Learning to Breathe: Is Your Religion Making You Sick? by Paul Axton

John Cheyne writes of epidemics of insanity among Christians desiring to be more holy. Obsession with sin, blasphemy, and fear that one had somehow committed the unpardonable sin has been a prime cause of insanity.1Pietistic melancholy, Methodist quests for perfection ending in mental breakdown, narratives of lives revolving in and out of asylums due to the disease of religion, seem to point to a literal aggravation of the human disease rather than healing. Scott Peck’s advice to many of his patients, though he was a Christian, was to shed their religion as it was making them sick.