When alone, the person cannot remain in any one place; this passion forces him to leave and wander around, seeking another place to live. Sometimes such a person becomes a wanderer and a vagabond.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

Acedia involves a vague and general lack of satisfaction. The person, from the moment that he is under the rule of this passion has no taste for anything. He finds everything pointless and insipid, and no longer cares about anything.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

A profound sadness is more harmful to us than all the attacks of the evil spirit.
—St. John Chrysostom

Apart from the fact that sadness, if allowed to fester…greatly disturbs the relations of the individual with his neighbors.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

Again, let us note that sadness may not be provoked by the frustration of a particular desire having to do with a quite specific object; it may be tied to a more general dissatisfaction, an overall sense of frustration with one’s entire life, revealing that a person’s deep-seated desires (the true significance of which are not always clearly known) have not been fulfilled. 

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

The Life of St Theodosius provides us with an example of this. Some monks had turned from the right path by the practice of an aberrant and badly understood form of asceticism and above all in these efforts had placed their confidence in themselves rather than God. As a result they were overcome with psychic difficulties through the activity of Satan. St Theodosius welcomed them into his monastery to care for them. St Theodore of Petra provides us with a similar case:

A number of men in the mountains and in the caves had not led the struggle for a Christian life according to Christ, and, for having practiced a rash form of asceticism with great zeal, were pierced through by the sword of pride. They had attributed their ascetic activities to their own strength and had forgotten that our Lord had said: Without me, you can do nothing (John 15:5). Because of this wasting of the flesh, or having in some way fallen under the judgment of God which surpasses understanding, they were delivered up to Satan, and because of their deranged minds they could no longer control their thoughts.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

We have previously devoted a lengthy study to the subject of spiritual maladies. As a result, we will limit ourselves in this work to merely recalling the analysis of the passions of acedia and sadness—their links with the various forms of depression are quite obvious and, in recent years, have attracted the attention of some psychiatrists who have shown themselves quite sensitive to the depth, richness and wisdom of Patristic analysis.

These last mentioned illnesses have an exemplary value. All the more so as symptoms of anxiety and depression afflict over two hundred million individuals, who most often receive only chemical treatment for their illness. Undoubtedly some of these are organic in origin and, as such, this therapy is justified. However, most of them, as is generally admitted, are suffering from what is currently called ‘mal de vivre’ (feeling lousy’). In other words they suffer from existential problems which standard psychiatry remains totally incapable of treating. It is obvious that these problems to a great extent relate to the spiritual sphere as envisioned by the Fathers whose nosology and therapeutic techniques would appear to be most pertinent, for despite the fact that both time and social context are different, they touch upon universal dimensions of human existence, upon difficulties that afflict everyone who desires to find a meaning for existence and to harmonize their interior life; individuals who wish to conform their activities to values whose disappearance, as many psychiatrists and psychologists admit, leads to the increase of mental problems, especially anxiety and depression.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet

Aggression, also found in the majority of neurotic states and in certain psychoses, can be connected with the passion of anger in the broader sense given to this term by the Fathers. Asthenia or lethargy, common to many mental diseases, corresponds rather exactly to one of the essential components of the passion of acedia. One can also perceive a direct connection between standard neurotic phobias, defined as ‘agonizing fears, with the passion of fear. The neurosis of anxiety can be easily classified within the framework of this same passion of fear and the passion of sadness. Psychotic depression has a connection on the one hand with acedia and on the other with despair, an extreme form of the passion of sadness.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet