Mental illness - science or cope out?

I was reading about the expert opinions on the mental conditions of Cho Seung-Hui. Diagnoses haven't been made yet, but the possibilities abound - bipolar depression, schizophrenia, psychotic depression, avoidant personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, feeling of powerlessness, grandiosity...

People with avoidant personality are described to avoid social situations for fear of disapproval. I thought, that's me when I was a teenager and a non-Christian. People with paranoid personality disorder have a deep distrust of others. I thought, that's me too! Another psychologist identified acute rejection as one of the common factors in school shooting. And yes, you guessed it. I, too, suffered from acute rejection in my high school years. I was a loner like Cho was. I was dead quiet to the terrifying and that's what my friend wrote on my graduation memoir. My mother took me to the doctor when I was 2.5 fearing that I was mute because I didn't speak. I rarely smiled and withdrawn, because I found nothing to be happy about in this world. In fact, I didn't think it'd make a difference whether I live or die, nobody would care.

So, I've the traits of a killer! And I could be one too. I mean, who on earth could withstand the hurt that caused by your best friend who you went to school with everyday and suddenly one day decided that you can be replaced by new found friends and completely ignored you? Well, I can tell you how much it hurts, that acute rejection that drove me to tears every day for 6 months. It didn't help that I was away from home for the first time in a foreign land knowing no one. Up to this day, emotions still swell up within me when I recount this. But it was precisely this painful experience that led me to God.

My point is, most of what identified as mental conditions are really not all that uncommon to all of us, just the extent of it. Psychologists and psychiatrists may come up with a new mental condition every day. But are they really sickness? No doubt there are people with genuine physiological problems. But sometimes, it feels as if we're just trying to get rid of the problem by giving labels to the behaviours that we don't want to see or have no answer for. We seem to have more and more people with psychological problems and mental illness, and no solutions for it. Is counseling and drugs enough? I'm afraid not, otherwise it'd have made a difference to my friend who's being counseled for years.

The problem with psychology and psychiatry is its basis on humanistic belief that reduces all human emotions and behaviours to statistics and graphs. It believes only humans can have the power to change the world. The supernatural isn't in the equation.

That's why no amount of mental instutionalisation, counseling or profiling can solve the problem. Because the answer doesn't lie in science or rational thinking, but in the missing spiritual element of Jesus. That incident in high school has left a scar and affected my life more than you can imagine, but to let that excruciating pain of rejection drives me deeper into my own world is suicide. And I know without God, I would choose to go down that path, like drugs, slowly eats me away and eventually destroys me.