Active Minds offers many resources for individuals with mental illnesses and allies. Suicide prevention website provides information about wealth and how to support someone who may be experiencing suicidal thoughts. American Psychological Association (APA) is a national organization for psychologists that are also dedicated to improving public access to information and services related to psychology. The government website for mental health provides a directory of government mental health programs as well as general information related to mental health. A national addiction recovery program aimed at building skills that help to combat addictive behaviors offering meetings in many communities as well as online. OK2TALK is an online support community for young adults living with mental illness. Community members are supported in sharing and learning from the stories of others in a stigma-free environment.

This chapter provides basic and fundamental knowledge that will be helpful in identifying if psychiatric symptoms are present and assisting when there may be concern about psychiatric stability. It discusses what one can expect from individuals who are being approached with concern about their current mental health status. The chapter facilitates connection to a treatment provider who can evaluate the signs and symptoms of distress. Paranoia can elicit denial if auditory hallucinations are present that threaten safety if any information is revealed. Negative symptoms and disorganization can also impair reality-based thinking through difficulty engaging with the environment. The chapter provides the idea of some important considerations and expectations after one have made the decision to approach someone about concern for psychotic symptoms. Empathy is critical to the practice of psychology and psychological intervention, but it is also very helpful to use in everyday life and conversation.

This chapter discusses how pastoral counselors are different from other counseling professions. Pastoral counseling exists in a substantial community of related disciplines and professions. The two theoretical bodies of knowledge that combined to create pastoral counseling were the disciplines of psychology and theology. A review of pastoral counseling’s professional heritage sets the stage for the discipline’s contemporary identity dilemma. The formative nature of pastoral counseling training shapes the pastoral counselor’s self and is the rudiment from which the distinctive interventions of pastoral counselors organically emerge. Among the elements of training and formation most salient to shaping pastoral counseling interventions are clinical integration, pastoral formation, and the development of a spiritual orientation. The unique training and formation of pastoral counselors lays the groundwork for the development of interventions. Pastoral counselors share distinctive interventions that are born out of particular ways of being and a particular set of goals and objectives.

This chapter presents common research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, including how the researcher influences what is being measured, challenges and opportunities in measuring religion and spirituality, and cultural implications of the measurement of religion and spirituality. When reading reports of research on the impact of religion and spirituality on psychological constructs, pastoral counselors must consider what the researcher intended to capture, as this may be different from the pastoral counselor’s personal definitions of religion or spirituality. Pastoral counseling falls in the broad category of the social sciences. There are two general categories of social science research: quantitative research and qualitative research. Research in religion and spirituality must consider the cultures of those who devise the research and the cultures of those who participate. Pastoral counseling research is complex because it crosses multiple disciplines and encompasses concepts that are difficult to define and conceptualize: religion and spirituality.

This chapter explores the diversity of professionals engaged in pastoral counseling, the characteristics of those professionals within the ever-expanding landscape of mental health care, and the settings in which pastoral counseling most often occurs. It describes the plurality present within the discipline, summarizes the discipline’s use of the adjective pastoral, and offers a broad, fluid understanding of pastoral counseling. Pastoral counselors at the center of practice in the 1950s to 1970s may have claimed to speak in a singular tongue and envisioned a monolithic tower representing the theory and practice of the discipline. Pastoral counseling is an approach to mental health care that draws on the wisdom of psychology and the behavioral sciences alongside spirituality/religion/theology. Pastoral counselors are bicultural because they have graduate training in both religious/spiritual/theological education and a mental health discipline. Religiously endorsed pastoral counselors are, like all pastoral counselors, bilingual and bicultural.

An indicator of the growth of research in the field of psychology and spirituality can be seen by examining the increase in the number of citations found over the past several decades in the PsycINFO database, which is the premier resource of the American Psychological Association (APA) that provides abstracts of peer-reviewed literature in the behavioral sciences and mental health. In addition to the field of psychology, data on the relevance of religion and spirituality is being generated by disciplines in the humanities and the physical and other social sciences to which spiritually oriented psychologists and other mental health therapists need to pay attention. One area that blends the psychological and the spiritual and offers an opportunity for collaboration between psychology and pastoral counseling is that of mindfulness-based therapies. The challenges for the world’s religions and spiritual traditions are the challenges for psychology and its allied professions, including pastoral counseling.

This chapter comes from an integrative/holistic approach to play therapy. Although the foundation is influenced by the work of Carl G. Jung, it is integrative because it focuses on practices from many other schools of psychotherapy as well. The chapter concentrates on directive approaches of using trays of sand and small figures as a therapeutic tool in the play therapy room. Jung’s psychology, also known as analytical or depth psychology, is not a tool, methodology, or even a group of techniques, but a way to gain insights that can influence psychic healing. The child’s psyche leads the process in Sandtray-Worldplay. Symbolic images become concrete as they bring powerful insights into consciousness. The builder and the witness travel together through four stages in Sandtray-Worldplay: building and observing, experiencing and reflecting, joint experiencing, and photographing. The sandtray process is led by the builder and facilitated by the witness/therapist.

This chapter examines the relationships between pastoral counseling and spiritual direction with an eye to how the related disciplines can work together to provide holistic care for clients facing the complex problems of modern life. It explores the common ancestor of spiritual direction and psychotherapy in the care for the soul in Western philosophical and religious traditions, tracing their separation in the past century. The chapter considers ideas from an interfaith and contextual perspective and raises questions for the future of pastoral counseling based on cultural differences and emerging social trends. Positive psychology has provided helpful distinctions that are useful in describing how counseling, pastoral counseling, and spiritual direction are both similar and different. Many counselors both pastoral and clinical mental health are interested in promoting cognitive, psychosocial, and faith development, and these concepts also inform spiritual direction; both relationships would cover ideas such as images of God.