Certificat Vasileios Thermos
The Paradox of Mental Health Care and Spirituality:
The Culture of Extreme Individualism as a Mediator
This article challenges the widely accepted idea of a positive correlation between spirituality and mental health, by highlighting the paradigm of contemporary American culture. As spirituality is increasingly embedded into American mental healthcare, yet mental disorders among American population become more prevalent than in other countries, I resort to the nature of the extremely individualistic culture which accompanies recent wild capitalism. What I try to show is that this culture may act as a mediator between spirituality and mental healthcare, in the sense of altering spirituality which eventually does not serve health and may become pathogenic.