Deacon and psychiatrist Rareș Ionașcu: Children need unconditional love, clear boundaries and present parents

Deacon Dr Rareș Ionașcu is a psychiatrist and serves the Romanian Orthodox Church in the diaspora. He practises psychiatry in France, in the Angoulême area, and serves as a deacon at the Romanian Orthodox Parish of St Joseph and St John of San Francisco in Bordeaux. Actively engaged in dialogue between medical science and Christian theology, he is encountering an increasing number of people in his clinical practice struggling with anxiety, depression and various forms of addiction.

In the following interview, Deacon Rareș Ionașcu discusses the weakening of contemporary people’s inner structure, the pressure to succeed and the decisive role of the family in the development of identity. The interview was conducted as part of the #ForLife series.

Alexandra Nadane: In your clinical practice, you often see people who say they no longer know who they are. What is the major problem that disrupts a person’s inner structure and leads them towards anxiety, depression or addiction?

Deacon Rareș Ionașcu: As the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg shows in his book The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age [1], we live in a world in which…