In the eighth installment of the Florida Courier’s series on Blacks and mental health, we learn that Gov. Rick Scott’s veto will make it tougher to provide mental health care to people in need.
BY JENISE GRIFFIN MORGAN
FLORIDA COURIER – This story originally appeared in the Florida Courier on April 18, 2014.
Dr. Reba Haley often stands in the pulpit of her Tampa area church and delivers a message that most Black pastors won’t touch: If you’re dealing with a mental health issue, seek professional help.
Haley is founder and CEO of The Hope Center for Living, a counseling center in Riverview. It’s next door to Covenant Family Church, the ministry she pastors with her husband.
An ordained minister and a psychologist, Haley is among a small but growing number of Black pastors who are trying to change the way mental illness is perceived by the African-American church.
Prayer alone
Last year, LifeWay Research released a survey showing that one-third of Americans and nearly half of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians believe prayer and Bible study alone can overcome serious mental illness.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) states that nearly 60 million Americans experience a mental health condition every year and that mental illness affects one in four adults and one in 10 children in the U.S. That one in four number is the same rate for African-Americans.
Despite those numbers, it’s still a taboo subject, especially in the Black church.
“What I have seen is the church has not addressed the mental health issue from a clinical aspect and has communicated that parishioners pray about it. So that is the message that is being conveyed to parishioners from the pulpit,’’ explained Haley.
Lack of knowledge
“Perhaps their lack of clinical knowledge or awareness on mental health issues or a lack of knowledge of resources to address mental health issues could be their reasons for not addressing the issue, because the Bible says, ‘My people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge.’”
She continued, “If I don’t have the knowledge, I can’t convey the knowledge. If I don’t really understand mental health and depression and bipolar and schizophrenia, then I really can’t convey it. I can’t give you something I don’t have.’’
Haley, who is planning a mental health in-training session in Tampa in June for all ministers and church leaders and recently wrote a book on the subject, estimates that 90 percent of pastors at predominantly Black churches don’t broach the subject of mental health with their members.
“The churches can do more training from the pulpit, more sermons on how to handle depression, how hope to cope with stress, how to resolve conflict, how to minimize anger, how to do breathing exercises for relaxation,’’ she told the Florida Courier.
‘It’s not the devil’
Haley believes in exercising all of God’s spiritual gifts in ministry. She does “speak in tongues,’’ practices “laying on of hands’’ and administers oil on the foreheads of her parishioners. But she says when it comes to mental illness, too many pastors want to solely focus on the spiritual.
If someone is hearing voices, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a demonic spirit, she noted. “The church’s perspective is if you hear voices, that’s the devil, so we’re going to cast the devil out of you and not address the mental health issue.
“What we hear in ministry is that behavior is directly tied to a demonic force so they (ministers) move into a spiritual mode of deliverance.
“It’s not the devil. This is people’s mental health and they have a chemical imbalance in their brain,” she offered.
Environmental stressors
Haley, who has a Ph.D. in Christian counseling from St. Thomas Christian College in Jacksonville, says she became interested in the mental health field because mental illness runs in her family. She offers free counseling to members of her congregation, but she refers someone to other mental health agencies or to a psychiatrist if she believes the person needs medication.
She also cites how important it is for churches to treat the entire person.
“We just say, ‘God will make a way.’ I know your lights are off, your husband’s abusive, but God will make a way. We have to address those environmental issues,’’ which she says can lead to depression. “If you’re unemployed, if you don’t have enough food, you’re uneducated, you don’t have a job, your environmental stressors can lead to depression.”
Lost control
Pastor Derrick Lamar Smith is all too familiar with depression and openly shares that he has a mental illness.
He related to the Florida Courier how he was arrested in 2009 on a child abuse charge and spent 13 days in the Leon County (Tallahassee-area) jail.
The pastor of Bright Hope Christian Church in Tallahassee admits he whipped his teenage son for stealing money from the church. The aftermath of that arrest and going through the legal system was for him “humiliating, embarrassing and shameful.’’
He calls that experience a breaking point that led him to therapy.
“My beating my son was not about my son; it was about an image I was trying to maintain and felt I was losing control.’’
Seeing a mental health counselor, he said, was “like having a conversation with a friend. It was just what I needed. Cathartic and therapeutic.’’
Sharing Hope
Smith is one of the presenters for NAMI Tallahassee’s Sharing Hope initiative.
“Sharing Hope: Understanding Mental Health,” a national NAMI program, is a one-hour, structured presentation tailored for African-American churches. The program provides an overview of mental illness, treatment, and recovery from the perspective of people of faith who have experienced these illnesses.
Since 2012, NAMI Tallahassee has been visiting area Black churches interested in learning more about mental health.
Felicia Thomas, a Tallahassee-based attorney and a coordinator of the Sharing Hope program there, told how a young veteran dealing with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) attended one of their presentations at a Tallahassee church.
“After the presentation, he said that’s exactly what he needed, that he was going through things that day,” she said.
The Sharing Hope team was able to provide resources and support for the man. It was also helpful to a family member who attended the session with him.
‘Get educated’
Doris Strong, another Sharing Hope coordinator and the mother of a 34-year-old son diagnosed with a mental illness, says the primary message they share with church folks is that “mental illnesses are real and treatable.”
Strong says it’s important for congregations to “get educated so you can be more of an advocate to your loved ones and friends.”
She also stated how important it is for pastors to become engaged. The most disappointing Sharing Hope event they’ve had was at one of Tallahassee’s most prominent Black churches.
“We had a very large church and the pastor didn’t even show up. We had one person show up” from the congregation. “If he had really advertised it, that church would have been packed,” she remarked.
In denial
Smith says many Black pastors still have not bought into the reality that it’s OK to get counseling.
“We should not make it taboo and embarrassing and shameful. People come to see me now more than ever,” he said, since he started talking about living with depression.
Smith, who studied Christian counseling at Baptist College of Florida, said he’s not too proud to know when he needs help.
“I go get the big guns. I get the folks that have much more training. I’m not afraid to say I don’t know. … I know therapists. I recommend therapists.’’
He adds that too many pastors are “uninformed and in denial’’ about mental illness.
“Many of them are in denial because they have that old mindset. ‘The Lord will fix it.
You just need to fast and pray.’ I do believe it. They go together, but I always say, ‘Fast and pray on the bus to see your counselor…. Pray and go get yourself some professional help. Pray on your way to see a therapist.’’’
Suffered in silence
The Rev. Susan Gregg-Schroeder, coordinator of Mental Health Ministries based in California, told the Florida Courier that she has been especially concerned about her colleagues in ministry with ethnic congregations, where there is fear that such a disclosure may bring shame to the family, and impair a person’s future in the ministry.
“The sad truth is that hundreds of our clergy have been forced to leave the ministry because of the stigma and ignorance associated with mental illnesses,” said Gregg-Schroeder, a White minister who said her depression began in 1991 during her third year of ministry at a large urban church.
She started Mental Health Ministries in 2001, an interactive web-based ministry, to provide educational resources to help erase the stigma of mental illness in faith communities.
“Despite my experience in pastoral counseling, I did not recognize or understand what was happening to me. Few people at church knew about my depression and hospitalization. For two years I suffered in silence, hiding my condition from the church community for fear of losing my job.
“The religious community has much work to do to address the shame, guilt and stigma associated with mental illness. Unfortunately very few seminaries incorporate adequate information about mental illness into their core curriculum.
“Studies show that a majority of individuals with a mental health issue go first to a spiritual leader for help. Yet our clergy are often the least effective in providing appropriate support and referral information,’’ she added.
Jenise Griffin Morgan, senior editor of the Florida Courier, is a 2013-14 fellow of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. She can be reached at Jmorgan@flcourier.com.