I agree that the spirit and God matter. I think most psychiatrists would agree with you as well, given that they're mostly religious just like the rest of the population.
I'm not entirely sure I buy that.
The jump you're making here is between "matters" in the absolute, or in any sense, and "is relevant to designing a medication to treat some particular illness."
I'm not sure how you go about designing a medication for an "illness" whose dynamics are not understood. If the human spirit is involved in the process, and you pretend that doesn't matter, then you will devise a treatment that attempts to "treat" a condition you think you understand, based on some signals you see on the wire. Never mind where those signals originate.
How, for example, would affirming the existence of God and talking about the spirit cure, even in theory, cortical blindness?
Uh, I wasn't aware that blindness was a "mental" condition.
How would you fit these views in to developing a medicine for autism?
I guess we'd first have to understand what autism is. Beyond a set of symptoms. Yes, I know there are medications that are being used to "treat" autism. No, I am not aware of any clear definition of what autism even is, beyond vague symptomatic expressions of the problem. I'd like to know by what means the medical community concluded that the actual being -- the person himself -- the spirit, if you will, is somehow not involved in the problem, and that the condition is completely organic. That's rhetorical, of course. The medical community would never look there.
The fact that religion matters to people does not mean that you need to somehow (I'm not even sure how you would do this-is there a prayer or something the scientists should say while they're measuring brain waves?) to include religious beliefs into the results of scientific research.
Prayer? "Include" religious beliefs? Uh, no. You would do what scientists do. You would discover how to detect the interaction of a spirit with a body. You might have to infer some stuff, much in the way that the sub-atomic particle guys infer the existence of little tiny itsy-bitsy too-small-to-measure things by the effects they have on their surroundings. Along the way, you might discover that, for example, the "mind" isn't necessarily the same thing as the "brain."
I don't know why it is that visions of mysticism are evoked by mentions of a spirit. It just is. That we have no way in physics to describe it and no way in current science to account for its interaction with bodies is largely a problem of observation and derivation.
Saying that religion isn't relevant to studying the functions of the brain doesn't mean it's irrelevant-it just means that you can't add anything to your measured knowledge of the brain with it, and consequently, that it can't produce the sorts of repeatable and tangible results that you need to develop medicine.
Conventional wisdom is that the brain is the seat of thought and intellect. If we accept that thought and intellect are the product of chemistry and bio-electronics, then -- as long as the actual mechanisms are properly understood -- the development of chemical medicines is valid.
The existence of a human spirit, as a component of the human condition, however, messes with that model. If there is a spirit (sorry, we just don't have a handy technical term for that) involved in the business of thought and intellect, and if the mind involves certain non-physical structures as a consequence, then what? You're looking at the machinery for ways to create remedies for the operator. Who happens not to be physical.
Look, you've invested a ton of time into a line of study, and I have no illusions that I can snap my fingers and change how you look at things.
I would, however, invite you to take extra care to watch for bits of evidence -- anomalies, if you will -- that point toward the existence of something beyond what your learning has thus far presented to you.
Just keep your eyes open. That's really all I can ask.
I did, and it changed things for me.