Christ On The Psych Ward

- Applicable not just to those with mental health issues, but for churches and the church at large

On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”

2023 College Theology Society Best Book Award 2023 Catholic Media Association Third Place Award, Theology – Morality, Ethics, Christology, Mariology, and Redemption 2023 Association of Catholic Publishers Second Place Award, Theology Dust in the Blood considers the harrowing realities of life with depression from a Christian theological perspective. In conversation with popular Christian theologies of depression that justify why this suffering exists and prescribe how people ought to relate to it, Jessica Coblentz offers another Christian approach to this condition: she reflects on depression as a wilderness experience. Weaving first-person narratives of depression, contemporary theologies of suffering, and ancient biblical tales of the wilderness, especially the story of Hagar, Coblentz argues for and contributes to an expansion of Christian ideas about what depression is, how God relates to it, and how Christians should understand and respond to depression in turn.

Drawing on New Testament studies and recent scholarship on the expansion of the Christian church, Gary B. Ferngren presents a comprehensive historical account of medicine and medical philanthropy in the first five centuries of the Christian era. Ferngren first describes how early Christians understood disease. He examines the relationship of early Christian medicine to the natural and supernatural modes of healing found in the Bible. Despite biblical accounts of demonic possession and miraculous healing, Ferngren argues that early Christians generally accepted naturalistic assumptions about disease and cared for the sick with medical knowledge gleaned from the Greeks and Romans. Ferngren also explores the origins of medical philanthropy in the early Christian church. Rather than viewing illness as punishment for sins, early Christians believed that the sick deserved both medical assistance and compassion. Even as they were being persecuted, Christians cared for the sick within and outside of their community. Their long experience in medical charity led to the creation of the first hospitals, a singular Christian contribution to health care. "A succinct, thoughtful, well-written, and carefully argued assessment of Christian involvement with medical matters in the first five centuries of the common era . . . It is to Ferngren's credit that he has opened questions and explored them so astutely. This fine work looks forward as well as backward; it invites fuller reflection of the many senses in which medicine and religion intersect and merits wide readership."—Journal of the American Medical Association "In this superb work of historical and conceptual scholarship, Ferngren unfolds for the reader a cultural milieu of healing practices during the early centuries of Christianity."—Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith "Readable and widely researched . . . an important book for mission studies and American Catholic movements, the book posits the question of what can take its place in today's challenging religious culture."—Missiology: An International Review Gary B. Ferngren is a professor of history at Oregon State University and a professor of the history of medicine at First Moscow State Medical University. He is the author of Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction and the editor of Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction.

It’s three a.m. in the side yard of a shack in the worst part of town. I’ve got a dirty-faced baby on my hip and there’s a pit bull standing on the septic tank in the next yard over barking his head off. My patient sits on the hood of her ex-husband’s low rider smoking a cigarette and dumpingher pills into a mud hole by the right front tire. Airbrushed across the hood of the car is a cross-eyed Jesus with open arms. She lays her hand on top of his as the still-hot engine ticks. Throughtears she pleads, “Help me Jesus, please.” The dog is silent. Sirens approach. “Just breathe,” I tell her. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” The baby fidgets, resting her head against me, staring up into my eyes. I raise one finger and she holds it tight. I fumble for the words again. “Just breathe.” Midnight Jesus shares fascinating, bizarre, and sometimes humorous true-life stories of everyday people looking for hope in their darkest hours. Poignant and unpretentious, Jamie paints beauty where at times it seems none exists—from skating rinks and bars, late-night highways and lonely apartments, broken churches and rundown trailer parks, jail cells, bridge rails, ERs, psych wards, and that place over the levee where God laughs and walks through the cool dark night.

In telling the story of her son's thirty-year struggle with schizophrenia, Ruether lays bare the inhumane treatment throughout history of people with mental illness. Despite countless reforms by "idealistic reformers" and an enlightened understanding that mental illness is a physical disease like any other, conditions for people who struggle with mental illness are little improved. Ruether asks why this is so and then goes on to imagine what we would do for people with mental illness "if we really cared."

A mini-book written to help people (and their friends and family) who have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. If you’ve just been diagnosed with a mental disorder, you may be feeling overwhelmed and have all kinds of questions. In this mini-book, Christine Chappell writes out of her own experience of diagnosis and offers readers a redemptive perspective from which to begin processing their nuanced problems. Cautioning against a “fix it” mentality, she shows how the Scriptures provide stabilizing truths about our personhood, purpose, and potential for making God-glorifying progress during the challenging post-diagnosis journey.

“The landmark book that argued that psychiatry consistently expands its definition of mental illness to impose its authority over moral and cultural conflict.” — New York Times The 50th anniversary edition of the most influential critique of psychiatry every written, with a new preface on the age of Prozac and Ritalin and the rise of designer drugs, plus two bonus essays. Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionized thinking about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. By diagnosing unwanted behavior as mental illness, psychiatrists, Szasz argues, absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions and instead blame their alleged illness. He also critiques Freudian psychology as a pseudoscience and warns against the dangerous overreach of psychiatry into all aspects of modern life.