Mental health concepts of evangelical Protestants

There has been an upsurge of interest in the problems encountered when attempting counseling and psychotherapy across cultural and ethnic barriers. Differences between therapist and client in nationality, race, and socioeconomic background have been widely discussed. Protestant evangelicals have not received much attention in this literature, yet this group has a world view not likely to be shared by the majority of mental health professionals. To fill this gap, 152 members of liberal and traditional (evangelical, fundamentalist) Protestant churches were investigated. Measures of religious orthodoxy and of modernity served as independent variables. Dependent variables were attitudes toward seeking mental health services, opinions about mental illness, and tendencies to view mental health problems as spiritual. The results indicate that evangelicals are prepared to use professional help, although they are concerned about the beliefs and values of the mental health practitioner and express fears that secular therapists might try to alter their beliefs and values: They prefer to go to religious advisers. They also appear to have certain characteristic ideas about mental illness that need to be addressed in any attempt to counsel such clients.