Dmitry Alexandrovich Avdeev

MENTAL ILLNESSES:

ORTHODOX VIEW

Psychiatry: Pages of History

It is known from the history of medicine that the formation of healing in Russia as a special social system of care for the sick is inextricably linked with the penetration of Christianity into the life and customs of people. From the moment of the baptism of Russia, healing was under the direct protection of the Orthodox Church.

Even the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir in his Ustav declared "lechts" (doctors) to be people of the Church, subject to the bishop. At the Stoglav Council of 1551, Ivan the Terrible demanded assistance in caring for the poor and sick, which included the "devoid of reason". By the decision of the Council of the Hundred Chapters, the monasteries took upon themselves the care of the mentally ill, in particular, those who had committed crimes. Monasteries had performed these functions before, but the decrees of the Hundred Chapters Council clarified and expanded their duties.

The process of separation of psychiatry from the Church began approximately at the end of the eighteenth century. Psychiatry preferred to become more "objective", and scientists and practitioners preferred to rely only on facts, data from clinical and laboratory observations. Eminent professors could not resist the temptation to find a rational answer to everything and dot the i's.

Here is what the famous Orthodox writer Sergei Nilus writes about this in his book "The Great in the Small": "Chance, a certain confluence of circumstances, a psychic reaction, nerves, the flabbiness of an unbridled barich, atavism and many other things that explain equally little, will lead the wise men of this age to explain the psychology of the present moment. But they will not even bother to explain it: it is not the truth that is dear to them, but their pseudo-scientific point of view. To refuse it means to admit one's incompetence, and which of them has the courage to do so? In the life of the aristocracy of thought, in which they have usurped the first place for themselves, they do not care about humanity, which is perishing in the errors they have created, if only their primacy, their guiding influence over the frivolous crowd, would be preserved.

They know how to explain the sudden illness of a healthy organism by a contagious principle that is outside the organism and penetrates it from without, but the microbe of spiritual contagion – discovered long ago and known to spiritual doctors, the great men of prayer of the Church, the only spiritual healers of the restless human soul – is not given to modern false healers to rediscover. Their spiritual eyes are closed by apostasy and unbelief, and "when they see they do not see, and when they hear they do not understand."

October 1917 and the communist doctrine, the cornerstone of which is atheism, brought dramatic consequences known to the world. What happened in medicine, in psychiatry? Man was reduced to carnal reality (brain, body fluids, nerve ganglia, internal organs, reflexes, and behavioral reactions). Personality also began to be considered from a physiologically oriented point of view. The spiritual understanding of every disease was finally overthrown. And in return came the biological one.