The World Health Organization (WHO) defines “health” as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
A more explicit focus on spirituality, often considered outside the realm of modern medicine, could improve a person’s well-being beyond that offered by a strictly medical approach to wellness.
A recent report from the Nurses’ Health Study, which followed more than 74,000 participants for 16 years, found that women who attended weekly religious services had an approximately 30% lower mortality rate compared with those who had never attended religious services; and those who attended religious services more than once per week had an approximately 40% lower mortality rate compared with those who had never attended religious services.
Another report from the Nurses’ Health Study noted that attendance at religious services was associated with a reduction in depression risk and a 6-fold reduction in suicide risk.
“Clinicians can begin to address the need by acknowledging spiritual health as part of obtaining a routine social history. Asking questions such as ‘Do you have a faith or spirituality that is important to you?’ and ‘Do you have a religious or spiritual support system to help you in times of need?’ signals respect for such issues while eliciting critical information to inform future care.”
Of course, don’t expect a psychiatrist or psychologist to routinely address spiritual care. For more than a century, mankind has been the unwitting guinea pig of psychiatry’s deliberate “social engineering” experiment which included an assault on the essential religious and moral strongholds of society.
It was in the late 1800’s that psychiatrists first sought to replace religion with their “soulless science.” The theory that “man is an animal” with no soul, which is the basis of psychiatry, was originally taught at Leipzig University, Germany, in the late 1800’s and then further promoted by Pavlov, Freud and others. In the 1940’s psychiatrists deliberately targeted religious values, sanitizing criminal conduct and redefining sin and evil as “mental disorders.” And today, family values, morality and religion have been attacked and made to seem old-fashioned by an insidious psychiatric “authority.” Indeed, the DSM-5 lists “Religious or spiritual problem” as a mental disorder.
By reducing spirituality to psychological (brain) factors, psychiatry has nearly sabotaged religion as a civilizing, cultural force. The pedophile priest scandal of recent years is directly traceable to psychiatry’s subversion of religion and infiltration of the church.
Psychology and psychiatry are not scientific disciplines as they are unable to provide objective proof of the existence of anything they diagnose or treat. With the sanctity of religion discredited by psychology and psychiatry, many people today live spiritually deprived lives, burdened physically and mentally with unrelieved guilt, insecurity, and without hope for their future.
Churches of all denominations should work together to provide humane and workable social services, such as drug rehabilitation, assisting the elderly, literacy and education programs, and religious programs to the community. They should refuse to allow psychiatry and psychology’s atheistic lies to create conflict within and between religions.
More attention to spiritual matters could bring medicine closer to the World Health Organization’s longstanding definition of health.
Click here for more information about psychiatry’s subversion of religious belief and practice.