Pastoral Care of Depression

This book provides the essential tools needed to transform negative God images in depressed clients!

Pastoral Care of Depression: Helping Clients Heal Their Relationship with God is designed to help clergy and mental health professionals understand how depression negatively affects the way people emotionally experience God and how, through therapy, this hurtful God image can be changed into a much more positive one focused on healing.

In the past, the God image (as well as the essential differentiation between God image and God concept) has been explained in dull, analytic terms that are difficult to understand. This book’s jargon-free language and engaging presentation make it an effective learning tool for students and professionals alike. Inside, you’ll find numerous psychological tests, complete with sample test forms, that identify the God image. These are clearly explained and include all the information needed to take, administer, and interpret them.

Pastoral Care of Depression teaches you to use psychodynamic and cognitive interventions to change a client’s God image, including foundational knowledge and clearly presented techniques to implement in the therapeutic relationship. This comprehensive treatment manual arms you with the most comprehensive array of cognitive interventions published to date, with tens of easy-to-follow techniques designed to tap directly into an individual’s subjective experience of God. Two appendixes give you a sample God Image Automatic Thought Record and Treatment Plan form.

Part I: Depression and the God Image examines:

• the nature and development of depression
• symptoms of depression specific to religious people
• defining a client’s image of God, how it developed, and what it reveals
• the relationship between self, depression, and God image, and how God images relate to Christian thought

Part II: Changing the God Image addresses:

• the importance of self-evaluation for therapists and counselors—and how to do it
• the nature of the therapeutic relationship
• counseling skills that strengthen the therapeutic relationship
• how to conduct an God Image Assessment Interview and how to work with what that interview reveals
• transference, countertransference, cyclical maladaptive patterns, and internalization in psychodynamic psychotherapy
• appropriate, effective psychodynamic interventions
• the essentials of cognitive therapy and how it can be utilized to positively affect the God image
• treatment planning and case conceptualization
• important ethical issues for consideration

With well-designed test and exercise forms and clear instructions on their use and interpretation, Pastoral Care of Depression provides the essential tools needed to work effectively with this important client group. Make it a part of your professional/teaching collection today!