From old times, people have been concerned with a mysterious and astonishing health problem that produced worry and fear, compassion and acceptance, or coldness and rejection. This illness is a mental, psychic one and was spread in the course of time all around the world. Its main causes were explained differently from region to region, from culture to culture, from religion to religion, in function of the level of knowledge specific to each epoch. The Christian religion also tried to explain this difficult disease through the Christian concepts based on the teachings of The Old and New Testaments. However, there is not yet a final and unitary Christian explanation regarding the right roots of the mental illness. This non-uniformity of the explanations arises from the complexity of the problem, the madness-related phenomena being a dilemma even for the current scientific and theological knowledge. In this paper I have shortly reviewed the main aspects concerning the psychic illness as defined by the Fathers of the Church, its classification, and especially its causes from the theological standpoint. Regarding the last point of the analysis, in order to evaluate the perception of different social groups on the mental diseases and affected persons, a survey containing representative questions focusing on mental illness was carried out. The survey offered some unexpected results among the respondents selected from the theological, medical, exact sciences, but also from other domains.
