Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment

A Guide for Pastoral Counselors

Take your rightful place on the holistic health care team, with the goal of restoring vitality of body, mind, and spirit to people suffering from emotional illness!

This book is designed to bring essential knowledge and skills to the religious professional who seeks to provide special ministry to the emotionally troubled. It provides a basic understanding of psychiatric illnesses, theory, and treatment modalities that is certain to enlarge the perspective of the pastoral worker.

In addition to an essential overview of psychiatry in general, Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors will help you to better serve people suffering from depression, anxiety disorders, chemical dependency, reality impairment, or personality disorders. The book's format is designed specifically to help pastors grasp the principles of intervention in each of these disorders. Each of its five concise clinical chapters follows a four-part format that covers the duties and responsibilities of the clergyman as part of the holistic health care team, consisting of:

• recognizing the disorder
• assessing its severity
• intervening in a crisis
• counseling in the recovery phase

In their experience, the authors have observed that severe emotional or psychiatric illnesses often involve spiritual sickness as well. Spiritual sickness is a complex concept that may take many forms depending on the type of emotional illness it accompanies. Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors shows you what spiritual symptoms to look for when assessing someone in your care. For example, did you know that:

• severe depressive illness could include the loss of faith, abandonment of hope, loss of a right relationship with God, or even self-hatred, guilt, despair, and self-annihilation
• a psychotic reaction marked by loss of contact with reality might involve abnormal self-importance, grandiosity, fear, or stubbornly mistaken perceptions of reality
• a problem with alcoholism might involve immoral behavior, irresponsible conduct, denial of the loss of control over liquor consumption, or abject guilt, shame, and self-hatred
• personality disorders may bring on profound disturbances in social relationships, self-centered anger, impulsiveness, dishonesty, impurity, or distrust of others
• people with anxiety disorders can lose their trust in God, develop obsessive fears and tensions, and become unable to turn things over to God's divine care

In Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors, you'll find the information you need to make effective judgments and assessments about the people seeking your help. The book provides you with fascinating case studies that highlight symptoms and illness patterns as well as treatment options and techniques for coordinating pastoral counseling with the mental health team. You'll learn to recognize the spiritual symptoms of disease-negative, inappropriate, of self-defeating attitudes or behaviors-and to deal specifically with these manifestations of illness through pastoral intervention and counseling.