December 17, 2018 Show with Steve Bloem on “The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness: A Guide for Training & Reference”

Proverbs 27:17 and the Purpose of Christian Conversation

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on the 17th, I can't even say the word, 17th day of December 2018.

Also want to give a shout out to my very dear longtime friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. It is his birthday today and I hope that God blesses him with a wonderful celebration with his family, friends and loved ones.

Introducing Steve Bloem and the Ministry of Heartfelt Counseling

Today we have a first-time guest and I am very enthusiastic to interview this individual because I think this is a topic especially that every man, woman, especially those who are counselors, especially those who are pastors, elders, and I consider those the same office biblically, deacons or anyone who has family, friends or loved ones who are suffering with mental illness.

I'm speaking of Steve Bloom and he is a counselor, author and founder of Heartfelt Counseling Ministries and we're going to be addressing his book, The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a guide for training and reference and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Steve Bloom.

Hey Chris, good to be with you, thanks for having me. And by the way, am I pronouncing your name.

Correctly? I don't know if it's Blome or Bloom. That's Blome, it's a dot b-l-o-e-m, Blume. Yeah,.

So I did pronounce it correctly then. Yeah. Great. Well, tell our listeners something about Heartfelt Counseling Ministries. Oh yeah, Heartfelt Counseling Ministries is a non-profit.

With the IRS, a 501c3 charitable agency and we decided to actually start it. We decided to, after my daughter was killed in a car accident and it was on 9 -1 -1 that evening and on the way back and on the way back and a guy that was on heroin and just hit her head on and killed her and we were right up there, you know, we saw it.

We were the first responders, but when I heard those words, she has never been more, any more devastated and I saw how life is fragile and how it's temporary. It's a breath God gives and he takes away and therefore we, Robin and I started.

How old was your daughter when she was tragically killed in that accident? She was 19 years old. Wow. Well, I want to somehow introduce you to dear friends of mine, Jerry and Fern Hill. They run the Timothy Hill Children's Ranch in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, which is a home for homeless boys and they also have a new division for homeless girls, which is a recent development and that ministry was started because Timothy Hill, a child prodigy before the age of 13, used to see how his parents lovingly welcomed foster children into their home and he had a dream to start a home for homeless children that would be positioned on a ranch because Timothy loved horses and farm animals and his parents were surprised when they were getting phone calls from real estate agencies that their 12-year-old son was getting prices on land to start a home for homeless children and tragically Timothy, while riding his bicycle to school, was hit by a truck and killed at the age of 13 and Jerry and Fern Hill knew that they had to make Timothy's dream come true and by God's mercy they did and even Lorne Green from Bonanza Fame helped them by hosting telethons on television for this because Lorne Green used to live in eastern Suffolk County in East Marion, Long Island, and so that ministry has been running for over three decades and it is a very wonderful ministry.

So I got to get you hooked up with them because of the similarity. Yeah, that'd be great, yeah, because we work with homeless people in.

Downtown Grand Rapids. Not only was I a clinical social, but at the same time was reaching out for reaching out to the homeless and the education they need or dealing with the alcoholics.

Wow. Well, what we usually do on Iron Trip and Zion Radio when we have first-time guests is we have them give an abbreviation or a summary of their salvation testimony, what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in, if any, and what providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

Sure, and I stayed there until I was 17. I decided, that's when I got saved, I got saved at a camp in northern Michigan about as far as you can go with the lower peninsula and I was in the, it was the third time I'd gone to this camp.

I was just preoccupied with girls and things like that and they were having the Lord's Supper and all of a sudden I was like, you know, I thought I was confronted by Christ. I said, Steve, why do you keep, you know, missing me?

Why do you keep going on without me? And I just, wonderfully, and I ended up going to Bath-Ordain there at 19 because I'd been along with the Lord. And when in your life did you.

Realize that you had a call to be a counselor? Well, I realized I had a call to be a pastor,.

But it wasn't until I had the and the horrors of that, that things for me, and then it helped for me. And then I finished up with a ministry, a master minister, and I finished that up at Baptist Bible Seminary in Clarkside.

So then I started directing my, I saw God directing me to not only be a pastor or a counselor, but through the, I actually got depressed and then I worked at a psychiatric hospital, then I worked for 10 years as a clinical case manager along with the Servant Center of Grand Rapids.

And so that's how I gradually developed that counseling, especially I read a lot of books on mental illness, have been doing that. Well, praise God,.

The church is better for it now that you are blessing the body of Christ with counseling, something that is, I think, very seriously and urgently needed. And I think as life gets more complicated as the years go by, it's even more urgently needed, especially when things that are, have always been considered in the past as being aberrant and bizarre and so on, are being deemed as blessings and things that people should be celebrated for and that people should be viewed as heroes for being involved in.

And of course, I'm not broad brushing this with all of mental illness, but I'm speaking of things like transgenderism and a multitude of other things that are viewed upon as being the cream of the crop of humanity, if you will.

Pastoral Counseling, Psychiatry, and the Limits of Psychology

Yep. And I'm going to give our email address out for our listeners, if you would like to join us on the air with a question for Steve Blum. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N as in Nancy, Z as in zebra, E as in Edward, N as in Nancy at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please, as always, give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

And I could readily see a subject like this lending itself to people having personal and private questions, either regarding their own life or a loved one who is battling with mental health issues. So that's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

The issue at hand, I think, is very important because I'm certain, in fact, I know pastors personally who have wrung their hands and thrown up their hands and have reached a plateau in their ministry when it comes to counseling certain members of their congregation who are suffering with mental health issues that are far too deep for that pastor's personal experience and knowledge to handle.

Because there are obviously issues involving the mind that are quite beyond the scope of what one would learn ordinarily at a bible school or a seminary. But if you could if you could tell us what was it that specifically drove you to write the book that we are addressing today, the Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a guide for training and reference.

Okay, I was doing a lot of blogs on grief and also on mental illness. And I realized, you know, that this is something that I needed to know more about. And so I was depressed myself and I wasn't getting the right counseling.

And I was getting all different versions of legal. They said, go off your medications. Others said psychological. So I wanted to discover for myself and I wanted to help others. A lot of people think that I'm into psychology, but I'm not really into psychology.

But I am an assistant into psychiatry as far as referring people to psychiatry so that they can know how this is treatable. Now I also know, you know, loss issues and even things like the dark night of the soul.

Let's go back to the Puritans. Some Thomas Mann had some great articles on depression and preached about being in darkness doesn't mean you're in sin.

So yeah, did that answer your question? Yes. And we have a question from a listener in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Ted, who said, how does Mr. Bloom's approach to Christian counseling differ from those who believe that because the Bible is sufficient for all life, we therefore have no need for mental health professionals and that psychology and psychiatry are completely incompatible with Christian belief and should therefore be avoided at all costs?

That I would imagine is an extreme view because there are issues that are organic, although they might be a minority of issues. I'm not sure. I'm not the expert that you are. But yeah, if you could answer.

Ted's question. Well, yeah, I mean, it's back to what is the sufficient? What does that mean? And, you know, I mean, we kind of give the illustration that you got a guy that's flying a plane and there's a problem.

So he steps aside with his Bible and he's trying to fix it. So he wouldn't have much trust in him. So we think everything should come under the lens, but not that we should leave mental illness because the pastor or handbook of mental illness actually talks about people in the Bible who have had depression.

And Trifold Job had a trifold depression. He had a, it was terrible reactive depression. He had a biological depression and he was put in depression. So, but I completely not, and for the most part, I agree with that, except for I go back to the fall and what happened in the fall as far as diseases or mental illness.

Yes. Well, the Bible obviously is our sole infallible and inerrant authority absolutely in the church, but there are details in everyday life that aren't specifically addressed in the Bible. I mean, the Bible is sufficient for all we need to know in regarding obedience to God, in regard to salvation, in regard to how we are properly to worship him and how they are, they are fully sufficient for every good work.

But obviously I'm assuming that just like a physician needs to go to medical school, there would be a need in certain, in a certain realm for psychiatry, but I'm assuming you would agree also that one needs to be extremely careful and even have perhaps the counsel of wise and biblically literate elders before one accepts the counsel and guidance of a psychiatrist.

And I am differentiating that from psychology, although I'm not going to discount all of psychology either, but there are things that are due, don't you agree that there are things that are due to organic problems in the brain?

Oh, definitely. I mean, they can be, you know,.

You can have a stroke, you can have dementia, you can have things that can happen in the brain, but sometimes people don't realize that mental illness is an organic thing and it's a deficiency of neurotransmitters, it's appetite, your sex drive, your outlook, and those can be held, I'm not talking about by anti-anxiety drugs, which are addicting, but actually antidepressants and mood stabilizers are effective, not only have I seen in my own life, but in others.

But you don't have to go on that. I mean, psychiatry, I've crossed with psychiatrists and psychologists many times over issues that were more morality or the view on Buddhism, or, you know, and I don't think we should get our moral advice.

He doesn't have a lot to say.

Unless, of course, he might be a Christian, he might be a godly.

Well, he's a Christian, yeah, that's different.

Before I ask any more of my own questions, I wanted to ask some of our other listeners' questions. By the way, Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, you have won a free copy of the book we are addressing today, The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a Guide for Training and Reference.

Please give us your full mailing address in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so that CVBBS .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, can ship that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We have, let's see here, we have John in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and I have to enlarge John's email because the font is microscopic, and let me repeat our email address again while I'm doing that.

It's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com if you have a question for Steve Bloom on mental illness. How should we think biblically about helping those diagnosed with bipolar disorder? And the second question is, how can the church come alongside those with mental health struggles?

So the first issue is about bipolar disorder, and the second question is about the church's responsibility as congregants, as well as leaders, to come alongside people with.

All kinds of mental health struggles. Well, bipolar disorder is one of the most awful disorders from mania, and then you go down into depression and in between that, but probably the question I'm asked the most by families and other people, what can I do with my bipolar husband?

He doesn't think he needs any help, and so that, in mania, that's why there's a lot of problems with that. As far as in the church, I started a support group material that I published on my own, and it's like an eight-week guide from the scripture, and then going through that, and so people who want to learn more about this, and maybe the parents of children, maybe the husband or wife that may be suffering with themselves, they get a lot of comfort and a lot of strength in that, can be Christians afflicted with mental illness.

And so we've seen, you know, sometimes where I remember at one church I was at, there was a guy who I knew well, he came to my group, but he went into a mania because the doctor let him drop his medications, and you know, he was standing out on a tree because he thought that tree was the only place in the universe that he would be saved.

And one of the ladies who was cooking the meal in the kitchen got nervous, so they called the police. Well, you know, I mean, he didn't want to leave that place, and so there's a boy, and he got off his meds, he was naked outside his door.

He was a wonderful Christian. He knew the Lord. You know, the cultural mandate says, you know, get him help. And so I've also seen people dragged out with that of mental illness. Happens with me. I get up and say, look, I know what to do.

I know how to help. And so the stigma is still very great in the church, and so we can deal with that by bread, and you'd be amazed how many people in your church, how many people are hiding mental illness who are in the church.

Some so to the point where they stopped going to church because they were so roughly treated about it.

Well, you have also won, John, a free copy of the book that we are addressing today by our guest Steve Blom. That book, as you know, is the Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a Guide for Training and Reference.

And since you live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, want to pick that book up in a week or so from the Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, since it is right there in Carlisle, and sparing CVBBS .com, the shipping cost, sending that to you.

So that should be, we don't have the books yet, but we'll probably, God willing, have them in a week or so, or should I say CVBBS will have them. Let's see here. We have a first-time questioner from France, Yves, I don't know how to pronounce the city in France, N-A-N-T-E-S, Nantes, that's probably a complete butchering of the city.

I don't know.

But Yves says, what happens if a counselor gives conflicting advice to a patient? What can the patient do? I guess that would depend upon what it was in conflict with. Our listener didn't, is it in conflict with the Bible?

Is the counselor conflicting himself? But try to make a workable question out of that, Steve, and answer it to the best of your ability.

Well, count human beings. So they're going to make mistakes. And what I was taught, in one of my counseling things, was that, you know, you have to listen and you have to try to figure out what he or she is saying and then deal with the problem.

And so, like I say, yeah, it's a little vague, the question, but definitely there's going to be disagreements a lot of times. What we say, right from the onset, if there's something I'm doing that bothers you, tell me.

We don't want it to build up and vice versa. I remember I was I was talking to him, counseling him, and I asked him that question. He said, well, first of all, if you get rid of that gum in your mouth, that'll help.

So I said, oh, I'm sorry. Okay. You know, that was just one of the things that build up. So you can always get another opinion. You can, a lot of times you read above the counselor. If it's in the Bible, you read the Bible yourself.

You're a believer priest. You know the word. And if it's some other type of problem, you can get a second choice. In fact, if your psychiatrist says, I don't know anything anymore to do with you, I say fire him.

I mean, you know, a terrible thing, because there's many, many things that you could always do.

And there's great wisdom in having multiple counselors.

That's right, yeah. Yeah, all together, not just at the same time. I mean, not just everybody disagreeing, but you got to get together with it. Yeah, you can do that. That's what the church should do, also have some specialty.

Something like suicide is going to arise. And, you know, we had that. We also wrote a book called Broken Minds, Hope for Healing When You Feel Like You're Losing It. And that was published in 2005 with Kregel.

And a lot of that answers the question of what is right in mental illness, what isn't. You know, it takes the different views on it, the virtual warfare movement. Can you repeat that title? Yeah, it's Broken Minds, Hope for Healing When You Feel Like You're Losing It.

Okay, and you could also order any book that we mentioned on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio from cvbbs .com. That stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com. If they don't already have it, they can order it.

You said that was published by Kregel, correct?

Yeah, my wife Robin also wrote the book. We had a, you know, she's a dual though.

Oh, well, I've already got an idea that sometime in the near future, we should have you both on to address that book as well.

Definitely. Yeah, that'd be great.

All right. And by the way, Eve in France, if you have someone here in the United States who can receive this book on your behalf, so that he or she can ship this out to you, because cvbbs .com, our sponsors who ship out our winners, their free books, only ship out books and Bibles within the United States, because the shipping cost would be astronomical if we were shipping books out to our overseas listeners.

So let us know if there is someone here in the United States who can receive this book in your behalf and then get it to you themselves. And that goes for anybody listening who's overseas. We are only shipping these books to United States residents.

If you live overseas and you have a friend or a family member who lives in within the 50 states of the United States, who can get it to you, we'll ship it to them if you can provide their shipping address.

The Experience of Mental Illness, Grief, and the Need for Counsel

We're going to our elongated break right now. This is the time during Iron Trip and Zion Radio where we need to take a longer than normal break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, uses this midway break to localize Iron Trip and Zion Radio to Florida by airing public service announcements and commercials that are relevant to that local area.

So please use this time wisely to write down questions for our guest Steve Blum on mental illness and also use this time to write down the information provided by our advertisers because the more frequently you patronize our advertisers, the more likely they are going to remain on the air as our advertisers, which means the more likely we are going to remain on the air because we depend on their advertising dollars to exist.

But that email address to send in a question for Steve Blum once again is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Steve Blum right after this station break.

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Welcome back, and by the way, I goofed. That was not our midway break. That was our first break. Our midway break is going to be coming up in about 20 minutes or so. I apologize for the false alarm there, but the instructions that I gave still applied for you to write in questions and also write down the information that our advertisers provide.

By the way, if you just tuned in, our guest today is Steve Bloom, a counselor, author, and founder of Heartfelt Counseling Ministries, and we're discussing his book, The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a Guide for Training and Reference.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. If you have a question, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com. Please, as always, give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. By the way, I forgot to mention to Eve in France that if you can find an American representative for yourself where we could ship your free book here in the United States, you have also, since you're a first-time questioner, you've also won a New American Standard Bible.

I forgot to mention that. We have another listener. We have Bruce in Center Reach, Long Island, New York. Are there any definitive indicators that a person in a demonized category of behavior as opposed to a physically based mental illness category or behavior?

Let me repeat that. Are there any indicators that place a person in a demonized category of behavior as opposed to a physically based mental illness category or behavior? Oh, yes. In fact, in the.

Book, Pastoral Handbook, we talk about that. We do a differential diagnosis, which is a medical term of comparing diseases, what they have in common, what they don't. And we do that with schizophrenia versus demonization.

And there's a definite difference. In my public practice, I worked with a team, and I was supposed to help figure out who should get served. One guy, I said to him, he said, I'm demon-possessed. And then he said a few more things.

I said, you're not mentally ill. I said, if you're demon-possessed, you have to be saved. He said, no, I can never do that. He said, I belong to a coven. A witch coven. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. And so he just, you know, there's a definite difference, and we use the differential diagnosis in our appendices, and we talk about that quite a bit, because that's a very good question.

Yeah, I'm assuming that there are going to be circumstances when you are not a hundred percent sure that it's demonic. Right. Unless there are actually supernatural things accompanying the person's behavior.

Have you ever personally experienced someone that you were certain was demonically possessed where, and another question that I have to follow up would be, how close is Hollywood and the movie The Exorcist and things like that to that in regard to people speaking languages that they had never learned here on earth as a student of foreign languages?

You know, those are the sometimes the things that come up as the evidences of demonic possession in movies. I don't know how accurate those things are, if they're just a product of fantasy or so on, if you could.

Well, they're getting a lot more right on.

Depression. I don't deal with a lot of demon possession. I don't do, I have more people who.

Are accused of being. But have you ever experienced it though? I mean, I don't know if this person from the coven was actually demon possessed in your opinion, or if they were just.

Depressed. I think he was demon possessed, but. No, as far as what I asked though,.

Are any of the things that we see in Hollywood accurate, or is that just fantasy of people speaking languages they were never trained to speak, and that kind of thing? Oh, I mean,.

I think that could definitely be possible. I mean, you know, if somebody has immersed themselves, can be channeling, I think, you know, people do channeling, and so there's those. Well,.

Thank you, Bruce, and Center Reach Long Island, make sure we have your full mailing address so that CVBBS .com can ship you out a free copy of the book by our guest Steve Blum. The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, a guide for training and reference.

We have a question from Mary in Cork, Ireland, and I also have to enlarge Mary's email because the font is microscopic. And while I do that, again, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N-G-M-A-I-L .com.

Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA. Can you please ask your guest, where in the Bible can one direct a person to who is struggling with mental illness?

Oh, yeah, there's a number of places you can go in the Bible to. Job is one that a lot of, I think he probably had elephant type, he meets the criteria in the DSM -5 of the psychiatric manual of actually, I think also you can see many people who may not have mental illness, but Jeremiah was one, he probably didn't have mental illness, but he had a tremendous amount of grief and sorrow in his life.

And he's good to read. He wrote Lamentations. Lamentations 3 is one of the most wonderful scriptures there is as far as feeling that God is away. If you read the Psalms, the Psalms, see what letters have been through.

I mean, one Psalm says, the spirit of a man sustains his sickness, but a wounded spirit, who can bear it? Proverbs 18 .14. There's other songs, somebody, you know, just speak words that are not...

Well, thank you very much for that excellent question, Mary. And we know that you have a relative here in the United States who can receive that book for you. So we will make sure that that individual gets that book and holds onto it for you for when you return to visit the United States.

Thank you so much for contributing a great question to our program. We have Joey. Go ahead.

I just wanted to make a quick comment. When we first got the book, and I was talking with the staff at Christian, they have... Okay, great.

Great, but obviously they would have to pay for it if they do that route, but they might want to buy after they get the free copy, they might want to buy copies to give to other friends and family. Yeah.