Is Incoherence the New Obesity: The Pervasive Rise of Distorted Cognition

Why Did He Say That?
We've all seen "it" happen, and cringed., an embarrassing situation at wok or at church where someone's brain fails to connect the dots about basic reality,

You're sitting in church when the head elder gets up and tells the story of the fall of man, adding an anecdote about how he used to wonder how it could be just on God's part for Satan to be allowed to possess the snake in the garden, until it hit him --or, it's worse if he says God "told him" -- the snake must have given its consent. In his mind this seeming realization answers the dilemma behind the question and gives him great peace. There's only one problem, though, and it's a big one: he's oblivious to the fact that his brain is putting animals and people in the same category, as moral beings who can "give in" to the devil, and consent to being possessed. He's seeing animals as being in God's image, not people alone. An involuntary shudder crawls up your spine. Anxiety triggers your imagination to conjecture about the future, and you start to legitimately worry whether his conflation of animals and people could lead to distortions in the gospel message itself. Will his next talk be about how animals can repent of their sins, or how Jesus died to redeem animals too and not just people?

You cringe. Not because you dislike the person, in fact he's someone you relate to and admire. You cringe not because you have a judgmental attitude against his, as he's done nothing wrong, and you have compassion for him. You cringe because of the flawed logic itself which is unsettling to the brain and brings to mind a sense of potential danger and unease, like the way the floor boards of a boat feel when the sea becomes uneven and the waves begin to reel gently back and forth.

"It" Happens Again
You try to shake off the experience, and continue going about your day at church, but in small group Bible study "it" happens again. As the leader of the group asks for prayer requests and praises, a woman speaks up about how she'd been praying for some time for cows in a field beside her house. Their horns were growing much too long and no one was doing anything about it. Then one day she walked past the cows again and their horns were trimmed. Her conclusion? That God had sent angels to cut the horns of the cows. You pause in shock, waiting for someone to say in a tactful way how illogical this conclusion is. When no one speaks up after several seconds, you try to think of such a way yourself to point out to her that she isn't making sense. Before you've settled on a Christian way to do this, another church member speaks out with a hearty "Amen", saying God is good for sending the angels to do a work people weren't willing to do.

At this point you aren't sure what to say or how to address this. Instead you send a silent prayer up to God to help these people see their logical errors.

You find yourself asking yourself why didn't her brain move to the most likely cause of the trimmed horns, that a person had come and cut them? Why did she conclude angels were carrying out animal husbandry and maintenance of property that belonged to people in this world?

Later in the week you run into the preacher at the grocery store, and he's still adamant about his revelation about the snake in the garden. You can see this wasn't a one-time lapse in judgment due to something like fatigue or stress from overwork. He really believes this illogical idea. But how could a preacher who used to be so grounded in the scriptures and whom you admired for his correct deductions of Bible truth become so off point?

These examples are not meant to mock faith, prayer, or belief in divine intervention, but to illustrate how causal reasoning can quietly break down without being noticed.

Mental Conditions On the Rise at an Unprecedented Rate
And there is an answer to the question: mental conditions are on the rise. The statistics show most major categories of mental illness show significant increases in diagnosis and prevalence over the past several decades. And what do all these conditions have in common? While they all have distinct symptomology that overlaps with some other mental conditions and some symptoms that don't overlap with other conditions, there is also a common symptom "denominator" that they all share: distorted cognition.

The Common Symptom All Mental Conditions Share
All of them involve distorted cognition, or if you prefer to word it this way, distorted thought patterns. What is a distortion in cognition? It is an error in logical reasoning that the brain makes due to malfunction. This is happening at the physical level. While a person can be irrational by choice, and even people with the most well-balanced and healthy brains can choose emotion over logic, this is not a problem with the thinking process itself when a person does this. Their thinking process is in tact, and they are choosing to override it and "go with" their emotions instead of logic. But the nonsensical conclusions formed due to illness, when the person isn't choosing between two options of thought, and instead really believes the distorted logic, are not happening because the person is "being irrational" by choice. They are genuinely confused. And the confusion is happening at the physical, mechanical level. Toxins in their brain or pathogens, conditions like Lyme Disease or mold exposure, nutrient deficiencies or exposures to BPAs and plastics, "re-wire" their brain, causing what neuroscience calls 'altered connectivity' between brain regions. When this altered connectivity occurs in the pre-frontal cortex and other regions associated with logic and moral reasoning, it creates distortions in a person's understanding of basic reality, including God and His moral truths.

Obesity Something You Can See; Distorted Cognition is Invisible
Markers for obesity are way up too. We know in general Americans are much unhealthier than they were even 20 years ago, But obesity is something you can see. So it's easier to ground yourself in this new reality and understand that these exorbitant numbers really are true. You go to the mall and only a minority of people are thin. Almost everyone is overweight or obese. Among your friends you've all gone way up in size, even your friends who eat healthy, organic food and who do not overeat have gained weight. You can see the statistics around you.

We Are Experiencing a Mental Health Epidemic, and It Can No Longer be Ignored
It's harder to really believe mental conditions are on the rise at such alarming rates though, because we can't see brain toxicity. We don't want to believe it as it's troubling to the mind, it's never happened before to this extent and is unprecedented, so our mind isn't accustomed to this new reality, and the brain resists the conclusion that mental conditions which were once quite rare are now commonplace.

This cognitive dissonance, brought on by the mental shock of this new state of things, may persist even when confronted with real incidents of lapses in judgment from friends and coworkers like the ones described above. You may even fail to recognize the symptoms in yourself for the same reasons.

This may have gone on for some time. But things have worsened in recent years, and it's no longer an occasional experience. It's every day, several times per day, with many different people. The same people who 15 years ago were logical and grounded are now drawing conclusions based on conjecture, opinion, facial expressions, tone of voice, suspicions, wrongly connected information, "signs", and it seems like everything and anything else except logical reasoning!

It can no longer be ignored, explained away, or merely cringed at. We're to the point now where the situation is serious and people are waking up to the reality that we're experiencing a mental health crisis as a nation, and asking what can be done about it. And we need to do our part to help our brothers and sisters -- and society at large -- with this new epidemic.

Government and Societal Structure Rely on Human Beings With the Ability to Reason
People were created to be rational and moral beings, we cannot function if we lose reason. The natural "environment" and social structure for a reasoning being is government and law, because we are moral agents who live under moral law. But while this is as intrinsic to us as building dams is to beavers, if we lose our reason and our moral understanding, this no longer comes intuitively to us and people become like animals who make decisions based on things like intuition, signs, feelings, inclinations, and no longer based on right and wrong.

We do not have an instinctual mode like the animals do that allows them to make choices and exist harmoniously in a flock or group and care for their young without reason. When reason goes in human beings, government can't be understood as the concepts involved in government and law and order and punishment and redemption are concepts that rely on logic and moral understanding, and society begins to collapse.

Not only this but someone who has lost their reason cannot present the gospel in its true terms, and the person the gospel is presented to cannot understand it without reasoning ability, so church members who lose logic will not be able to perform their God-given mandate to take the gospel to every creature.

This is serious. But even in such a serious situation we can trust God as our Helper, and He always has a plan.

A Reason For Why This May be Happening
We've seen sin increase at an unprecedented rate in our lives. Sex trafficking -- even of minors, children -- has increased in America and around the world. Pornography use -- even among Christians -- is at a very high rate. In recent years cross-sex hormones has become the accepted treatment for people who struggle with gender dysphoria. Surgery on minors has even been performed in some cases.

If anyone doubted we were in the last days of this world's history before this, the past 10 years have contained enough sin to convince them otherwise.

In the book of Deuteronomy, one of the curses that is mentioned will fall on Israel if they choose to abandon God and take up idols is "madness and confusion of mind" (Deuteronomy 28:28). We've already seen physical illnesses go way up in recent years, one of the curses mentioned in this chapter. Could the mental conditions also be part of the judgments of God upon a disobedient nation and world?

America was never meant to stop being a Christian nation. We were given a high calling and a weighty responsibility before God to institute laws that honored Him, and shine as a light in the world.

What many get wrong when America is referenced as a Christian nation is some believe that since we were not supposed to enforce the worship of the God of the Bible that we were also not supposed to make gay marriage illegal, or transgenderism, and things like this.

This is all wrong. We were always supposed to enforce the last six commandments; it is the first four that our laws were never meant to touch. Our role in God's plan was never to be a secular nation. We were to be a nation founded on Christian principles. This is why we defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

Our founding fathers knew they were signing a contract with God when this country was founded.

But in a big way in recent years we've rebelled against this important covenant.

I believe that the rise of mental conditions may be a direct judgment from God on a nation that has broken their agreement with Him.

And our unfaithfulness has spread to the rest of the world who have been influenced by us. After we instituted abortion, other nations who never even thought of the idea until we did it, did the same. After we made gay marriage legal, other nations followed suit. We've played the role of a tempter to the rest of the world, and could it be that now God must judge both us and them?

Sin and Earth Connection
The Bible recognizes a direct connection between the sins of human beings and the judgements God sends on the earth itself.

He turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground,
and fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who lived there.
Psalm 107:34

“There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land.
By swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery,
they break all restraint, with bloodshed upon bloodshed.
Therefore the land will mourn;
and everyone who dwells there will waste away,
with the beasts of the field
and the birds of the air;
even the fish of the sea will be taken away.”
Hosea 4:1-3

“There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land.
By swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery,
they break all restraint, with bloodshed upon bloodshed.
Therefore the land will mourn;
and everyone who dwells there will waste away,
with the beasts of the field
and the birds of the air;
even the fish of the sea will be taken away.”
Jeremiah 12:4

For the land is full of adulterers—because of the curse, the land mourns and the pastures of the wilderness have dried up—their course is evil and their power is misused.
Jeremiah 23:10

In Ezekiel God mentions four main judgments that He gives for wickedness; sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague.

“For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful judgments—sword and famine and wild beasts and plague—to kill its men and their animals!
Ezekiel 14:21

We have certainly seen an increase in illnesses like COVID, Lyme disease, MS, and more. These could be described as plagues or epidemics.

And even our soil has been destroyed and no longer holds the minerals and nutrients needed to provide good brain health or proper glucose control. This could be a judgment from God, and it is definitely affecting our mental health and bringing about "madness of mind" in some individuals.

Just something to think about.

The Health Message
But while it may be true that in a general sense illnesses including mental ones are on the rise, God wants to provide for His people in the area of health. He has individuals He wants to preserve the mental health of, or recover mental health if they've lost theirs. He is our ark in the midst of a raging sea, and if we depend on Him He can get us safely through the storms around us.

What is His plan for bringing this about?

In these last days God has placed a special emphasis on the health message in a way He never has before in past history. This is not to say there's ever been a time when health has not been essential -- and not optional -- for the Christian. There hasn't. Health is important from Genesis to Revelation, starting with Adam and Eve in the garden who had a whole food, plant based diet, to Daniel in Babylon, and the early believers at the time of the apostle John. But we have been given special revelation about the increase in health conditions, and how these affect the mental functioning of the brain, that is pertinent for these last days.

With comments like "many are born insane" and that breathing unhealthy air can lead to insanity, Mrs. White sheds light on conditions that have stumped doctors and which have brought misery to families. While a few years ago many reacted to these comments in a startling way, now the reaction is often relief at finding someone who finally "gets it." Mrs. White is explaining situations our friends are in, or our coworkers, real situations that have stumped doctors, that have become more and more common and are no longer a surprise. Young children being incoherent and out-of-control with mood swings, the reasoning center of their brain offline while the unconscious involuntary parts of the brain involved in mood regulation dominate the person.

Many of her comments about a blunted sense of right and wrong -- from ill health, not sinful choices -- shed light into conditions like personality disorders, which so many families are struggling with as these disorders increase.

A general theme runs through her writings, something that is of the utmost value to those of us who are Christians and have gone through "the system" of the psychiatric world. The theme is that of moral understanding being a function of the brain and of how whatever affects the body affects the mind and can blunt moral understanding.

When I was treated at the hospital for psychosis, they asked me if I saw and heard thins that weren't there. (I replied "no" as I thought the things I was seeing and hearing were God and celebrities speaking to me through the Holy Spirit and these things were obviously real and "there.") They asked me if I had thoughts of harming myself or others. But they never asked me questions about right and wrong. They didn't ask me if I believed lying was wrong and why, or stealing, or why it's wrong to harm others. These kinds of questions would have exposed whether I was having problems with moral reasoning. It's really not safe to release someone who has had a psychotic episode back into society without asking them these questions and testing their moral insight. They came from a secular atheist background, and thus they their hierarchy of values was all misaligned, and also they don't view people as moral beings, but rather highly evolved animals, so they weren't looking at the human brain correctly. In short, they didn't have a right conception of my problem and they didn't have the answers either.

In my room at the hospital I'd been hallucinating little translucent squiggly lines. One of them shook and moved in an artificial way and was very attention-grabbing. It represented a sinful lifestyle of seeking pleasure and excitement. Another shook with a healthy vitality. It represented a holy, healthy life of obedience to God. I thought God was sending me the lines to "test" me and ask me whether I would choose Him or reject Him. When I saw a line appear, I was supposed to walk towards it if it was the healthy lines, and resist it if it was the artificial, "flashy" lines. But I found myself compulsively chasing after the artificial lines, despite my best efforts. I didn't know I was having irresistible compulsions, a symptom that can occur with psychotic disorders.

If they had asked me moral questions at that time I would have said wrong was anything artificial and health-destroying, and right was anything natural that builds up health. I'd lost the ability to understand that "love worketh no ill to one's neighbor" Romans 13:10, and that the ill that makes something sin includes dimensions of holiness, purity, and righteousness, as well as direct physical harm. A lot of Christians sadly remained stumped when atheists ask "why would God say a gay relationship is wrong when no one gets hurt?" The answer to this is actually that it is in fact wrong because of the harm it does. The harm, however, is primarily in the area of impurity and unholiness. It can't be loving to engage in an act with someone that degrades them and strips them of holiness, when they are a being made in God's image. Such acts will bring mental misery to such a being, as well as a spiritual condition of hardening their heart.

People are made in God's image. It's wrong to steal from them because as a being made in His image they have a right to reap what they sow. They have a right to own property. And anything I didn't reap and put in the work for is not mine by right. Lying is wrong because people have a right to true information on which to base their choices. Give them wrong information and they could make a mistake or choose something they never actually wanted to choose. Lying deprives them of this basic human right. It also breaks trust among people.

I could not understand these concepts when in psychosis. Everything was reduced down to natural or unnatural. The wrongness in sin I could not see, and the rightness in keeping God's commandments I could not discern.

In such a state self-defense and murder look like the same act. Lying, I thought, was just a different mode a person used in the world to interact with others and get information. Telling the truth was one mode, and lying was another mode, and they were both equal. I would have failed a morality quiz and it would have been helpful in my treatment to give it to me again and release me only when I could articulate basic right and wrong.

What unsettles me is that clinical assessments rarely examine whether a person has regained the capacity for moral reasoning—the very faculty that allows safe, relational participation in society.

As you can imagine, after I came out of psychosis and regained my ability to see the beauty of the law of God and to know His character, moral understanding became the big theme I focused on. It is the most important function of the human brain. It is the function we should care most about when we focus on our health. And who is the voice that spoke the most about it and gave it the focus it deserves? Ellen G. White, and really ultimately Jesus who is the One behind her visions.

God saw how important this theme is in these last days, and He gave her visions o emphasize its importance.

She had visions about how God's seventh-day adventist people were to be involved in new cutting edge treatments in the health field. Initially we were to pioneer the way. Unfortunately we fell into a backslidden state, however this doesn't mean individuals can't be involved in the work.

We were not to just eat healthy and then that's it. We were to treat conditions and symptoms. Thus many of the natural health treatments which are becoming more mainstream in natural medicine today -- such as the Walsh protocol which uses high dose nutrients for psychosis -- are perfectly in line with her counsel.

Jesus as Healer
I believe God wants to send judgements to wake people up and if possible bring them to repentance, and He also wants to deliver many of His own people out of mental conditions.

He can do both of these things simultaneously. In a general sense mental conditions can have a huge increase -- even something like psychosis could potentially become commonplace -- and He can still deliver individuals out of psychosis.

He is the Healer. I experienced this reality when I found myself interacting in Bible study after coming out of psychosis, and seeing the rise in distorted cognition, and realizing I was one of the more logical people in my group Bible study. How could this be? How could the woman diagnosed with the psychotic disorder be among the most sane? It's because Jesus healed me and saved me out of that experience.

There are individuals in our churches today who are quietly experiencing significant psychotic symptoms—often unnoticed, untreated, or misinterpreted as purely spiritual struggles. At a small church I used to attend years ago there were at least two of us there. And I believe God has some among the psychotic whom He intends to heal and bring out of psychosis. He knows who those people are. He knows who needs to be healed and who it is not best to heal. We need to submit to His plan and allow Him to choose the outcome. But in order to be truly submissive to His plan, we need to be learning these new treatments that are available for psychotic disorders, like the Walsh protocol, like treatment for mold exposure, which is a huge source of psychosis, like copper toxicity which also causes psychosis.

I speak of psychosis briefly here because it is the most extreme version of distorted cognition, and it can put a person in a place where if they went into psychosis while in rebellion to God, and now they can't understand right from wrong, they can't repent of their sins and tun to God now. They need a Christian to aid them in health treatments so they can get their brain back, and then they can again have opportunity to make a choice to follow Jesus if they choose to do so.

But really all distorted thoughts are a problem. The girl with anorexia who believes she is worthless and doesn't deserve to take up space, and must starve herself...even though this may not be a full delusion, it is still causing her much suffering and distorting her perception. She would still really benefit from treatment (Dr. Walsh has a program for anorexia too, involving methionine and addressing a condition called undermethylation.)

The distorted thoughts of the preacher at the beginning of this article could cause him to preach a nonsensical sermon that confused people and lead some people away from God. He could benefit from treatments.

God intends to carry out His plan of taking the gospel to the whole world through His church, and preparing a people to stand in His Presence at the time of the end. In order to do this He will use the health message to restore minds that have been lost from illness, and prevent others from losing their minds. He also uses the whole process of doing health treatments, and looking to Him for wisdom on health issues, to work our characters and remove lack of trust and sin from our hearts. So the acts of doing health treatments work the character.

Then He will continue the character process with His people through to the end.

The health message is His way of carrying out His work in a world where disordered thinking is becoming the norm, and it prevents disordered thinking from taking over the church and rendering God's work impossible to do.

"God has sent me before you to prepare the way."

When Joseph's brothers who had sold him into slavery as a teenager finally reconciled with him years later, Jospeh forgave them and said these words:

"But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance."
Genesis 345:7

It was not God's will his brothers sold him into slavery. God never tempts anyone to do evil (James 1:13). They did this evil on their own out of the jealous motivations of their hearts. So what did Jospeh mean by God sent me before you? This is a reference to the fact that it was God's will for Joseph to go to Egypt, and God's will would be done. His plans cannot be thwarted (Job 42:2), thus I'm sure He would have worked out another way for Joseph to be sent there had his brothers been obedient to God and loved their brother rather than selling him as a slave. When Jospeh's brothers used their free will to do evil, God worked out His will despite their cruelty, and he even used the particular details of the situation to bring about Joseph's rise to second-in-command of Egypt.

In a similar way, God never wanted mental conditions to exist. Adam ate from the fruit and brought misery and woe into our world, including natural evils like cancer, psychotic disorders, and distorted cognition. God never wanted this to happen. And He certainly never wanted some people to suffer hellish experiences where they spend many years trapped in the throes of tormenting psychosis. But if someone has that experience, God uses it for good and overcomes evil with good in that person's life if they are a believer. God uses all things for good.

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.”
Genesis 50:20

Many of us who have a genetic make-up that caused us to react sooner to pollutants in the environment and diseases like Lime disease, causing us to develop full psychotic disorders or severe conditions like OCD or major depression, and who have improved our symptoms with treatment, feel as though we have "gone before" others who are just now learning these symptoms and conditions exist.

We have been the "canaries in the coal mine' for many years, and during that time we've learned much. I believe God intends to use us, along with mental health professionals who understand these conditions, to help educate and stay the evil tide of mental symptoms that is upon the earth. Because it is now to the point where it is like a tidal wave that is breaking on the land, and sweeping through all of our institutions and systems and communities at once, threatening to collapse society.