A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
Psychiatry gives us also a new appreciation of the religious life and
needs of our race. Man's religion shows in his capacity to feel and
grasp his relations and responsibility toward the largest unit or force
he can conceive, and his capacity for faith and hope in a deeper and
more lasting interdependence of individual and race with the Ruler or
rules of the Universe. Whatever form it may take expresses his capacity
to feel himself in humility and faith, and yet with determination, a
more or less responsible part of the greatest unit he can grasp. The
form this takes is bound to vary individually. As physicians we learn to
respect the religious views of our fellow beings, whatever they may be;
because we are sure that we have the essentials in common; and with this
emphasis on what we have in common, we can help in attaining the
individually highest attainable truth without having to be destructive.
We all recognize relations that go beyond individual existence, lasting
and "more than biological" relations, and it is the realization of these
conceptions intellectually and emotionally true to our individual and
group nature that constitutes our various religions and faiths.
Emphasizing what we have in common, we become tolerant of the idea that
probably the points on which we differ are, after all, another's best
way of expressing truths which our own nature may picture differently
but would not want to miss in, or deny to, the other. One of the
evidences of the great progress of psychiatry is that we have learned to
be more eager to see what is sane and strong and constructively valuable
even in the strange notions of our patients, and less eager to call them
queer and foolish. A delusion may contain another person's attempt at
stating truth. The goal of psychiatry and of sound common sense is truth
free of distortion. Many a strange religious custom and fancy has been
brought nearer our understanding and appreciation since we have learned
to respect the essential truth and individual and group value of fancy
and feeling even in the myths and in the religious conceptions of all
races.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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