Mental Health Management – Mechanisms, Modes, Models and Metaphysical Mindsets?

Clearly this blog post is not going to exhaust the many facets of these emerging understandings and that is why we always – always, encourage you, the reader, to do some serious ‘seeking out’ yourself.

However, there is one lens, one vehicle that is so often overlooked, but has been running in the background of all that which has been briefly looked at here – we contend from the very beginning of the existential quandary. It predates all and never stopped operating during these various ‘takes’ and/or understandings of what is perceived to be in play our worlds, and our various interpretations of it. 

Understanding our human capacity, agency, fragility and flaws has been the pursuit of humanity since creation. Yet, regardless of labels or categorisation’s, inexorable themes and realities remain. Truly identifying origins, not just outcomes and the management thereof, must be a core of that pursuit, one our contributors here have all attempted to add to.

Whatever lens we apply in our search will colour, flavour, even shape our perception, but ultimate truth is what is genuinely what is longed for in the human search for meaning.  

However, if our search ‘tools’ don’t allow us to truly search for that, then we often settle for the apparent, even the functional. To quote William James (considered the ‘father’ of American Psychology’) ‘The truth is what works!’.  Pragmatism and outcomes then become, again, the end of our pursuit, not the origins – but without truly discovering such, answers will be partial and management of the psyche limited.

Enter the 1970’s globally recognised psychotherapist Rollo May, who was one of the first therapists to publicly challenge the new ‘gimmick filled’ space of pop-psychology and what we have at the Dalgarno Institute now euphemistically called the psycho-social scaffolding syndrome.

Rollo May was an American existential psychologist who really focused on what it means to be a whole person—someone who owns their freedom, faces their anxiety, takes responsibility, and keeps searching for meaning in a world that can feel confusing and indifferent. His work sits at the crossroads of existential philosophy, Christian Theology, psychoanalysis, and humanistic psychology, and his goal wasn’t just to relieve symptoms but to help people become “fully human” in a deeper, more integrated way.

May taught that anxiety, guilt, death, and meaninglessness aren’t just problems to be fixed; they’re basic facts of human existence that shape who we become. He reframed anxiety as a sign that something important is at stake: when people face their anxiety instead of running from it, they can grow in freedom and responsibility; when they avoid it, they tend to shrink into conformity or neurosis.

For May, existential psychotherapy was never just about applying techniques. It revolved around three big ideas:

• Being‑in‑the‑world (Dasein): Each person lives in a physical world, a social world, and an inner world (what he called Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigenwelt). Therapy helps people clarify how they relate to all three instead of being passively swept along by them.
• Freedom and limits: Healthy people recognise both that they can choose and that they also have limits—fate, biology, history, circumstance. Real growth comes from taking responsibility within that tension rather than pretending one is totally free or totally powerless.
• Authenticity and creativity: Therapy helps clients reconnect with their own will, creativity, and deepest values, so they stop hiding behind roles, rationalisations, or defences and start living more honestly.

For May, therapy is essentially a dialogical encounter—a real, honest, and sometimes risky relationship between therapist and client that mirrors the kind of truth‑telling and vulnerability we’re called to with others and with ourselves in everyday life.

May grew up in a Congregationalist family and even served briefly as a local pastor, so a Christian‑existential way of thinking stayed woven into his work.  One of his earliest works was The Springs of Creative Living – A Study of Human Nature and God a subchapter in that book became an often used quote from May,  “Jesus Christ the Therapist for Humanity.”

May held the view that Jesus Christ functions existentially as the symbol of someone who fully embodies authentic existence—taking on suffering, death, and evil while still affirming love and meaning. However, he never reduces Christ to a purely psychological symbol, but he does tend to read the Christian story through the lens of existential courage: the courage to face anxiety, guilt, and death without despair, and to keep choosing to hope and love. For him, a “life‑affirming” religion—including a Christian spirituality—is one that helps people confront the big, hard questions of existence with courage, creativity, and responsibility, rather than with denial, escape, or rigid dogma.

In a nutshell, Rollo May’s core message is that authentic human life grows when people courageously face their freedom, anxiety, and finitude through love, creativity, and honest relationship—and within that frame, his references to Jesus Christ are meant to point us toward a way of seeing, thinking and being that embodies the courage to be even in the face of seeming nothingness and/or suffering.

This current, this motif of the ‘existential whole’ which goes way beyond ‘scaffolding and quick fix maskers’, as stated, continues to run underneath the human experience. It ‘bubbles up’ to the surface in different eras/seasons and notably it wasn’t until another couple of decades that another iteration emerged.

Positive Psychology?

Dr Martin Seligman is considered the ‘father’ of Positive Psychology, arguably, a new school of thinking and practice that emerged with some note the early 90’s.

It is important to note that the core tenants of this discipline- Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment, echoing much of the American Christian Counsellor, Dr Larry Crabb’s work in his bestselling book “Inside Out” first published in 1988.

Positive Psychology has always openly included spirituality in its framework, although colloquially loosening its definition to include aspects that are not ‘spiritual’ at all in the purest sense of the genre.

Seemingly borrowing much from contributors such as Dr Crabb and May, Seligman’s Positive Psychology flips the traditional focus of psychology from “what’s wrong with people” to “what helps people thrive.” Like May and Crabb he does focus somewhat on impediments, but more proactively he centres on not what makes people ‘ill’ but explores the conditions that enable individuals and communities to flourish.

Again, much like May and Crabb, Seligman’s work at its core has the idea that wellbeing isn’t just the absence of distress—it’s the presence of positive functioning. As previously introduced above, Seligman’s most well-known framework is PERMA, outlines the five key elements of a flourishing life:

• Positive Emotion: experiencing joy, gratitude, hope
• Engagement: being deeply absorbed or “in flow”
• Relationships: having meaningful, supportive connections
• Meaning: belonging to and serving something bigger than oneself
• Accomplishment: pursuing and achieving goals

Seligman also emphasises character strengths (like courage, kindness, and perseverance) as practical tools people can develop to build resilience and purpose. Rather than abstract ideals, these can be measurable and trainable traits.

In practice, Positive Psychology is used in education, therapy, workplaces, and community programs to build wellbeing proactively—not just treat problems after they arise. It does have ‘gimmicks’, but they are more cleverly deployable principles that go beyond a mood or emotion ‘tweak’. In short, Seligman’s work reframes mental health as not just surviving, but genuinely flourishing—personally, relationally, and socially.

Again, all these helpful mechanisms, at different levels and guises, are tapping into or borrowing from the anthropologically situated spirituality embedded meta-narratives.

The Psychiatric Diversion?

Let’s go back just a little… Before Rollo May gave the world his existential insights, Auschwitz survivor and one of the core members of the Viennese School of Psychotherapy, Viktor Frankl, penned an astounding (and psychiatrically speaking) diversionary work after his horrendous experience of Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

The work, Man’s Search for Meaning presents a new therapeutic model, logotherapy. This was an existential-psychiatric model built on the claim that the primary human motivation is not pleasure or power, but the will to meaning. In academic terms, the book is both a Holocaust testimony and a philosophical-therapeutic argument: suffering does not automatically destroy meaning, because meaning can be discovered even under extreme constraint.

Frankl’s Core thesis

Frankl’s central proposition is that human beings are oriented toward meaning, and that psychological distress often intensifies when that orientation is blocked or denied. Logotherapy derives from logos, meaning, and is designed to help people identify the specific meanings available in their unique circumstances rather than impose a single universal purpose. This makes the theory distinctly existential rather than symptom-centred, because it treats the person as a responsible chooser situated in a meaningful world.

A major contribution of Frankl’s work is his insistence that unavoidable suffering can still be endured with dignity if it is interpreted within a meaningful frame. He does not romanticise pain; instead, he argues that when suffering cannot be removed, one can still choose one’s attitude toward it and thereby preserve agency and inner freedom. This is why Frankl’s account of the concentration camps is so important to the book: it serves as both empirical witness and existential proof-of-concept for his thesis.

Meaning and Perception of Origins?

Frankl’s account is often summarized through three routes to meaning: creative work, meaningful relationships, and the stance taken toward unavoidable suffering. In the first, meaning is realized through what one gives to the world; in the second, through what one encounters in love and human connection; in the third, through moral courage before suffering. These categories matter because they make meaning concrete and practical rather than abstract or merely spiritual.

Logotherapy is not simply a worldview; it is also a clinical method aimed at helping patients become aware of latent meaning in their lives. Frankl describes techniques such as paradoxical intention and de-reflection, which are meant to reduce self-defeating anxiety and shift attention away from obsessive symptom-monitoring toward broader life purpose. The therapist’s role is therefore not to supply meaning, but to widen the patient’s field of vision so that personally fitting meanings become visible.

The Existential ‘Punch’ and Why it Matters.

Frankl’s model challenges reductionist psychology by rejecting the idea that humans are exhausted by drives for pleasure, status, or biological conditioning. It also resists nihilism by claiming that meaning is possible even in suffering, deprivation, and apparent absurdity. Academically, the book occupies a key place in existential psychology because it joins phenomenological observation, moral anthropology, and clinical intervention into a single framework.

As a text, Man’s Search for Meaning is powerful because (as with Bolte-Taylor’s work) it unites lived experience with theory, giving logotherapy unusual moral authority. Whilst clearly this work is not ‘the answer’, it does add significant weight and increased focus on the under-current of human existence that we continue to refer to in this blog. Frankl’s work remains influential because it offers a durable account of resilience, responsibility, and meaning-making under pressure.

A concise academic formulation could be: Frankl’s logotherapy proposes that human flourishing depends less on comfort than on the discovery of meaning, and that even unavoidable suffering can become psychologically bearable when integrated into a purposeful interpretation of life – And that continues to be unassailably true if origin of foundations, not just scaffolding is to be found.

The ‘God Shaped Vacuum’ and the ‘God Shaped Brain’?

One of the most brilliant minds that advanced science in the distant past was Blaise Pascal. Not only was he a pioneering mathematician, physicist and inventor but a significant leader in philosophy in his day.  His work heavily influenced the scientific revolution and emerging European thought. However, his entire portfolio was founded on Christian Theology and its notions on the Creator God. 

Pascal is on record as declaring that, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”   Big claim indeed! However, Pascal clearly believed it to be more than a subjective experiential expression, rather a foundational element in his view and understanding of science.

The specificity of this perspective claim was informed by the disciplines that he mastered in, to the end that these other sciences found their correct foundation in the Judeo-Christian worldview and its Theology. This too – Theology – was the founding science of all learning institutions emerging in Western thought, that led science out of the alchemist muddied middle-ages to discovering (not inventing) what an unseen Designer had created, not only its mechanism but its order.  Pascal’s quote above about the wholeness of the soul (and arguably the organ of the soul, the brain) issues from that understanding.

Coming back to the 21^st century, another doctor (a medical one) Timothy Jennings, wrote a medically based book titled, “The God Shaped Brain – How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life.” This book pursues the link between understanding the divine, neuroplasticity and brain reactions.

Jennings unpacks the intricate link between spirituality, ‘God’, and the brain. The work reveals how our perceptions of the divine reshape neural pathways, fostering healing or harm. A loving view of God activates prefrontal growth, enhancing empathy, peace, and resilience, while fear-based concepts trigger chronic stress, inflammation, and relational decay.

Core Neural Dynamics: Beliefs about God aren’t abstract—they rewire the brain’s architecture. Positive, compassionate God-concepts stimulate the prefrontal cortex for sharper reasoning and altruism; fear-driven ones over activate the amygdala’s alarm system, inhibiting higher cognition and promoting anxiety.

• Amygdala acts as the brain’s fire alarm, flooding the body with stress hormones during perceived threats from a punitive God.
• Hippocampus and hypothalamus regulate the response, but chronic fear erodes neural health.
• Loving meditation, as in Newberg’s studies, builds new pathways for emotional balance.

Theological Blueprint? Specifically, the Christian understanding of God embodies selfless love—the “law of life”—mirrored in creation’s cycles of giving, from oceans to economies. Humanity, patterned after the Divine, thrives in harmony with that created best practice, but fractures when sin severs the circle, birthing selfishness and disease.

A very recent research offering continued to look at psychedelic drugs and the longing for this ‘scaffolding’ to provide resilience for shattered or troubled psyches.

Whilst most of the research on these substances’ hints at possible symptom abatement (reduced distress) the side-effects and attending harms of psychedelic use are not easily dismissed. This new research gauged a different response; psychedelic drugs appear to produce a shared brain signature, but the effect is less about “resetting” the brain than about temporarily loosening the boundaries between brain networks. (e.g. Bolte-Taylor’s hemisphere integration.)

In the largest imaging study of its kind, researchers found that LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, and ayahuasca all increased crosstalk between systems involved in higher-order thinking and systems tied to vision and sensation, suggesting a common neural fingerprint rather than isolated drug-specific effects. (As an aside, the accidental ‘discoverer’ of LSD,  Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, theorised that the ‘trips’ experienced whilst on these substances may help mentally ill patients ‘get outside themselves’ and more ‘rationally’ self-reflect and diagnose their illness so as to better manage it – This did not work, as arguably, this study confirms.)

This matters for resilience because it shows how powerfully the brain can be altered by substance use, even when the changes are temporary. It also reinforces a broader lesson: brain flexibility can be therapeutic in some settings, but chemically induced disruption is not the same as healthy resilience, which depends on stable self-regulation, learning, and recovery over time – the short cuts aren’t helping.

Whilst these and other ‘scaffolding’ for the psyche can be built with a number of things, foundations can only be built on fact and truth of the best-practice given order, if restoration, healing and wholeness are to be realised. In his book Dr Jennings reveals Vance Vanders’ voodoo “curse” and how recovery shows belief’s power: fear kills, truth restores. Jenning’s conclusions included the notion of a shift to a God of boundless, other-centred love heals minds, bodies, and societies, echoing neuroplasticity where worship in and of that deity literally grows the brain.

This poignant fusion of true spirituality, faith and neuroscience urges beholding a loving God to transform not just character, but the very organ of the soul – the brain.

The Jung Epiphany

All this brings me to perhaps one of the pivotal moments in psychiatric history. A moment often buried by the noise of the meta-physical denying stakeholders in the scientific arena.

In the mid-20^th century, Psychiatrist Carl Jung not only bumped into this always running under-current (and arguably inextricable foundation that all these previously mentioned scientists are tapping into) but also embraced and prescribed it.

Jung in his psyche management profession, “seminal ideas on recovery,” directly quoting his advice to alcoholic patient Roland Hazard: After Jung’s standard treatments had failed, Jung declared Roland “hopeless” unless he experienced a “vital spiritual experience” leading to an “entire psychic re-arrangement.”

Carl Jung was on a journey of discovery himself, which eventually led to growing Christian-rooted convictions, referenced in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections where he shares personal encounters with God, despite unorthodox views on evil—affirming spirituality’s power to reorder the psyche where therapy alone fails.

“Spiritus contra spiritum” literally translates to “spirit against spirit”.  Loosely translated, it refers to “a spiritual experience to counter addiction to the spirits (alcoholism).” Spiritus in Latin means both alcoholic beverages, i.e., spirits, and the highest religious experience. In relating this simple phrase, Jung confirmed for Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous) that the A.A. program aimed at spiritual development and a spiritual awakening, as treatment for alcoholism, was the correct direction.

On January 23, 1961, Bill sent a letter of appreciation to Dr. Jung thanking him for his contribution to A.A.’s solution for alcoholism through his work with Rowland H. The Big Book refers to ghostwriter part of the story on pages 26 & 27. This letter, dated January 30, 1961, was Dr. Jung’s immediate reply.

Dear Mr. Wilson,

Your letter has been very welcome indeed.

I had no news from Rowland H. anymore and often wondered what has been his fate. Our conversation which he has adequately reported to you had an aspect of which he did not know. The reason that I could not tell him everything was that in those days I had to be exceedingly careful of what I said. I had found out that I was misunderstood in every possible way. Thus, I was very careful when I talked to Rowland H. But what I really thought about was the result of many experiences with men of his kind.

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.*

How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days?

The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism. I see from your letter that Rowland H. has chosen the second way, which was, under the circumstances, obviously the best one.

I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible.

These are the reasons why I could not give a full and sufficient explanation to Rowland H., but I am risking it with you because I conclude from your very decent and honest letter that you have acquired a point of view above the misleading platitudes one usually hears about alcoholism.

You see, “alcohol” in Latin is “spiritus” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.

Thanking you again for your kind letter

I remain Yours sincerely C. G. Jung

As you can see the thread, path – the current – running in and under all this goes beyond the dimensions that the forensic sciences play in. If foundations and restoration are the goal, not mere psyche scaffolding gimmicks, then one must enter into this anthropologically situated science.

Epilogue

The Humpty Dumpty Dilemma and Anchors of the Soul?

Many of our readers will be familiar with our Humpty Dumpty Dilemma Project and how the re-tasked nursery rhyme inventories much of the current state of First World fragility.

The project highlights profound deficiencies, primarily, sustainable spirituality – in today’s “Humpty Dumpty” culture—people who’ve had a great fall but can’t be pieced together by governments or experts. Some key elements include:

• Missing ingredients for wholeness: As an example, and for sake of brevity, Dr. Larry Crabb, in his seminal work Inside Out lists three non-negotiable needs for completeness – true intimacy, true identity, and true spirituality—echoing many Biblical principles that are outlined in its ancient pages of wisdom. Assets such as  vision, plans, allegiance, accountability, role models, and an immovable anchor.
• Self-talk versus ‘God’-talk: Talking Therapies remain indispensable, but they can be honed with better sources of conversation, both internally and externally. (You can see an inadvertent ‘borrowing’ of this in Dr Bolte-Taylor’s ‘huddle’.) Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones also extracted a clear practice and principle from Psalm 42 and: Instead of letting your depressed “self” talk to you, talk to yourself—commanding the soul, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” to redirect toward hope.
•  Parables and anchors: Draws on the Parable of the Wheat and Tares (Matthew 13:24-43) to urge sowing “Kingdom Counsel” against enemy-sown “weeds” like addiction, and the Wise/Foolish Builders for storm-proof lives.
• The Sustainable Spirituality: All this is just part of that scrutable and sustainable spirituality that is foundational, not just scaffold. This metaphysical space appears, from scientific enquiry, to have an author and claimed best principles and practices of that author. This is what philosophers, metaphysicians and scientists have been ‘bumping into’ for millennia, but as the One New Testament author writes in Acts chapter 17, the groping around in the dark for answers was only because the ‘Light’ had not been turned on – But perhaps now it has!

Shane Varcoe,  Executive Director, Dalgarno Institute

Endnotes

Origin Of Thinking

• https://aihcp.net/2023/06/02/the-four-temperamants-and-anger/
• https://newlife.rehab/luxury-rehab-center-library/personality-types
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments

A 20^th Century Rework – Endnotes

• https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/disc-personality-types
• https://discinsights.com/pages/disc-personality
• https://discpersonalitytesting.com/blog/what-are-the-four-disc-types/
• https://careerminds.com/blog/the-12-disc-personality-types
• https://www.crystalknows.com/disc
• https://situational.com/blog/what-are-the-four-disc-personality-types/

Four Brain ‘Characters’ – The Taylor Perspective – Endnotes

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ono2PGQPh0s
• https://sobrief.com/books/whole-brain-living
• https://www.middlewaysociety.org/whole-brain-living-by-jill-bolte-taylor/
• https://www.shortform.com/blog/jill-bolte-taylor-whole-brain-living/
• https://drjilltaylor.com/whole-brain-living/
• https://www.tias.edu/en/artikelen/rethinking-leadership-how-using-whole-brain-living-can-enhance-our-leadership

Mental Health Management – Mechanisms, Modes, Models and Metaphysical Mindsets? – Endnotes

• https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-theories-and-ideas-of-rollo-may/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollo_May
• https://www.scribd.com/presentation/444280322/ROLLO-MAY
• https://michaliskhalil.com/existential-therapy-and-creativity-rollo-mays-therapeutic-encounter/
• https://study.com/academy/lesson/rollo-mays-existentialist-theories.html
• https://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/resources/review_may-rollo_paulus.htm
• Inside Out – Dr Larry Crabb
• https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7061/c4d514560f72b5059b4be92a4212237ca0cb.pdf
• https://www.sloww.co/mans-search-for-meaning/
• https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/mans-search-meaning-viktor-emil-frankl
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press. This is the key book where Seligman develops the PERMA model
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press. This earlier book lays out his broader approach to wellbeing
• Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14. This is the foundational article for the positive psychology movement
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1963/01/jungs-view-of-christianity/658592/
• Spiritus Contra Spiritum – Carl Jung’s Letter to Bill Wilson January 30, 1961 | AA Central Office of Salt Lake