The Chair of Christian Though Lebel Lecture in Christian Ethics

Why Mental Disorders Are Not Brain Disorders (Alone): A wholistic Christian Approach to Mental Health Care
featuring Dr. Warren Kinghorn

In an era in which mental health research is dominated by brain sciences, those who live with mental illness are often encouraged to understand unwanted experience and behavior as a neurobiological problem or even a “chemical imbalance.”  Mental health advocacy organizations, including Christian mental health advocates, often embrace this neurobiological framing as a way to reduce stigma and shame associated with mental health problems.  To be sure, mental disorders do happen in the body and brain.  But they cannot be reduced to body and brain, and doing so paradoxically intensifies certain forms of mental health stigma, promotes mind-body dualism, and enhances biomedical power at the expense of patient agency.  In this lecture, I will draw on Thomas Aquinas’ conception of the human as wayfarer to argue for a holistic, non-dualistic, non-reductive approach to mental health care.

Warren Kinghorn MD, ThD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center; Esther Colliflower Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology at Duke Divinity School; co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; and a staff psychiatrist at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.  His current teaching and scholarship centers on the way that Christian faith communities engage questions of mental health and mental illness. He has also written on the moral dimensions of combat trauma, on the philosophy of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the role of the therapeutic alliance in psychiatric medication prescribing.  He is a co-author of the recently published Prescribing Together:  A Relational Guide to Psychopharmacology (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2021).

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But can intentional sin impact mental health, like King David's depression from his his rebellion?