Christian Faith Communities are Often on the Front Lines of Mental Health Care

TMC’s Co-Director, Warren Kinghorn, MD, ThD, spoke with Vox author Tara Isabella Burton for her article examining churches’ role in helping people living with mental health issues.

“When I asked Warren Kinghorn, associate research professor of psychiatry and pastoral and moral theology at Duke Divinity School, about how well Christian communities were handling questions of mental illness overall, he said that the question was secondary to the fact that, often, those communities had no choice but to handle them. Clergy, he said, are “on the front lines” of mental illness response because of the importance of faith communities in religious people’s lives — whether or not they were equipped to do so. For this reason, he said, it was all the more vital that faith communities respond effectively to parishioners dealing with mental illness, getting them the help they need.”

Read the full article here.