Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? Quotes

“Major depression also appears to have become unusually widespread in the late Renaissance. This disorder is diagnosed when a person shows a severely depressed mood, a loss of interest and motivation, and withdraws from usual activities. In Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb analyzes references to melancholy in diverse literary works, finding that while they are almost nonexistent in the early Renaissance, by the 1600s they are a principal theme in prose, drama, and biography. Babb concludes that the late Renaissance was characterized by “an epidemic of melancholy.” The poet John Donne, who offered sonnets to the “Holy Sadness of the Soul,” provided a vivid description of this malady, which he himself knew well: “God has seen fit to give us the dregs of misery, an extraordinary sadness, a predominant melancholy, a faintness of heart, a cheerlessness, a joylessness of spirit.”
― Ian Osborn, Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment

“I was also aware of three other historically important Christians whose apparently obsessive-compulsive symptoms had become a source of latter-day psychiatric speculation. They were Martin Luther, architect of Europe’s sixteenth-century Reformation and a figure of incomparable importance in the history of Western civilization; Ignatius of Loyola, Luther’s famous adversary, founder of the Catholic order known as the Jesuits and leader of the Counter-Reformation; and Alphonsus Liguori, a nineteenth-century Catholic saint who is renowned for his contributions to the field of moral theology.”
― Ian Osborn, Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment

“From a psychological perspective, no Christian construct in Luther’s time was as specifically therapeutic for obsessions and compulsions as that which he discovered. Only sola fide was able to completely relieve the agonizing sense of accountability that Luther felt for his salvation. It accomplished this by transferring responsibility to God.”
― Ian Osborn, Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment

“Finally, Luther, Bunyan, and Thérèse all developed mature religious philosophies that differed from those of their communities because (from a psychiatric standpoint) each needed desperately to find a cure for obsessions and compulsions and, in order to do so, needed to find an entirely new perspective from which to view obsessional fears.”
― Ian Osborn, Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment

“By emphasizing God’s mercy, more infinite than a parent’s for a child, she found salvation in her own weakness. “Sanctity,” Thérèse explains to her sister, is “a disposition of heart which is confident to the point of audacity in the goodness of our Father.”
― Ian Osborn, Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment