Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment

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

• 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