ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature and role of the pastoral counsellor in the lives of people whom psychiatry diagnoses as suffering from mental illness. The pastoral counsellor will share many of the attitudes concerning mental disturbances which form the psychiatric view of madness as illness. Religious conversion had often been accompanied by the phenomenon of mental and emotional upheaval. The psychiatrist viewing the process identifies the characteristics of pathology, or abnormal mental functioning. The ‘crisis’ may be one which involves the complete breakdown of a person’s sense of meaning and rational functioning. For many psychiatrists, psychosis is a sign of deep and disturbing illness. The Christian tradition conveyed to Simon a view of psychological disturbance as an expression of inner conflict. In viewing madness from a religious perspective, pastoral counsellors see it as part of a range of experience within which madness and sanity differ only in their creative fruitfulness and the social context in which they occur.
