Mental Health Food

Truth is to the soul as food is to the body, except to say that there's no such thing as unhealthy truth, e.g., junk truth, processed truth, deep fried truth, etc., no matter how much it triggers the recipient.

 "The study of mental health," writes Ripperger, "includes in its very ratio or notion the necessity of the mind to attain the truth in order to have mental health." 

Conversely, we know that those who suffer from mental illness often do not possess the truth about the thing(s) which troubles them. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the science of mental health and illness grasp the nature of truth so as to be able to foster it in those under its care. 

Well, the American Psychological Association begs to differ: it has officially voiced 

approval of policies President Joe Biden has adopted to address the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, immigration, climate change, LGBTQ rights and access to health care, among others. 

We also support the administration’s actions to reinstate the policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military, since scientific research shows not only the deleterious effects of discrimination but that gender identity is irrelevant to the ability to serve our nation. 

Of course. As if we need scientific research! to prove that trannies make the toughest soldiers. 

We are also pleased that this White House has made curbing global warming a priority, especially given growing anxiety and concern about the environment documented by psychological research.

If only there were some way to cure people of the anxiety they feel over imaginary problems... 

"The human intellect, in order to know the truth, must conform or adequate itself to the thing" -- the real thing, not imaginary things such as "transgenderism," catastrophic climate change, discriminatory policing, "systemic racism," etc. 

Hmm. It seems that the APA aligns itself with the very societal forces, powers, and institutions that guarantee more mental illness. Which is perfectly understandable. Your problems may be imaginary, but that doesn't mean psychologists are going too charge less to treat them. Gotta feed the monkey. 

As we've said before, Thomistic psychology is just common sense; more to the point, it is simply a description of human behavior, emotion, and intellection, of what we do and can't help doing when we think, will, or desire. But

Part of the scourge of modern philosophy and its effect on modern society is that people expect reality or things to congrue to them; this is prime material for mental illness (emphasis mine).

This is to literally invert the cosmos, so no wonder it should result in so much psychopathology -- and again, no wonder modern psychology should embrace a metaphysic that lubricates the greasy wheels of the revenue stream.

"While we may want the sky to be green" -- or men to be women, or trespassing to be insurrection, or election security to be racist, or Trump to be a Russian agent, or defunding the police to make us safer -- "nevertheless reality dictates that it is actually blue." Bottom line:

People who suffer from a grave psychological illness make assertions which do not congrue with reality and it is precisely because the individual's intellect is not functioning properly that he states what is false.

Does this imply that people who make untrue assertions suffer from grave psychological illness? Not necessarily, but certainly more often than we might appreciate. Adam Schiff, for example, may not be as delusional as he appears to be; rather, his lies may be a result of sociopathy, which is another form of grave mental illness, and no doubt more dangerous than mere delusions.

It's the difference between, say, a delusional but harmless and even entertaining Keith Olbermann, and a conniving psychopath such as Schiff or Omar, who have no entertainment value. Yet. 

If people "are unwilling to conform to reality, they have already begun the process which will result in causing mental illness." 

You'd think this would be uncontroversial, but then, you have common sense. In fact, there are whole university departments dedicated to the proposition that truth is relative. Conveniently, such twisted thinkers are too stupid to understand the arguments that demolish their ideology.

Nevertheless, for the restavus & bestavus

it is not difficult to see that falsity is the evil or bad of the intellect, for if the intellect is by nature designed to know the truth, then falsity militates agains that nature (Ripperger).