Abstract
This paper reviews a series of 70 patients who were referred because of the author's known religious commitment. Although few specific conclusions can be drawn, the material presented suggests that the evangelical patient who requests referral to a psychiatrist of a similar religious orientation is most likely to be a depressed woman in her third decade and more likely to be referred by her physician than by her minister.
A history is presented of an eighteen-year-old girl admitted from a protestant Bible school in a hypomanic state. It is suggested that religion plays a normal integrative function in human life when personal qualities of commitment, capacity for relationship and self-giving are common.
The neurotic-defensive uses of religion are many: in this paper the subservience of religion to the mechanisms of denial and regression is noted. The history also illustrates the qualities of religious expression in manic patients — their religious experience is grandiose, self-centered and superficial, representing a form of regressive identification for the patient.