God,heresy trials and psychiatry

It is 50 years since the first edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (ANZJP) and therefore fitting to pause and reflect on what has been published during this time. A starting point for this paper was reviewing how much God has featured in publications over this past five decades during which Australia and New Zealand have become increasingly secular.

An electronic MEDLINE search reveals three articles featuring God in the ANZJP over the past 50 years.

In the first of these God articles (Carstairs, 1974), pioneering social psychiatrist Morris Carstairs outlined the development of an independent youth culture in the West galvanized by the appearance of the Beatles. Carstairs documents a new global movement of young people rejecting what they viewed as the materialistic and morally bankrupt values of the Western establishment. He described young Westerners travelling to India seeking truth and meaning in a new spiritual path and God devotion (bhakti) sometimes with dramatic consequences. For example, a young traveller began to believe he had supernatural powers as villagers sought him out for spiritual guidance about such things as the weather, sickness and appropriate days for getting married.

Most psychiatrists have encountered intriguing people who have developed God delusions – prophets or Messiahs of a new age, or even Jesus Christ, Mother Mary or God Himself.

In the next God article, psychiatrist Verity Humberstone focused on schizophrenia (Humberstone, 2002). But rather than God delusions, Humberstone explored the experiences of people with schizophrenia living in supported accommodation. She found that belief in God was a key strategy people use to cope with a schizophrenic life; God being for some the only thing more powerful in their lives than their psychosis.

This theme of Higher Power emanating from the human capacity for imagination was a focus in the third God article published 10 years ago (Sellman et al., 2007). The importance of strengthening executive functions (the brain’s ‘higher power’) was proposed as a final common pathway for the diverse ways by which God or a Higher Power is instrumental in people’s recovery from addiction. These ways include religious, ethnic, ‘entheogenic’ drug and cognitive-behavioural experiences and interventions.

A co-author of that third paper (Sellman et al., 2007), Sir Lloyd Geering ONZ, is one of Australasia’s pre-eminent thinkers and writers about God. Coincidently, 2017 is the 50th anniversary of a heresy trial in which he was the central protagonist. This trial rocked the Church and sparked considerable public debate in New Zealand. Geering was Principal of Knox Theological College Dunedin at the time, teaching and speaking publicly about key findings from modern theological scholarship: that Jesus didn’t physically rise from the dead; the Bible is not the inspired word of God; and humans do not have an immortal soul. Geering was opposing Christian fundamentalism, which saw him charged by the Presbyterian Church with ‘doctrinal error’ and ‘disturbing the peace in the church’. The case, heard in front of more than a thousand people, was eventually dismissed. Several years later, he left Knox College to become the first Professor of Religious Studies at a New Zealand university (Victoria), while remaining a Presbyterian minister through to the present day, now aged 99 and still writing and lecturing.

God for Geering is a symbol, perhaps humanity’s greatest symbol, which has undergone cultural evolution through three time periods – Ethnic (up to 500 BC), Post-ethnic (500 BC to 18th Century Enlightenment) and the present Humanistic period (Geering, 2001). Geering sees the advancement of the Kingdom of God in social developments such as the abolition of slavery, assertion of human rights for all, liberation of women from patriarchal dominance and the current struggle for justice for homosexual and transgender people.

The divine values behind these movements are the same values motivating the best in Psychiatry as it seeks to right human misery and dysfunction by assisting individuals and families improve their thinking, feeling and behaving. Psychiatrists are modern day priests whose work, guided by science, contributes to the advancement of the Kingdom of the new God. And the ANZJP is full of examples of this God beyond the three papers mentioned above.

This new God is not an all-powerful and all-knowing Creator God. This modern God is the expression of an ideal, a small flame of Heaven created by the good we do whenever we choose to do it (Benedikt, 2007). This new God is understood as a human creation, helping people imagine civilization progressing towards a fair, loving and peaceful paradise here on earth rather than a golden utopia existing in an eternal afterlife. German philosopher and anthropologist, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) described the process of an idealized psychological projection of God as follows: ‘The personality of God is the personality of man, freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature’.

What are the current ‘conditions and limitations of Nature’, the realities of human existence that Psychiatry is currently working within as it engages in doing God’s work?

It is beyond the limits and purposes of this paper to review the animalistic basis of our species and the social and environmental problems that have accelerated in the context of neoliberal fundamentalism in Australasia over the past 30 years. However, there are four obvious issues that are currently undermining Heaven on Earth, which serve at least as examples of the societal challenges that psychiatric practice is confronted by: family poverty sitting starkly alongside growing numbers of billionaires; fellow citizens slavishly engaged in consuming recreational products marketed by corporations more powerful than nation-states; disconnected often antisocial and violent individuals alienated from the mainstream and over-represented by indigenous people; and lonely older persons who feel they have no value or purpose in an increasingly technologically driven world. The 1403 articles on depression published in the ANZJP over the past 50 years have a social context.

The year 2017 commemorates another significant historic event; one which has shaped the development of the modern world. It is 500 years since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 when German monk Martin Luther mounted a public protest against the Roman Catholic Church’s corrupt sale of indulgences, a mechanism for obtaining God’s forgiveness of sins committed by those who had died and were in Purgatory. Like Geering, Luther faced a heresy trial, but unlike Geering’s the charges were upheld and Luther’s life became seriously at risk. Thus began a monumental split within Christianity, which ultimately produced conditions that gave rise to the Enlightenment and the modern secular Western world.

At this 50th anniversary of the ANZJP, it is timely to think about where Psychiatry is going, and perhaps how it could be more assertive as a public force for good. Can we draw inspiration from the past to further advance humanitarian ideals? Will we see a new movement of younger colleagues protesting against the excessive materialism and moral degradation in the system they are inheriting, comparable to the movement observed by Carstairs 40 years ago? And could we see our psychiatric leaders speaking out against present day scourges and destructive ideologies akin to the courageous religious stands undertaken by Geering and Luther?