What Actually Heals? A Son's Search for Understanding

David

Welcome to the show. Today I'm going to share some highlights from Dr. Scott Richards' forthcoming memoir, Dissent from Freud: My Lifelong Search for the Soul of Psychology. -- Picture a cold winter night in High River, Alberta, in 1966.

David

Scott is ten years old. Snow is scraping against the windows. A drainpipe is banging outside. The furnace kicks on in the basement and the whole house sort of trembles in the cold. And his mother sits on the edge of his bed because he has asked a painfully ordinary question: why doesn’t Dad come to my hockey games?

David

I think scenes like this matter because they show how mental illness enters a family -- not as an abstract diagnosis, but as absence. A father is still in the house, still alive, still technically there... and yet he is missing from church, from work, from family life, from the rink, from those little rituals a child uses to feel loved and secure.

David

His mother tells him the doctors say his father has had what they called a nervous breakdown. Then she names it more clearly: depression. He feels sad most of the time. He is exhausted. He can’t think clearly. Medicine hasn’t helped very much. And next week he is going to the hospital for electroshock therapy -- what we’d now call electroconvulsive therapy.

David

Now, if you’re hearing this through the ears of a ten-year-old, it is TERRIFYING. Electricity. Hospital. Your dad not getting better. And the detail that gets me is not just Scott’s fear. It’s his mother’s hesitation when he asks, what if it doesn’t help? She says, basically, I don’t know. That uncertainty is the moment the floor drops out.

David

As someone who cares deeply about religion and mental health, I’m struck by how early Scott learns something many children in suffering homes learn before they have language for it: love does not always protect you from helplessness. You can love your father, need your father, even pray for your father -- and still watch him disappear into an illness you cannot reach.

David

He lies there in the dark imagining what he might lose. No dad at the boards during hockey. No fishing in the Highwood River when spring comes. No drives west toward Kananaskis and Banff. That is a child’s view of loss, isn’t it? Not a theory, not a diagnosis manual -- just, will I still have my dad?

David

And that sets up the question I carried with me through this memoir: what does a child learn when suffering enters the home before he has words for it? Sometimes he learns fear. Sometimes vigilance. Sometimes the ache of wanting to fix what he cannot fix. But sometimes -- and this is important -- he also begins to search for what actually heals. Not slogans. Not denial. What truly helps a human being come back from the edge.

David

Scott doesn’t know it that night, but the wound becomes a calling. The boy under the quilt, listening to the storm, is already being formed by the question that will shape his future life: when mental illness takes hold of someone you love, what can bring them home?

David

Then the memoir jumps ahead to December 1977, and I love the way it does this. Scott is now a missionary in Esquimalt, British Columbia. Rain on the window. Wet cedar in the air. A small apartment. He opens a letter from his father -- one of only a couple he received during his mission -- and inside that letter his father does something rare. He speaks plainly about depression, faith, and slow recovery.

David

His father says that for years sickness kept him from serving in church, and when he tried to participate he found no joy in it. That’s clinically and spiritually honest. Depression can flatten motivation, pleasure, hope -- all of it. Then he says that in recent months he has started to find joy again. Not suddenly, not spectacularly. Gradually. Effortfully. The spirituality in the home is increasing. Church participation is returning.

David

That matters because the memoir is not giving us a cheap miracle story. It is giving us a layered recovery story. A father who suffered severely. A family who watched. Small improvements. Setbacks, probably. Then meaning begins to reappear. His faith in Jesus Christ remained alive even through what he calls the bad years. And for Scott, reading that letter becomes evidence -- lived evidence -- that spirituality can sustain a person in terrible darkness.

David

A few days after the mission ends, back in High River, the deeper disclosure comes. His father tells him there were times during the worst depression when he thought about ending his life. That is a devastating sentence. But then comes the sentence that, honestly, stopped me: he had made a promise to God that he would not do it. He would endure. His faith kept him alive.

David

Now let me be careful here, because this is where people sometimes split things apart that should be held together. His father does NOT say faith made counseling unnecessary. He does NOT say medication was irrelevant. In fact, the memoir says both counseling and medication helped him gradually recover. Therapy helped him see perfectionistic thinking and unrealistic expectations. He had to learn to challenge negative thoughts, to become kinder to himself, to be careful about what he allowed to live in his mind. That is psychologically rich material. And then he adds that faith helped with that part too -- not replacing the effort, but strengthening it.

David

And this, to me, is exactly why the Bridges Institute for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies that Scott founded matters. It provides scientifically supported spiritual resources for mental health professionals and the public. It builds bridges between science, spirituality, psychotherapy, and mental health.

David

Scott’s experience with his father's depression and eventual recovery gives that mission a human face. Evidence-based care mattered: counseling mattered, medication mattered. But faith and spirituality also mattered -- not as superstition, not as denial, and not as a substitute for treatment. More like a sustaining and healing influence. And if mainstream psychology still carries some old Freudian suspicion toward religion, memoirs like this ask us to look again... because sometimes what keeps a person alive is not one thing, but the convergence of therapy, medicine, effort, relationship, and a sacred promise made in the dark. Thanks for listening.