Religious experience and psychopathology

Abstract

Psychiatry needs to deal with spirituality and religious subjects because these are ubiquitous concerns of the patients and frequent manifestations of the different mental diseases. In schizophrenia and other delusional disorders, the concerns center on the meaning of life, origin of the universe and natural and social setting. In the depressive states, the question is why regarding losses and death. In obsessive disorders, there are preoccupations about what is good and what is bad, in anorexia nervosa on the identity and body subjugation, in substance dependence on pleasure and selfdistraction and in stress reactions on the meaning of the disasters.

The study of demoniac diseases and of witchcraft throughout the centuries helps to understand the important contribution of medicine to the improvement of the fate of persons who suffer mental diseases, something that should be promoted for the recovery of the aspects of mental disease related with spirituality.