Ministries in Mental Illness (#3305, 2008 BOR)

Mental illness is a group of brain disorders that cause disturbances of thinking, feeling, and acting. Treatment should recognize the importance of a nonstressful environment, good nutrition, and an accepting community. Treatment should also recognize the importance of medical, psychiatric, emotional and spiritual care, psychotherapy or professional pastoral psychotherapy-- in regaining and maintaining health. Churches in every community are called to participate actively in expanding care for the mentally ill and their families and communities.

John Wesley's ministry was grounded in the redemptive ministry of Christ with its focus on healing that involved spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical aspects. His concern for the health of those to whom he ministered led him to create medical services at no cost to those who were poor and in deep need, refusing no one for any reason. He saw health as going beyond a simple biological well-being to wellness of the whole person. His witness of love to those in need of healing is our model for ministry to those who are suffering from mental illness.

All aspects of health - physical, mental, and spiritual - were of equal concern to Jesus Christ, whose healing touch reached out to mend broken bodies, minds, and spirits with one common purpose: the restoration of well-being and renewed communion with God and neighbor. But those whose illness brought social stigma and isolation, such as the man of Gadara, whose troubled spirit caused fearsome and self-destructive behavior, were embraced and healed with special compassion (Mark 5:1-34). When the man of Gadara said his name was "Legion; for we are many" (verse 9), his comment was suggestive of the countless individuals, in our time as well as his, whose mental dysfunction - whether genetically, environmentally, chemically, socially, or psychologically induced--causes fear, rejection, or shame, and to which we tend to respond with the same few measures no more adequate for our time than for his: stigmatization, isolation, incarceration, and restraint.

We confess that our Christian concepts of sin and forgiveness, at the root of our understanding of the human condition and of divine grace, are sometimes inappropriately applied in ways that heighten paranoia or clinical depression. Great care must be exercised in ministering to those whose brain disorders result in exaggerated self-negation, for while all persons stand in need of forgiveness and reconciliation, God's love cannot be communicated through the medium of forgiveness for uncommitted or delusional sins.

We reaffirm our confidence that God's unqualified love for all persons beckons us to reach out with fully accepting love to all, but particularly to those with disabling inability to relate to themselves or others due to mental illness.

Research published since 1987 has underscored the physical and genetic basis for the more serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, and other affective disorders.

Public discussion and education about mental illness are needed so that persons who suffer from brain disorders, and their families, can be free to ask for help. This includes freedom from the stigma attached to mental illness that derives from a false understanding that it is primarily an adjustment problem caused by psychologically dysfunctional families. Communities need to develop more adequate programs to meet the needs of their mentally ill members. This includes the need to implement state and local programs that monitor and prevent abuses of mentally ill persons, as well as those programs that are intended to replace long-term hospitalization with community-based services.

The process followed in recent years of deinstitutionalizing mental patients has corrected a longstanding problem of "warehousing" mentally ill persons. However, without adequate community-based mental-health programs to care for the dehospitalized, the streets, for too many, have become a substitute for a hospital ward. Consequently, often the responsibility, including the costs of mental-health care, have simply been transferred to individuals and families or to shelters for the homeless that are already overloaded and ill-equipped to provide more than the most basic care. Furthermore, the pressure to deinstitutionalize patients rapidly has caused some mental-health systems to rely unduly upon short-term chemical therapy to control patients rather than upon more complex programs that require longer-term hospitalization or other forms of treatments where research provides successful outcomes achieved. Such stopgap treatment leads to repeated short-term hospitalizations, with little or no long-term improvement in a person's ability to function.

The church, as the body of Christ, is called to the ministry of reconciliation, of healing, and of salvation, which means to be made whole. We call upon the church to affirm ministries related to mental illness that embrace the role of community, family, and the healing professions in healing the physical, social, environmental, and spiritual impediments to wholeness for those afflicted with brain disorders and for their families.

1. We call upon all local churches, districts, and annual conferences to support the following community and congressional programs:

   (a) adequate public funding to enable mental-health systems to provide appropriate therapy;

   (b) expanded counseling and crisis intervention services;

   (c) workshops and public awareness campaigns to combat stigmas;

   (d) housing and employment for deinstitutionalized persons;

   (e) improved training for judges, police, and other community officials in dealing with mentally ill persons;

   (f) community and congregational involvement with patients in psychiatric hospitals and other mental-health-care facilities;

   (g) community, pastoral, and congregational support for individuals and families caring for mentally ill family members;

   (h) more effective interaction among different systems involved in the care of mentally ill persons, including courts, police, employment, housing, welfare, religious, and family systems;

   (i) education of their members in a responsible and comprehensive manner about the nature of the problems of mental illness facing society today, and the public-policy advocacy needed to change policies and keep funding levels high;

   (j) active participation in helping their communities meet both preventive and therapeutic needs related to mental illness; and

   (k) the work of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), Washington, D.C., a self-help organization of mentally ill persons, their families, and friends, providing mutual support, education, and advocacy for those persons with severe mental illness and urging the churches to connect with NAMI's religious outreach network. We also commend to the churches Pathways to Promise: Interfaith Ministries and Prolonged Mental Illnesses, St. Louis, Missouri, as a necessary link in our ministry on this critical issue.

2. We call upon seminaries to provide:

   (a) technical training, including experience in mental-health units, as a regular part of the preparation for the ministry, in order to help congregations become more knowledgeable about and involved in mental-health needs of their communities.

3. We call upon the general agencies to:

   (a) advocate systemic reform of the health-care system to provide more adequately for persons and families confronting the catastrophic expense and pain of caring for mentally ill family members;

   (b) support universal access to health care, insisting that public and private funding mechanisms be developed to ensure the ~availability of services to all in need, including adequate coverage for mental-health services in all health programs;

   (c) advocate community mental-health systems, including public clinics, hospitals, and other tax-supported facilities, being especially sensitive to the mental-health needs of culturally or racially diverse groups in the population;

   (d) support adequate research by public and private institutions into the causes of mental illness, including, as high priority, further development of therapeutic applications of newly discovered information on the genetic causation for several types of severe brain disorders;

   (e) support adequate public funding to enable mental-health-care systems to provide appropriate therapy; and

   (f) build a United Methodist Church mental illness network at the General Board of Church and Society to coordinate mental-illness ministries in The United Methodist Church.

ADOPTED 1992

AMENDED AND READOPTED IN 2004

See Social Principles ¶162T.