Mental Health Care for Less

published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by admin

Concerned about the price of health care? You're not alone. The New York Times reports that:

According to a recent survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa, pronounced SAM-suh), the leading reason that people with mental health issues don’t seek treatment is cost. They fear the fees.

The same article goes on to direct people to free or low-cost sources of mental health care.

The advice is great for you and your congregants and family.

Do you know of other resources that could benefit those seeking care? Please share them in the comments section.

Yours in health,
Robin

Robin Swift, MPH
Health Programs Director
Clergy Health Initiative

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Blue Friday

published on Friday, November 20, 2009 by admin

Here is a link about an important if somber topic, and one that is sadly familiar to parish clergy.

Greg Warner of Religion News Service has written a good article on depression and suicide among pastors. (We spotted it just yesterday in the latest issue of Christian Century but it appeared in USA Today three weeks ago, as well as in many denominational outlets.) It discusses the suicide in September of Baptist pastor David Treadway in Hickory, NC. One of the experts quoted in the piece is Steven Scoggin of CareNet, a pastoral counselor based in Winston-Salem and a friend of the Clergy Health Initiative.

Flickr/camil tulcanI can’t add much – the article is worth reading, and the fact that it got picked up in some prominent publications will ease the stigma surrounding these issues. Your humble bloggers have given health talks several times now before groups of clergy, and when we mention depression, it's greeted with rueful, slightly self-conscious laughter. Yes, we're all despondent and half-crazy -- what else is new? Suicide is more shocking, of course, and rarely discussed openly, though I know the 2005 death of Raegan May, a member of the North Carolina Conference, still weighs on the minds of many who knew him.

Most of Warner’s points are ones we make in our presentations on our work:

  • The congregation expects that the pastor should be constantly available.
  • Pastors tend to be people-pleasers with high self-expectations. Confronted with the challenges of ministry, this perfectionistic thinking can lead to a cycle of frustration and isolation.
  • There are serious career risks when a pastor admits the need for mental health treatment.

What was most striking to me in Greg Warner's article was the notion that depression is hard for the church to deal with and hard for some pastors to admit even to themselves. A pastor's interior life should not include depressive moods or thoughts; as Steve Scoggin puts it, the experience of depression "violates their understanding of their faith." I hope that here on the blog and elsewhere, we can explore more fully the borderlands of faith and mental health. The two realms are at odds in some ways, and there is work to do to overcome the gap in understanding.

We included items on last year’s Clergy Health survey about depression. We have done the analysis, are going through the academic peer-review process, and will have more to say about the findings soon.

Shalom y’all,

John

John James, M.A.
Research Coordinator
Clergy Health Initiative

Photo Credit: Flickr/camil tulcan

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Whales

published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by admin

At least several times a year we read that whales have run aground on a beach somewhere and died. Though groundings have happened in many places around the world, there appears to be a correlation between this sad behavior and underwater sonar testing by some nation's navy. Because they have hearing that is far more sensitive than that of humans, whales may experience the sonar as fingernails on a blackboard and literally be driven mad. There is something intolerable in the environment which they cannot escape, so they beach themselves. The whales make it clear that something has gone terribly, terribly, wrong.

The stresses of pastoral ministry may not sound like fingernails on the blackboard, at least not at first. The pastor may assume she is able to keep adequate boundaries around her feelings at being unfairly criticized by some layfolk in her parish. She may be convinced her family is dealing well with the difficulties of parsonage living. She may rationalize the decay of intimacy in her marriage as a passing thing, hoping the relationship will heal itself. She may convince herself that a mounting sense of desperation is the result of inadequacies in her prayer life, something she can fix with more discipline and focus. But the noise increases and the environment becomes more and more unbearable. To mention the cacophony to someone in the denominational chain of command is politically risky, and next Sunday is approaching, with its expectations for fresh preaching, strong pastoral presence and excellent listening skills. She wants to scream.

Of course she does, and she needs a place where she has permission to do that. A place where she won't be judged, politically compromised or criticized. She needs to be with others who have heard the din and survived, because they are best equipped to listen to her. Where are those sets of ears? Those empathic souls? Those pastors to the pastor? For a pastor to be healthy in the Wesleyan sense, she must have that place of safety and of caring: peer group, trusted clergy friends, fellow workers in the Kingdom. They may just be the answer to the prayers she believes have recently gone unheard.

Peacefully,
Ed

Edgar Moore, M.Div., Ph.D.
Executive Director
Leadership Education at Duke Divinity

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