Our Lady of the Slough of Despond

I still recall a shocking letter to the editor of the Toronto Star some years ago from a psychiatrist. He argued that religion caused mental illness. His evidence was that the mentally ill tended to gravitate to churches.

Unfortunately, many psychiatrists think this way. Starting with Freud: Freud argued that religion is emotionally toxic. He called religion a sickness—an "obsessional neurosis"—that leads people to live sexually repressed, uptight, and therefore unhappy lives.

Indeed, hostility to religion is intrinsic to psychology as a discipline; because it really exists and is justifiable only as a substitute for religion. What, after all, is a “psyche”? The word is the Greek equivalent of the English “soul.” The most obvious place to go for “knowledge of the soul” – psychology, properly speaking—is therefore religion. To set up a separate discipline is to imply that religion is not valid.

Psychiatrists and psychologists will generally, therefore, steer patients away from religion; it is the competition, and their livelihoods depend on this. Because they do, they are positively harmful to the mentally ill. Indeed, the very idea of psychiatry may be harmful to the “mentally ill,” inasmuch as it tends to distract them from contacting a priest. Because this is really what religion is all about: the healing of spiritual “illnesses” or states of ill-being.

Consider this:
- 28 percent of those who never attend church declare themselves "very happy,"
- 39 percent of those attending weekly think they are “very happy.”
- 47 percent of those attending more often than weekly are “very happy.”

(from University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. See http://www.davidmyers.org/Brix?pageID=54)

What could be more obvious than to tell someone who is depressed to go to a church?

Yet government actually funds them to go see a psychiatrist instead. And there is an uproar if public money goes to a church.