Mental Health Is a Spiritual Crisis in Disguise
In recent years, the Church has watched with growing concern as anxiety, depression, and suicide rise at unprecedented rates—especially in societies that are materially prosperous, technologically advanced, and medically sophisticated. Never has humanity had more access to therapy, medication, and psychological expertise. Yet never has the interior life of so many been so fragile.
This paradox demands a deeper question:
Is the crisis of mental health also a crisis of the human soul?
The Christian tradition has always answered yes.
Psychological science has done immense good. It helps us name trauma, understand disorders, and treat genuine illness. The Church welcomes this knowledge. Yet the human person is more than a neurochemical machine. We are not simply brains reacting to stimuli. We are persons created in the image of God, ordered toward truth, goodness, and love.
When the deepest question—Why am I here?—is left unanswered, no amount of therapy can fully heal the heart.
Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist and survivor of Auschwitz, observed something startling in the camps: those who lost all sense of meaning were more likely to perish than those who were physically weaker but still had a reason to live. His famous insight—“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”—reveals a truth the Church has always known: the human heart cannot survive without meaning.
Frankl’s insight echoes the Christian understanding of the soul: we are made for something more than survival. We are made for communion, for purpose, for transcendence.
Islam speaks of fitrah, the original disposition of the human person toward God. When that inner orientation is violated, the soul becomes restless and fractured.
Buddhism teaches that suffering becomes unbearable when we cling to illusions of control, permanence, and self-created identity.
These traditions, in their own ways, affirm a truth Christianity holds at its center: suffering without meaning leads to despair, but suffering embraced within truth can lead to transformation.
St. Augustine’s words ring more true today than ever:
“Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Modern culture trains us to feed the body, the ego, and the appetite, but neglects the soul. When the soul is starved of God, it rebels through anxiety, despair, and emptiness. What we now call “mental health crises” are often symptoms of a deeper spiritual hunger.
Pope Benedict XVI warned repeatedly that the deepest illness of the modern world is not political or economic, but spiritual. He called it the “eclipse of God.” When God disappears from public and personal life, so do objective meaning, moral truth, and human dignity.
A world that forgets God does not become freer; it becomes more anxious. Without a transcendent horizon, suffering becomes intolerable, and life becomes fragile.
The Catholic faith offers a different vision: every human life is willed, loved, and called by God. Even in pain, even in darkness, our existence has eternal significance.
The Church does not reject therapy or medicine. But she insists they must be placed within a larger truth about the human person. We are not merely problems to be fixed; we are mysteries to be loved.
True mental healing begins when a person can say, even in suffering:
My life has meaning because I belong to God.
Until modern society recovers this truth, no technological or psychological advance will be enough to heal the profound sadness of our age.
Ihttps://jimcsalonoy.com/mage: Gemini
Bro. Jim C. Salonoy, STh.B.
Correspondent
