God's Help for Depression, Autism or Neurodiversity.

Healing of psychiatric illness is more difficult than physical healing. Spiritually there is greater warfare. Bearing a grudge can make someone ill. The psychiatrist deals with that grudge directly. Emotional trauma can make someone ill. Barry Bennett described a woman being hit by a car. She wasn't badly injured but the trauma caused her to have severe arthritis. The psychiatrist is dealing with that trauma directly. Some psychiatrists say that depression is repressed anger - bearing a grudge. Ephesians 4:26,27. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry and do not give the devil a foothold. Anxiety is emotional trauma. What does the Bible say about anxiety? John 14:1. Don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Trust in him. I was watching an old film about a manned space flight to the moon. A man stood beside the moon rocket laughing at it. 'Your rocket won't get off the ground. It's too big.' I could sense God saying, 'Malcolm, I have a plan for your life. I have arranged it all so that everything will be all right in the end. But you are laughing at me. You're saying, your plan won't work, your plan won't get off the ground.'

Another problem is that to heal someone of autism or a personality disorder might change their personality and make them into a completely different person. I used to worry that, if God healed my depression, I wouldn't be able to write songs and stories anymore. Surely my vivid imagination was part of the problem. God can work very gently in a person, healing them slowly over a long period of time. Healing is a part of normal spiritual growth. As we become full of God's spirit we experience the joy and peace of the Lord. Philippians 4:4-9. Rejoice in the Lord always. As you bring your problems to him in prayer, the peace of God, which surpasses understanding, will guard our hearts and minds. Galatians 5:16-24. Live by the spirit of God and you will be filled with love, joy, peace, kindness and gentleness and become more self controlled. 

2Corinthians 10:1-6. We destroy arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God and take captive every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. We have strongholds in our thoughts that are evil and ungodly. We need to be set free from things that have happened in the past. When I was 7 I wet the bed because I was frightened of the dark. My friend pointed out that I had the same fear now and prayed for me to be set free. I was bullied at school and read newspaper reports about children who had attempted suicide or, in one case, stabbed two women because they were bullied at school. My depression and anxiety involved suicidal thoughts and nightmares about women being murdered. All of this can be traced back to those newspaper reports, many years ago. They were a kind of auto suggestion, a fear that that is what I would become. I recently bought a new mobile phone. It was full of adware and unwanted adverts kept popping up on the screen. This reminded me of all the unwanted thoughts of my obsessional neurosis, as the doctors called it in the 1980s. My friend, who is good at repairing mobile phones, showed me that the only way to repair it was to go through all the apps I had added to the phone that contained adware and take them out one at a time. That's how it is with healing a psychiatric illness. I left the weather app because I needed it and use it all the time. Although it contained the adverts that warned you that something was wrong with the phone when it wasn't, and these had caused the problem in the first place, the weather app was safe to use if you avoided clicking on those adverts and ignored them. There are aspects of your mind and personality that God will not erase because they are useful. If people are neuro diverse God will give them peace rather than heal them completely. I am not autistic but I have dyspraxia which makes you a brilliant intellectual who struggles to open a car bonnet. I still have a vivid imagination that can't always tell fantasy from reality. This had a lot to do with my nervous breakdown but it is also useful to a novelist. You can't write science fiction any other way.