Blessed alienation: the Christian monastery as a caring and restorative environment

Being mentally ill is often associated with experiencing alienation from society because sensations are not easily shared with others. Modern health care leads us to pose many questions. Some sufferers search and find their way to monasteries as they did centuries ago. We interviewed six persons staying in a monastery to understand the meaning of health and care in a monastic environment in contemporary Sweden. We analyzed the transcripts by means of a hermeneutic approach and discovered that the helping effect of the monastery was based on its contradictory/paradoxical structure that corresponded to the lifeworld of a person suffering from mental illness. The monastery was a place where one could be different but equal, and simultaneously provided freedom within boundaries, calmness and intensity, privacy and relations, demands and confirmation. This facilitated experiences of health and wholeness, necessary to manage the challenges of recovery.