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Madness - American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Hardcover)
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Madness - American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability
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Madness is a sin. Those with emotional disabilities are shunned.
Mental illness is not the church's problem. All three claims are
wrong. In Madness, Heather H. Vacek traces the history of
Protestant reactions to mental illness in America. She reveals how
two distinct forces combined to thwart Christian care for the whole
person. The professionalization of medicine worked to restrict the
sphere of Christian authority to the private and spiritual realms,
consigning healing and care - both physical and mental - to
secular, medical specialists. Equally influential, a theological
legacy that linked illness with sin deepened the social stigma
surrounding people with a mental illness. The Protestant church,
reluctant to engage sufferers lest it, too, be tainted by
association, willingly abdicated care for people with a mental
illness to secular professionals. While inattention formed the
general rule, five historical exceptions to the pattern of benign
neglect exemplify Protestant efforts to claim a distinctly
Christian response. A close examination of the lives and work of
colonial clergyman Cotton Mather, Revolutionary era physician
Benjamin Rush, nineteenth-century activist Dorothea Dix, pastor and
patient Anton Boisen, and psychiatrist Karl Menninger maps both the
range and the progression of attentive Protestant care. Vacek
chronicles Protestant attempts to make theological sense of
sickness (Mather), to craft care as Christian vocation (Rush), to
advocate for the helpless (Dix), to reclaim religious authority
(Boisen), and to plead for people with a mental illness
(Menninger). Vacek's historical narrative forms the basis for her
theological reflection about contemporary Christian care of people
with a mental illness and Christian understanding of mental
illness. By demonstrating the gravity of what appeared - and failed
to appear - on clerical and congregational agendas, Vacek explores
how Christians should navigate the ever-shifting lines of cultural
authority as they care for those who suffer.
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