Why Psychiatry Needs to Get Right with God

who does that care for souls and that's classically the task of priests of religious people go back into the ancient religious traditions of the shamanic role in the measure that that's been overlooked that's a real problem and that's a reason why there's a crisis of meaning a crisis of meaning will make people sick it'll make people sick eventually at all levels of their being welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vott the senior publishing director here at word on fire i have a great discussion for you today with bishop baron about why psychiatry needs to get right with god we'll discuss the connections between prayer and mental health and we'll ask why many psychiatrists tend to downplay spirituality before we get there though bishop good to see you as always hey brandon how you doing how are all the kids hey we're doing great kids are doing well listen i have something really cool here sitting on my desk that i know you haven't seen yet so i feel a little lucky that i've gotten one of the first copies it is oh my gosh it's volume two of of the word on fire bible series the long anticipated volume now this is like a specially made copy shipped from italy so the rest of them are still being printed and rolled off the printer but i wanted to share it with all the viewers of wow the word on fire show because i know how many of them have enjoyed the first volume looking forward to the second volume let me i'll flip through it here just as a little teaser so it's filled with all the beautiful artwork and commentary as the first volume so i just wanted to give people a little preview it's the rest of the new testament right so it's the gospel volume one so it's everything else in the new testament that's correct it's about it's about 30 thicker than volume one and it's it's hefty it feels kind of hefty uh we're gonna we're gonna start sending out copies i believe around december time but if you haven't already pre-ordered your copy you can do that now to ensure you're going to get one because with the first volume we ran out of copies within i think days and people had to wait months and months to get there so if you want to make sure you get it there's still time to pre-order you can go to the website wardonfire.org bible project wordonfire.org bible project i'll leave a link in the um show notes here but uh look forward to this it's coming i wish you could give it to me through that screen i want to grab it and look at it you'll get it you'll get your copy soon okay so today i wanted to discuss a recent article in the in the periodical scientific american it's been getting a lot of attraction online the article is titled psychiatry needs to get right with god psychiatry needs to get right with god i'll share a link to that one as well in the show notes but i thought we could kind of fisk the article as we usually do i'll read a few sentences and then get your thoughts on it so the article begins with an interesting observation about prayer during the covid crisis it says in the early days of the pandemic an economist named jeannette benson of the university of copenhagen examined google searches for the word prayer in 95 countries this was a global analysis she identified that searches for prayer hit an all-time global high in march 2020 the beginning of the pandemic and increases occurred in lockstep with the number of coveted cases identified in each country in the united states according to the pew research center 55 percent of americans prayed to end the spread of the novel coronavirus in march 2020 and nearly one quarter reported that their faith increased in the months after the beginning of covid despite limited access to houses of worship so maybe let's start there have you noticed this same pattern of of increases in prayer and devotion to faith during covid yes and it doesn't surprise me really because the theologians talk about limit experiences are often the places where god is is encountered and that could be when i reach the limit of my upward capacity for the good the true and the beautiful and ecstatic moments of life but also of course in negative moments when i come up against my limits i see my moral limits i realize i'm a sinner when i come up against tough moments in my life or in this case i come up against disease and death it's precisely those limit moments that we often encounter the reality that mysteriously transcends those limits i i stare as it were into the darkness beyond the limit that i've come up against so in that way no i'm not that surprised and i've often said that priests go to these limit experiences that's kind of how we're trained we're trained not to stay kind of in the comfortable space but to go precisely to the limits like hospital rooms and like funeral parlors and like nursing homes and like confession boxes where people are coming up against their limits so in that sense no it doesn't really surprise me that prayer would increase at uh at coveted time okay so then the article goes on to say that these trends these trends of increased prayer are not just interesting sociological trends they are clinically significant in the past year american mental health has sank to the lowest point in recorded history she gives some examples increases of mental disorders have increased 50 percent compared with before the pandemic alcohol and other abuse has surged and young adults were more than twice as likely to seriously consider suicide this year than just a few years ago yet she says the only group to see improvements in mental health during the past year during the coronavirus were those who attended religious services at least weekly whether virtually or in person she said 46 percent reported excellent mental health today versus 42 percent pre-pandemic uh she quotes former congressional representative patrick kennedy who said in a book that the two most under appreciated treatments for mental disorder are love and faith love and faith as a as a priest as a spiritual advisor does that resonate with you absolutely and you know the first thing about young people especially uh being affected negatively by the covet thing i've noticed especially among young how many of them are kind of staggering out of the covet period looking much worse for wear you know what i'm saying um weight gain seeing more seeming more tired and lethargic and less focused and it's like they went through uh just a trauma which they did for all kinds of reasons so i i get that i can see where mental health would have declined but then the issue of you know those who were connected to the faith coming out better yeah absolutely because we're built for it and you and i have talked about this brandon i think it's under appreciated during the time of the nuns and the increase in disaffiliation and we say oh we got to do something institutionally about that but we maybe haven't talked enough about the damage it's doing to these young people oh there they are the cool kids today they're all running away from church yeah but that's you're going to pay a price for that because when you bracket that which your soul is built to contact your soul begins to atrophy you know your soul begins to suffer we're not meant just for the goods of this world and when you say in a systematic way no no i'm eliminating that i'm eliminating my sense of the transcendent you get sick you get sick at all levels of your being the spiritual don't think of it as hovering mysteriously above everything think of it rather as like surrounding everything in you right as the aquarius said the soul is in the body not as contained by it but as containing it that little line has always been extraordinarily illuminating for me the soul is in the body not as contained by it but as containing it the spiritual envelopes it surrounds it conditions every other aspect of life body yes mind yes psyche yes so you bracket the spiritual or you ignore the spiritual you allow it to atrophy yes that will affect you at every level of your being so no i'm not surprised by that and that religious people are are hooked onto a source of health in a way that's very powerful the article goes on to observe that 60 percent of psychiatric patients want to discuss spirituality in the context of their treatment but most psychiatrists are leery to do so she says since sigmund freud's characterization of religion as a mass delusion nearly 100 years ago mental health professionals and scientists have eschewed the spiritual realm current efforts to flatten the covid19 mental health curve have been almost entirely secular and she gives a few examples the american psychological association set of resources makes no mention of spirituality the center for disease control and preventions only spiritual recommendation is to quote connect with your community or your faith-based organization she says overnight of the 90 000 projects that are funded by the national institutes of health fewer than 20 of them even mentioned spirituality and only in the abstract and she says only one of the 90 000 actually contains that term in its title needless to say she concludes a lack of funding for research on spirituality hamstrings clinical innovation and dissemination do you agree with with her conclusion yeah and i agree the influence of freud there has been really um deleterious freud is one of the fathers of you might say modern naturalism right the philosophical view mind you not scientific the philosophical view that reality is reducible to the physical what the scientists can measure uh one of the uh concomitants of that was his deep suspicion of religion and as she says his tendency to write it off is simply a delusion it's like a waking dream like an infantile uh fantasy even i would say among non-orthodox freudians that view that naturalistic anti-religious view has come up into way too much of the psychological and psychiatric establishment again even those that would not identify as orthodox freudians those naturalistic assumptions have i would say poisoned the conversation another problem of course is freud's tendency to reduce things to sex now bring these together that the religions tend to put limits on sexual expression therefore the religions are responsible for a lot of repression repression makes people crazy and unhappy and so another reason to dislike religion i would draw attention here brandon to freud's greatest disciple the one he had chosen as his crown prince his successor and that's carl jung and jung begins as a more or less orthodox freudian but then breaks with freud over sexuality jung thought it was way too simplistic to say all these psychological problems are caused by repressed sexuality but the second reason jung broke with freud it seems to me is about religion for one of a better term jung as we well know felt that this call it spiritual mythic archetypal religious dimension of life was enormously important in one's psychological development i would side very much with the jungian strain within psychology but i do fear along with this author that the freudian assumptions have found their way into much of it and it's going to make people sick i'll make one more connection who right now is one of the most influential cultural figures and an ardent disciple of carl jung and having a huge impact on young people's psychological health jordan peterson and peterson bringing i'd say this more jungian archetypal perspective that puts the focus on the search for meaning peterson was opening up the bible right in a jungian way but jung was often indebted to the church fathers as peterson is so i would argue that that's a more hopeful sign in maybe this bleak landscape of a freudian reductionism and a purely naturalistic hostility to religion that's going to make people sick and a and a proper recovery of the religious dimension is going to contribute mightily to people's psychological well-being i just realized that up to this point i've been referring to the author of the article as a woman but he's actually a man david rose marin so david for you i've been following your lead and call yourself david david's an associate professor at harvard medical school okay moving a little further down in david's article he says my own research has demonstrated that a belief in god is associated with significantly better treatment outcomes for acute psychiatric patients and other laboratories have shown a connection between religious belief and the thickness of the brain's cortex which may help protect against depression now of course he says belief in god is not a prescription you can't just tell people believe in god and you'll feel better but these compelling findings he says warrant further scientific exploration and patients in distress should certainly have the option to include spirituality in their treatment yeah no i'm absolutely right i would say as a as a priest you know priests used to be called soul doctors uh our task was kura animarum the care of souls and again keep aquinas in mind the soul is not some little squirrely thing buried in there somewhere but it's that which conditions the whole of one's life that one's relationship to god is the most fundamental reality well who does korah on imarum today who does the care of the soul we got a lot of people caring for the body i got specialized doctors for everything from my toes to my scalp right who cares for the psyche lots of people a lot of subdivisions of psychological care but kura animarum who does that care for souls and that's classically the task of priests of religious people go back into the ancient religious traditions of the shamanic role in the measure that that's been overlooked that's a real problem and that's a reason why there's a crisis of meaning a crisis of meaning will make people sick it'll make people sick eventually at all levels of their being so no no i don't i'm not surprised at all by that finding and i would encourage um people to recover that ancient art i tell my students at the seminary that what we call works of theology and philosophy they would have seen in in medieval times let's say and in the ancient church as soul doctoring manuals in a way to know clearly who god is to relate properly to god to live the moral life and the life of prayer properly all of that was caring for sin sick souls right there was something practical we'd say probably psychological about it would make people happier and healthier that's still true even you know our word salvation we think is just a purely religious idea but it's related to solus in latin which means health jesus is called the soter in in greek that's rendered as salvatore in latin which is rendered savior in english well it's the same idea the soter is the healer he's the healer in some ways we forgot that and maybe these findings and and these um struggles people having today will help us reawaken to our own tradition of spiritual healing all right as the article winds down to a close the author david puts forward two specific case studies you can see these dynamics at play the first one calls to mind the young people you described at the beginning of this conversation he says recently one of my patients an ostensibly secular 22 year old woman so young millennial gen z woman presented with an uptick in depression and anxiety she reported being feeling she reported feeling defeated and stated that she was losing hope of ever getting better my research though has taught me that many secular individuals believe in something and i therefore assess for spirituality with all patients irrespective of their religious affiliation or lack thereof and in that context this particular patient shared with me that she believed in god and also believed that she was brought to this earth for a specific purpose over the course of just three sessions focused on these ideas she came to a sense of increased hope that she could overcome her life challenges and her symptoms of depression started to abate what do you make of that case study makes perfect sense to me um soul conditions the psyche the psyche conditions the body remember louis you know your friend brandon c.s lewis talked about the inner inner locking rings right the body mind soul if you want and think of them as sort of like magnetized and if you lose the contact the soul loses contact with god it tends to demagnetize and so the psyche falls away then the psyche gets demagnetized the body falls away and the disintegration of the whole person follows um the key to integration is to get the soul properly ordered to god and then it becomes magnetized in a way that the body is drawn properly into or the mind is first and then the body what's happened to a lot of young people today and it's again i we've talked a lot about this but the hyper-secularized culture are universities that that just often poo-poo and make fun of religion and it's old-fashioned nonsense that's not a minor problem that's poison to the human spirit if if i'm coming of age thinking that that the greatest texts we have and the greatest uh spiritual practices we have are just a bunch of of medieval mumbo jumbo then i'm gonna miss what's been what is meant to feed the deepest part of me and that's going to have very deleterious effects throughout the entirety of my person um i remember this is brandon years ago when i was in cpe uh that this means clinical pastoral education when you're in the seminary you spend usually a summer about 12 weeks in a hospital learning how to deal with you know patients and and all that and there was i remember there was a doctor at the hospital where i was who you could tell he just hated religion and i would show up and he knew i was this chaplain in training you know and i'd come to the room and he'd be in there and he'd look at me like okay the witch doctor has arrived you know and then he let me do my little thing and i always i always imagined what i looked like in his mind and i had all the like a witch doctor outfit on and i was rattling as i was shaking rattles and all well that's precisely the the modern prejudice against religion that's caused a lot of problems because not witch doctor sole doctor and indeed that's different than the medical doctor that's different than the the psychologist but that's of of pivotal importance in the maintenance of solus of our overall health and i think the article that you're describing and i haven't read in detail yet is is pointing very powerfully in that direction and i think it's something our culture really needs to hear all right we'll wind this to a close with the last few sentences of the article david the author says that countless anecdotes like this one and he's got a couple more in the article himself says that countless anecdotes of this nature occurred during a recent year-long clinical trial that his own research team completed with funding from the john tippleton foundation he said more than 90 percent of patients responded experiencing some kind of benefit regardless of religious affiliation he says our findings suggest that patients benefited from this spirituality treatment irrespective of their diagnosis or their age apparently he says in the last line depressed millennials are just as likely to want and benefit from spiritual psychotherapy as geriatric patients as older patients sure because of augustine knew it our hearts are restless to the rest of thee because lord you've made us for yourself that's that basic christian anthropology and and i don't care how much post-modern you know mumbo jumbo you listen to that remains true and everybody knows it deep down that we're hungry for something that goes beyond this world if you shut that down now you're into charles taylor's buffered self you're in this little narrow awful space cut off from the transcendent of course you're gonna get sick so we're not the we're not witch doctors from a previous age we're soul doctors whose relevance is just as important today as it ever was um so yeah i mean millennials and what do they call the new one generation z the younger kids or the igen right the the uh gene twangy's uh term i i that's what that's why i tremble for these kids if if they look i i came of age in a culture that was still largely religious you know most people would have claimed religion most people many more than today anyway went to church on sunday now in this world that's denuded of religion that's a dangerous world to be moving around in well it's time now for one of our questions from our listeners we love getting your questions you can send them in to us at the website ask bishop baron.com there you can record your question on any device today we have one from felix he's in miami so down here in florida with me and he's asking how catholics interpret the bible here's felix's question hi bishop baron my name is felix in miami thank you for all your work my question is where does one go to get the catholic church's official interpretation on bible scripture the genre of each book in the bible and a list an explanation of its doctrines and dogma does the church offer a centralized guide where one can find this information if not what do you recommend thank you yeah thanks for that question and it relates to our show what brand a couple weeks ago about genesis um i would recommend first the vatican ii document called day verbum very short it means the word of god it's on the scripture and interpretation of scripture you could read it in one sitting easily but it lays out the principles i think very well the second one it's a document from 1993 from the pontifical biblical commission i believe ratzinger himself is the author of it interpretation of the bible in the church brandon what's it called again interpretation of the bible in the church take a look online for that international what's it called the biblical the pontifical biblical commission 1993 look for that text and it's it's more elaborated than dave urban but it would give you a very good idea of the catholic approach to the bible so i'd recommend those two things to you very warmly i think i told you this bishop that when i was becoming catholic i was asking for a similar thing felix is which is give me the book that has the line-by-line commentary of the bible from the official catholic church's perspective how does the catholic church read every single verse i want the one right interpretation but what i learned as you're hinting at is the church really doesn't do that the church offers principles and guidelines and it does have guard rails to say this or that interpretation of this or that versus wrong but it doesn't tend to say this is the one and only way to read each particular verse yeah that's fair and the church father is certainly aware of that you know multivalent quality and you're right too brandon that the creeds for example are they're very spare the creeds are very spare statements because they're not the the heart of it they're not the full elaboration of the faith they're like the guard rails you know so i believe in one god the father almighty so yeah if you're saying there are two or more gods you got it wrong and you say he's not the creator you got it wrong you think he's a being in the world you got it wrong so the creed lays out here's a guardrail don't go past that point um but yeah within those you've got a whole range of of interpretive possibilities felix we'll make sure we link to that document the interpretation of the bible and the church in the show notes and also again as a reminder pre-order your copy of this gorgeous new volume the word on fire bible volume 2 which includes acts the letters of the new testament and revelation so everything but the gospels which was in volume 1 but you can get your copy at wordonfire.org bible project again the book will be shipped out probably i think in a couple months here maybe a few months but you want to be one of the first people to get yours otherwise you risk waiting several several months to get it thanks so much can i have one please yeah go to the website bishopfire.org bible project you can order your own listen thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Id: L9pu57LWtZw

Length: 27min 51sec (1671 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021