Historical Overview Of The Vision Of Major Christian Confessions About Mentally Ill People

Abstract

The article is a review of the historic literature describing views of the three general Christian confessions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) to the mentally ill people. The author makes an attempt to trace the dynamics of development of these views in a mutual comparison with one another, as well as with the views on this issue, which are generally accepted nowadays. In particular, it was shown that with the transition from the Ancient glorification of strength and health to the Christian values of spirituality and mentality, the fate of mentally ill people began to depend on the attitude of the leaders of the church and were both quite well and terrifying horrible. The author also considers the issue of the relationship between the Christian ministries to the mentally ill and official psychiatric medicine. Today such relationships are mostly informal, interpersonal in their nature. They are built on mutual trust of individual representatives of medicine and the church, instead of developing them systematically. At the same time, most of the initiatives are initialized by the representatives of the church and not by the representatives of psychiatric medicine