of patients whose behavior I can read as evil, then goes off into a detailed account of a patient I can only read as reacting to cultural stereotypes in a hilariously vindictive way...raising the question of whether Real Wisdom might be able to review the histories of Hitler and Stalin and the followers who wanted them as leaders, the house of Ahab and the dynasty of Herod, Jim Jones and Charles Manson, with the same amusement and empathy I feel for the patient Scott Peck called Charlene. Personally I’d go so far as to say that the Bible teaches that there is an Evil Principle that has enough personal existence to “inspire” some of the most hateful, hurtful things troubled souls say, but I don’t know enough about the Evil Principle to debate about it.

Let’s just agree on the indisputable fact that, when psychotic patients say things that sound demonic, they’re in a worse condition than they are when they sound “lucid” or merely “dotty.” For many of these patients, a spiritual approach—either a New Age embrace-the-shadow approach or a fundamentalist cast-out-the-demons approach—offers equally effective, and much cheaper and safer, relief than either a physical or a chemical lobotomy. The undamaged part of the brain may remain in control throughout the patient’s life, or not. Some diseases that damage the brain are progressive; some patients who are able to control their demons for a few years have to be institutionalized anyway. Other brain damage is the result of trauma from which patients recover; the relative I’ve called “Aunt Dotty” never stopped hearing, but always controlled, the demons she acquired from cancer treatment, for almost forty years. So the advantages of counselling that helps patients cope with demons, before medication or hospitalization are considered, may be great.

What about the theory that some patients are genetically predisposed to develop mood disorders, a few of which may become severe enough to seem demonic, even without using drugs? People with M.D. degrees are still debating that. What has been known for a long time is that physical damage can be done to the brain by prenatal conditions, head injuries, prolonged fever, food intolerance, toxic chemicals, and/or physical diseases. I have an intuitive feeling that most, if not all, mood disorders are going to turn out to be linked to one or more of these factors.

People are probably drawn to the side of this dispute that matches their own experience. During the years when I felt depressed, it wasn’t because I wasn’t having sex, or because I wasn’t a Positive Thinker, or because one of my close friends was a Wiccan. It was probably only a secondary complication of my being gluten-intolerant. It certainly was not because my brain was predisposed to have some problem processing serotonin. It was because I’d picked up a nasty, painful liver infection from an unnecessary vaccination; undiagnosed gluten intolerance might have made me more vulnerable than other people, because a few thousand people had the vaccine and only about one hundred developed hepatitis. I needed neither prayer rituals nor antidepressants—just time to recover. But at the time nobody had the benefit of twenty-five years’ further observation of my condition. At the time, luckily for me, a counselling approach to depression was in fashion. A young person with the same symptoms today would probably be offered antidepressants “just to relieve the pain while we look at the other factors,” and, since a serotonin imbalance would not be the primary cause of that patient’s depression, a serotonin boost would be very likely to damage that patient’s brain.

And I think it’s reasonable to use the phrase “God’s own mercy” when I remember that, around the time my husband admitted his mood was depressed, a blood test showed cancer—although, by the time further tests pinpointed the cancer in his bone marrow, he’d reached Stage IV. A man I was dating when we met had been diagnosed as “depressed” first. After using Prozac for a few months, he developed a nonviolent kind of Prozac Dementia before further physical symptoms showed that he also had cancer, a less fatal kind. Cancer of the bone marrow, which is rare and poorly understood, caused my husband’s blood pressure and consequently his moods to fluctuate dramatically in his last years. If serotonin boosters had activated demons along with his raging and fainting cycles, there’s no reason to doubt that he would have been one of those murder/suicide statistics...and the most likely targets would have been me and/or middle school children.

It may sound easier for the average middle-class American reader to accept the idea, “Your son/daughter/wife/husband probably has a problem metabolizing serotonin, which is likely to cause him/her to be depressed if s/he doesn’t take medication,” than to accept the idea, “Your son/daughter/wife/husband is being attacked by demons and needs to participate in prayer rituals to cast them out”...but I would urge readers to think it through before they accept the more dangerous of these two explanations. Both treatments have helped many people feel better, and prayer rituals are much safer than Zoloft.

The physical condition of my copy of Healing of the Mind is a testimony to the way an ordinary couple of friends-of-the-local-library received it. It’s an autographed copy; Brooks visited churches and Christian bookstores, and lots of people turned out to be supportive and buy a book. But it was cheaply bound in a peculiarly oldfashioned way, unfamiliar to young readers in the 1970s: it came with “uncut pages.” My grandparents’ generation remembered reading a new book with a penknife in hand to separate the pages, although selling books that way was out of style even in 1900. And when I found this book on sale, secondhand, after page 50 I still had to separate several pages. The people who’d bought this autographed copy read about one-third of the book and decided it wasn’t for them.

But if you know someone who has trouble with demons, Healing of the Mind just might help that person...so I’m not going to refuse to resell or review this book. I am going to say that most people will not thank you for giving it to them as a gift. Not all of us even know someone who will. Brooks’ approach can be a valuable counselling or self-help tool, though, if it’s used with discernment.