In the worldview of mental healing, people's deeply-held thoughts make them ill or at least create the preconditions for disease and psychological problems. Mental healers insist that, just as people can make themselves sick by the way they think, the way they think can make them well again.
Psychologists teach people to improve depression by changing the way they think.
But mental healing travels further out the continuum occupied by these easily accepted cases, to claim that all disease is caused by how we use our minds and can be improved by using our minds differently. Mental healing departs even more radically from the normal view when it holds that thoughts can change not only the body, but even the external world. In energy systems, thinking is more likely to be considered part of the problem and pre-cognitive energy flow the solution. In mental healing, thinking is both problem and cure. Affirmations can also be used to nudge unconscious negative thoughts to the surface so they can be identified.