Mental Health and Religion

Religion and spirituality together represent one of the most powerful motivations of human action. Depending on their content and their structure they can mean both constructive and developing, but also highly destructive energy.

By using the term Spirituality, an experience center of religion is usually meant. This phenomenon is in today´s sociobiology considered a genetic constant shared among all the people. It consists of the cognitive element (religion as a hypothesis saying that the basic regulator of human life is somewhere out of our empiric world), the experience element and the element of attitude (“to be“ life mode). In a concrete man´s situation, these elements are particularly expressed and they reach different degrees of matureness.

You can see the positive effect of spirituality and religion in practice of medicine clearly in the area of human structures of existence (“existentials”) – i.e. while searching for the meaning in life (especially when asking whether there actually is any), while thinking about the good and the evil and the order of both (it´s relativity or absoluteness) and also while thinking about fear of death.

Fear of death as a widely known existencial represents, according to I.Yalom, one of the most powerful dynamisms and sources of human neurosis and psychosis. According to the same author, it can be empirically proved that religious people suffer less from fear of death than atheists.

The negative influence of spirituality and religion is in practice of psychotherapy and psychiatry most often seen in situation of so called „savage“ religiousness – the cases of deficiently socialized religiousness (and traditional churches are the most important source of individual religion socialization into society life). It is often visible on various individual special-experience-seekers on one hand (especially when they use drugs or different techniques of getting into abnormal state of mind) but also on people suffering from psychosis, which in the case of the believers does frequently posses some religious topic. Another large psychopathological area belongs to the situations of an abuse of power. These can be accidentally supported by religion, primarily from parents who sometimes tend to solve the lack of authority with God and his will, but also from various gurus, healers, witches, shamans and fortune-tellers which Czech people tend to trust with often surprising irrationality. Eventually this can be practised by church representatives and, in extreme cases, especially by sects.

As a result there exist two different attitudes towards spirituality and religion in psychotherapy. There is a will to help people who suffer from stress, mental discomfort or even mental disorder through their „savage“ spirituality or those who fell into extreme addiction to people acting as general and absolute authorities of epistemic (“knowledgeable”) or deontic (“big boss-like”) nature. Therapeutic exercises in fact copy analogical strategies of psychotherapy and psychiatry in nonreligious area. On the other hand, religious elements can help people who are dealing with trauma, loss, existential futility or are going through the searching for the meaning in life, because spiritual/religious offers can help them reshape positively their lives and make them feel open to new personal maturation.

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