Towards wholeness: transcending the barriers between religion and psychiatry.

Secondly, we share key values at a profound level in our response to those concerns. In the old but still relevant book by the social psychologist Paul Halmos, The Faith of the Counsellors (1965), he argued that it is not the case that as psychiatrists you are simply offering techniques in a detached or dispassionate way. Human beings are not merely interesting machines, nor do you treat them as such. Indeed, your involvement with patients recognises that they have a value that others, including themselves, may deny. Likewise, the Christian Minister re spects this concern for the human being and recognises it as something that overlaps with his theology of humankind as quintessen tially God-given and sacred. Halmos went on to argue that, far from being a value-free discipline, psychiatry has implicit values which have a clearly Chris tian origin. Of course, some may wish to challenge that, but I believe that he does offer us a way of examining the overlap between theology and psychiatry in some important respects. To take just one example, faith, hope and love are present in both our disciplines. Faith, not in the sense that only a religious person can be a good psychiatrist, but rather because both psychiatry and religion depend on a fundamental relationship of trust. For the secular person that trust is rooted in a trust of each other as people. For the religious person it involves even more than that —¿ a trust in each other in the presence of God. Or again there is hope. Psychiatry looks for a process of healing, of restoration to mental wholeness. Because we under stand so little even now about the human mind, we often have to proceed on the basis of hope and not certainty. For the Christian, our understanding of hope reaches beyond human knowledge to God himself, who comes to us in our need. And then there is the last of the three great virtues, that of love. Good medical practice, including good psychiatric practice, is always based upon real care and such real care is both costly and risky. Thirdly, because we share so much, yet retain our own distinctiveness, we need each other and cannot achieve a true wholeness without cooperating. On the one hand, religion, and Christianity in particular, needs you. Ofcourse, there have been some splendid liaisons over the years, but these have been far from universal. The book Psychiatry and Religion which I have quoted is a heartening sign of the progress that has been made, but more needs to be done. As Christian ministers Like the Church, psychiatry is truly inter national, but sadly there have been times when many on both sides have sought to erect barriers between us. We have both emerged the poorer as a result. Much more is to be gained, I believe, from an atmos phere in which goodwill, respect and co operation are allowed to grow. Part of the reason for these barriers lies in the origins of modern psychiatry itself. Freud, in his work The Future ofan Illusion, viewed religious faith as an immature response to the awareness of the helplessness of humanity: an illusion created as a way of coping with the unpleasant realities that life is nasty, uncertain and without purpose. He argued that we deal with the latter by projecting an “¿ ideal― figure who can look after us. It is clear that such a hypothesis was unlikely to be the best overture to a happy and warm relationship! Nor, of course, does it help when Christians and other religious people merely dismiss such a hypothesis out of hand. Freud had ample reasons for concluding that the patients he treated, central to whose illnesses were religious feelings, were in part the victims of their religion. Indeed, as many theologians recognise, religion can create problems as well as providing answers. For example, extremist fundamentalism has long been a curse that has dogged humanity, and terrible incidents like the Waco and Jones massacres are just modern instances of this. Professional rivalry, too, has been a cause of friction and antipathy between religion and psychiatry. Some clergy have resented the way in which their parishioners now turn to counsellors and psychiatrists when they might have come to them in the past. Moreover they have been saddened and angered by the fact that some of those so consulted seem to have been prepared to