He took the medication for about a year but found that he had to increase the dosage when the original doses failed to quell the panic attacks. Mike eventually went to an urgent-care clinic, where a doctor diagnosed him with anxiety disorder and prescribed Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug. ![]() ![]() “I thought, ‘I can’t function like this.’ Death would be preferable to going through more episodes like this.” “I thought that my life as I knew it was over,” he said. Feelings of fright, disconnection from reality and powerlessness would take over all at once. I wasn’t sleeping.”īouts of panic attacks followed day and night. “I was graduating from school, starting a business, was newly married, had a boatload of debt and was stepping up responsibilities at church,” he said. (Mike, 28, asked for his last name to not be used in this article because he works in a medical-related profession and does not want to lose his patients.) In the weary hours of dawn after pulling an all-nighter on a church project, he suddenly awoke from a nap on the floor of his office. Such conflict can place people whose minds feel unwell in a health quandary.Īre religious beliefs and mental-health treatments so oppositional that people have to choose one over the other? Or can people find a compromise?Īnd when religious beliefs oppose psychiatry or psychology, do religious institutions have the ability to address their congregations’ mental-health needs, especially severe illnesses?įor Mike K., the quest for answers began in early 2003. Some Christian churches, such as the Cornerstone Bible Church in Garden Grove, Calif., and the True Light Christian Church in Buena Park, Calif., teach that people are afflicted with problems of the soul, not illnesses of the mind. The Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a member, considers psychiatry a pseudo-science that promotes unproven mind-altering drugs.
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