Demystifying Psychiatry for the Church - Part I

Demystifying Psychiatry for the Church

If you have high blood pressure, you control it with medication. If you are a diabetic, you take insulin. If you are depressed, can you take an antidepressant?

There is a tension that exists between psychiatry and the church.  From what does this tension arise?

We have a construct that if we take medications that impact the brain we are showing a lack of faith, but we fail to recognize that the brain is an organ of the body  Many within the church feel that taking medication is an absence of faith and that if they believed enough, fast, or give alms, God will hear their prayers and heal them.  We are willing to use medication to treat any other organ of the body, BUT the brain.

This paradox might be rooted in the belief that the brain is the essence of a person, or the spirit. We believe the spirit can only be healed through spiritual disciplines and by taking medication to heal or support the function of this organ we call the brain ,we are violating some holy law.

The reasons for some of this are well founded.

Benjamin Rush, the "father of American psychiatry," was the first to believe that mental illness is a disease of the mind and not a "possession of demons." His classic work, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, published in 1812, was the first psychiatric textbook printed in the United States.

When considering how the view of psychiatry was formed, Sigmund Freud’s name is likely the first that comes to mind.  In the early 1900’s, Freud, an Austrian physician, brought forth the idea of a person being composed of Id, Ego, and Super Ego and the oft-touted process of psychoanalyses.

The popular movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) reflects how society dealt with the mentally ill, locking them away in asylums so they could be cared for by someone else.

Thankfully psychiatry has learned much in the last 50 years and now we have clear criteria by which a mental illness is diagnosed as well as a plethora of medications that are proven to be effective at treating the symptoms.