Anton Boisen and Mental Health

This evening, I came across a biography of Anton Boisen. Sometime in 1925, Anton Boisen was himself a patient in a hospital in Boston, U.S.A.  In his loneliest moments in the hospital, he needed someone to whom to address his needs. There was no one in the hospital to meet the needs of his "whole person."

Boisen realized that health is a "whole person" vitality. According to him, health is not attained by medicine alone but also demands the combined efforts of spiritual and psychological instruments. It is in the “wholistic” approach of healing the sick person that medical science, psychotherapy, religious faith, and other allied disciplines join forces and resources to form the “Healing Team."

In 1926/1971, Anton Boisen published an article revealing another need for involvement in people's emotional ills:

"We have therefore this truly remarkable situation -- a church which has always been interested in the care of the sick, confining her efforts to types of cases (physical) in which religion has least concern and least to contribute, while in those types in which it is impossible to tell where the domain of the medical worker leaves off and that of the religious worker begins (mental problems), there the church is doing nothing."