Posted on 05/04/2024 1:28:58 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Black and Latino Christians often turn to their pastors for mental health care, even when those clergy have limited expertise in working with those who are mentally struggling, according to a new study by the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.
For the study, co-authored by [Daniel Bolger and] Pamela Prickett at the University of Amsterdam, the researchers held focus groups in 2015 and 2016 with 14 Black and Latino pastors from different Protestant denominations and conducted 20 interviews with church members across two congregations in Houston, Texas. Church members were between 24 and 65 years old. More than half had completed a Bachelor’s degree and 63% were women.
Black congregants prefer to bring their difficulties to clergy because of stigma surrounding mental health issues in the broader racial and ethnic community. Latinos, meanwhile, “relied on pastoral care due to norms in their individual congregation.” The report’s authors noted that Latinos ”often attribute mental health concerns to spiritual factors.”
Bolger also said Latino congregants did talk about mental health at church, but only in the past tense, “when someone has been healed, when someone has overcome mental illness.”
Regardless, the pastor was seen as having a special “pull” among both Black and Latino Christians “to best craft a plan of care for individuals facing mental health challenges,” according to the study.
Bolger said that pastors were open to partnering with health providers and having them talk to their congregants about mental health. They’re just lacking time and resources to be able to do so...
He recalled a Latino pastor acknowledging that “sometimes I pray for them and that really helps and they get better, but sometimes I pray and they don’t.”
This led the pastor to pursue a master’s in counseling...
(Excerpt) Read more at religionnews.com ...
It way different than white folk mental health..... SMDH!?
And from this, the article generalizes to the entire population.
Yes, some communities have more stigma about seeking out psychiatric care in the medical system.
It has nothing to do with race. It is their preparation before entering into ministry, and the more fundamental issue of whether or not they are actually called by Christ.
Well, that is true.
I agree! It’s not like the medical system is THAT much better equipped! Doctors of every stripe, but especially in mental healthcare, need to carefully consider whether they are truly “called.”
“those clergy have limited expertise in working with those who are mentally struggling”
so what does that have to do wi Black and Latino, they don’t help whites either...
even so, ministers are not trained psychologists or psychiatrists. There's a limit to what they can reasonably be expected to handle.
Nor should ministers be expected to give free mental health care.
They have other responsibilities besides just counseling.
The *study* is a joke, anyways.
That sample size proves nothing.
Whether it’s school shootings in an upper crust suburb, or chaos in the inner city - a lot of our societal problems need an all hands on deck approach. Lest we wait for the state to intervene.
I’m thinking that if a non-Christian wrote this article, they are not aware that God fixes things on His schedule, not ours, and that the prayers offered may be actually a good option. Today’s secularists expect to fix everything immediately with a pill.
This is no surprise. Anything you say could be considered racist. They probably didn’t complain about being able to counsel “Hispanic” people except for possibly a language barrier. Basically, the reasons are probably different for both groups.
If called, Christ will equip. the Bible is sufficient for all things for faith and practice, and was so 500 years before the first university opened its doors, and way before psychology was a thing.
That is true.
Drunk, mouthy and entitled.And we're paying for it.
Apparently it must also be radically different if you have mental health problems at a Catholic or Orthodox Christian church, since the article states that they only bothered to survey Black and Latino pastors from different PROTESTANT denominations.
Moral of the story... if you experience mental health problems and seek out a pastor for help, make SURE you're either a white protestant OR a black/Hispanic Catholic OR a black/Hispanic Orthodox Christian, I guess. OTHERWISE, your pastor will be "ill equipped" to deal with that.
Must be FINE if you experience mental health problems at say... a white Presbyterian church in Maine, an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Washington D.C., or an overwhelmingly Hispanic Catholic parish in the Texas panhandle...
Bizarre "study".
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