The present review will be concerned with the relationships between religion and health. Our principal purpose will be to review the empirical research literature on this relations
One in five Australians suffers some form of psychological illness in any particular year, and nearly half do so at some stage in their life. It affects all age groups, sexes, ethn
The idea that virtue is related to health—and in particular mental health—has a venerable history in Western thought, dating back to Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Yet virtue has
The concepts of mental disorder, or illness, are ascribed to deviations from normal thoughts, reasoning, feelings, attitudes, and actions that are by their subjects, or by others,
One of the reasons that psychiatry is ethically complex is because that is the area of healthcare where involuntary treatment is most likely. There is an important difference betwe
The mad were once thought to be wicked or possessed, whereas now they are generally thought to be sick, or mentally ill. Usually, this is regarded as a benign decision by a more en
For the understanding, treatment and care of the mentally ill: The Church looks on these persons with special concern, as she looks on any other human being affected by illness. In
The pandemic has presented health workers with enormous challenges, showing us all the need to have an appropriate approach to health care to ensure no one is left behind and to ca
The expressions ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ derive from 19th century medical and public health discussions in which the term ‘mental hygene’ was also introduced. At that point modern psychology was still in its early stages and these notions in their negative forms were applied somewhat indiscriminately to describe or explain what was viewed as morally transgressive activity, dysfunctional personal patterns of behaviour, melancholy, neuroses, mental incapacity, and what we would now classify as serious clinical conditions such as schizophrenia. There were two broad tendencies at this time: to attribute mental ill health (and health) to physical and biological fitness and deficiencies or impairments in respect of this; or to regard it as a matter of moral (dis)order and (lack of) self-discipline. Notwithstanding the development of theoretical and clinical psychology, to some extent these tendencies persist and correlate with chemical and cognitive-behavioural approaches. Philosophically there have been two important approaches to the issues: the first going back to Plato, the second associated with interwoven strands in continental philosophy integrating ideas of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. In the Republic Plato draws an analogy between good order and well-functioning in the state and in the individual, and in the case of the latter explains this in terms of three components of the ‘soul’: the appetitive, the spirited and the rational parts. A healthy soul is one in which these are in functional balance with the first and second subject to the governance of reason. In this account mental health and illness are objective conditions relating to the intrinsic structure of the psyche. According to the second approach, by contrast, these conditions are social constructs reflecting the interests of elements within society to control others by deeming them defective or deranged. An influential advocate of this view was Michel Foucault presenting it in his book Madness and Civilisation (1961).