Psychology and Islam

Something i've been meaning to blog about for a while.....

I remember when I first decided I wanted to do psychology as a degree, several people were like “errr ….okaayyy then isn’t that supposed to mess your head up or something”, and a few people told me that their friend’s brother’s wife’s cousin or whatever had done it for a year and then decided to quit as it conflicted with their (Islamic) beliefs. Back then in college I didn’t really get the concept behind all these ideas but it came to me whilst I was sat in a lecture quite a while back. Psychologists come up with an explanation for every little thing that we do, for example you can’t even pick up a damn cup without a psychologist analysing it. Psychology is a vast area and there are millions of theories, models explanations etc of why we do the tiniest things, and how it happens, how we end up with mental/physical illnesses , how we perceive things, how we mentally process things and the list is totally endless. Anyway the point I’m trying to make is that psychology is made up of explanations, whereas Islam teaches that every single thing on the planet is in existence purely because Allah wills it. An example: If someone developed a mental illness a psychologist would try to explain the cause of the illness using various theories i.e. perhaps they had a bad childhood, or maybe there’s a lesion in the bilateral hippocampal area of their brain (sounds clever doesn’t it ) etc but from an Islamic viewpoint we would accept the fact that it was that person’s fate to get that illness. Even if they had the best childhood and they tried every prevention method in the book they would have still developed it if it was Allah’s decree.
However I don’t think Psychology and Islam are total polar opposites, many a time I have sat in lectures and the lecturer has said the possible cause of an illness could be “X Y and Z” and I’ve thought “Well duuurr Islam forbids that anyway” i.e. drug/alcohol abuse, child abuse, bad relationships between significant others etc.
I think psychology only “messes your head up” when you begin to believe the more harebrained explanations, (I dread to think what would happen to the world if we all believed Freud’s theories!!).