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  • What Can Athens Learn from Jerusalem? A Response to “Religious Coping in Schizophrenia Patients: Spiritual Support in Medical Care and Pastoral Counselling”
  • Thomas St. James O’Connor (bio) and Alida van Dijk (bio)

Athens was the place where Hippocrates worked as a physician and developed the famous Hippocratic oath that continues to challenge and inspire many medical doctors in their practice. Jerusalem is where Christianity began. Soon after the beginning, Christians moved into the Gentile Greco-Roman world, away from their Jewish roots in Jerusalem. Christianity adapted to the new environment of Athens, drawing especially on the Greek philosophers. However, down through the ages, there has been continual dialogue, challenges, and sometimes fights between Athens and Jerusalem, between science and religion.

The article by S. Mohr, C. Gillieron, P.-Y. Brandt, and P. Huguelet adds to that dialogue in this issue. These researchers from psychiatry and psychology have sought to discover if psychiatrists trained in religious issues can adequately address the religious needs of schizophrenic patients and facilitate better health care for these patients. The outcome of this study indicates that there is no difference between psychiatrists who address religious issues and those that don’t. However, we wonder about the outcome and whether science can learn from religion. First, we see the training of these psychiatrists through a ninety-minute session on religious issues as sorely inadequate. Ninety minutes is not enough. Religion and spirituality are vast topics, as the authors note. Religion in itself has produced countless volumes of thought. [End Page 209] Ninety minutes on religion would be like giving chaplains ninety minutes on psychiatric drugs and then seeing if the chaplains could prescribe the right medications for patients! Both writers of this response have extensive education and training in theology and chaplaincy involving master’s and doctoral degrees. We also have over one thousand hours of supervised clinical training in spiritual care through the Canadian Association for Spiritual Care. We consider ourselves beginners. Addressing a patient’s religious and spiritual concerns is a complicated process, especially when dealing with those whose religious ideation is mixed with psychiatric illness. We suggest that the reason that the study found no difference between the control group and intervention group is the inadequate training provided for the psychiatrists who addressed religion and spiritual concerns. We wonder what the outcome would have been if the experimental group had used chaplains trained in a professional association rather than psychiatrists trained in ninety minutes of religious issues.

Our second concern is about the relationship between science and theology that undergirds the study. Ian Barbour in his book Religion in an Age of Science1 notes four relationships between religion and science. One is conflict, where each seeks to prove the other wrong about truth claims. Here we see the fight between those who believe that the biblical account should be taken literally about creation and those who believe in evolution. A second relationship separates religion and science. This relationship is based on a belief that religion and science deal with different truths and that it is best to keep them separate. A third relationship is one of commonality on some subjects and difference on others. A fourth relationship is one of integration, where both science and religion are really one. In this article to which we are responding, the authors work from the last perspective, with the understanding that psychiatrists can do spiritual care.

Is this fourth relationship suitable for addressing the spiritual and religious needs of psychiatric patients? We think not. We applaud the fact that many in the medical world are discovering the value of religion and spirituality in healing and coping with psychiatric illnesses. These scientists have moved beyond conflict and separation and seek to work with religion. However, there is the underlying belief in many of the clinical trials around prayer, the reading of sacred texts, discussing religious and spiritual beliefs, using rituals, etc., that the elements of religion and spirituality are an intervention like prescribing medication. In this view, religion and spirituality are human-made and can be analyzed, dissected, and manipulated for the good of humans. Comprehensibility and controllability are key to this scientific approach. Yet at...

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