How Do Service-Users Experience Their Local Faith Community and Their Mental Health Staff Team? A UK Perspective (2010)

The local faith community and the mental health staff team are likely to hold different understandings of the mental health experiences and faith of the religious service-user. The complex set of relationships into which the service-user is thus placed was the focus of this small-scale in-depth investigation. Qualitative analysis was undertaken of interviews with eight participants, six women and two men, all self-defined Christians and all service-users within the UK National Health Service mental health services. The analysis generated four super-ordinate themes indicative of the tensions spoken about. The first two concerned the feeling of 'sanctuary', and that of 'imprisonment', evident from their experience of both settings. The latter two concerned mutual mistrust between both settings experienced by participants, leading them to develop their own individual 'journey' of understanding. The of integration between the views of hospital and church underscores the need for training for the two settings to facilitate such individual journeys deliberately, rather than by default. Hearing occasional unguarded and dismissive references to religiously committed people with long-term mental health problems, both at work and at worship (as a practitioner clinical psychologist, lecturer, and committed Christian) has been a feature of the four decades of my career. Whether their religious practice and belief are manifest on a psychiatric ward, or mental health difficulties are noticeable within their faith community, such people can elicit attributions of incompatibility with a dominant narrative, embedded in the off-hand remarks I have heard (and still do). Some have argued (e.g., Schumaker, 1995) all adherents of organized religion to be a mentally deluded group, but religion's relationship to mental health is generally expressed somewhat more even-handedly, such as: is growing evidence of a large body of religiously-based beliefs and practices in different groups, which may complement or conflict with those of orthodox medicine and psychiatry (Cinnirella & Lowenthal, 1999, p. 50?). There is increasing evidence of the complementarity to which Cinnirella and Lowenthal refer. For example, Corrigan, McCorkle, Schell, and Kidder's (2003) analysis of data from nearly 2,000 US people diagnosed with serious mental illness showed consistent trends - similar to those within the general population (see Hackney & Sanders (2003) for a meta-analytic overview) - of selfreported religiosity correlating significantly and positively with higher test scores on psychological well-being and life goal achievement, and lower scores on psychiatric symptoms. Selfreported spirituality was similarly associated. In the UK, the government's Faith Communities Unit advocates inter alia that local mental health agencies should form partnerships with diverse faith communities, providing a forum for (Faith Communities Unit, 2005, p. 19)· And such discussion is certainly needed, because the on-the -ground issues may be less simple than might be thought from the clearer relationships sometimes portrayed in the literature. Faith communities have ready access to potential mental health clients who are otherwise hardto-reach by public services, and their clergy may be viewed as having a 'frontline role'. However, the clergy themselves do not always welcome taking on a therapeutic role, in terms of their own finite resources, and of mental health training (Leavey & King, 2007). While onward refenal of such potential clients into professional mental health care is a useful alternative, even this is more complex than it appears, because it can bring to the surface in clergy an uneasy sense of lack of collegiality (Weaver, Flannelly, Flannelly, & Oppenheimer, 2003, p. 168) towards mental health professionals. There is certainly a suspicious attitude toward mental health professionals among some of the laity (Mitchell & Baker, 2000). …