ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the relationship between psychiatry and Christianity, and offers the effect the relationship has upon people diagnosed as mentally ill and those who treat and care for them. In contemporary Western society there are similarities between Christianity and psychiatry: both are preoccupied with subjective phenomena and with internal and illusive realities. Christianity has largely forsaken the search for objective confirmation of its beliefs. Christianity has found it difficult to resist the seduction of governments and authorities, even in the extremes of their inhumanity and wickedness. The relationship between Christianity and psychiatry exists in a number of forms. The abuses of both Christianity and psychiatric practice provide inflammable fuel for the more explosive conflicts. Psychiatry has protected the weak from some of the excesses of Christian ministry, but sometimes has undermined the faithful’s precarious beliefs while living off their disease.
