Mental health charity opens new centre for stressed-out City workers

WORK in the City of London offers high rewards but, as shown by some recent high-profile deaths, can carry a cost in terms of mental and emotional health.

Struggling in the darkness of despair, many will be familiar with the feeling of not having even a prayer to light the way out. 

In an attempt to address some of the needs of the City in particular, the Counselling Pastoral Trust (CPT), a mental health charity allied to the Church of England, next week launches a new site.

Appropriately, this is at St James’s Garlickythe in Skinners’ Lane, which for years was home to the Prayer Book Society. 

Dr Agnes Sullivan, a psychologist, set up CPT in 1993 to improve access to effective mental health treatments in the community. It is funded by grants and from fees paid by clients who can afford to pay for help.  

Schema therapy

In 2008, after training in the US with Dr Jeffrey Young, the architect of what is known as ‘Schema Therapy’, she also set up the Schema Therapy Institute at Fulham Palace in West London.

Young's model of psychotherapy aims to cure personality disorders and so-called ‘treatment failures’. It is especially useful in treating chronic depression, anxiety and relationship difficulties, and it is his techniques that are used to guide her work with and in churches. 

According to the Mental Health Foundation, about a quarter of the general population in the UK will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year. Mixed anxiety and depression are the most common mental disorders in Britain. There is no reason to think the statistics among church congregations are any different. 

Individuals are reluctant to seek help from statutory agencies for fear of being stigmatized. It is estimated that, despite the debilitating social, emotional and physical effects, less than 30 per cent of those experiencing moderate to even severe problems in their emotional and mental health seek treatment from their GPs, placing many families in a hazardous position. Churches are much more accessible than statutory agencies. However, it’s possible that those best placed to provide care in the community are missing golden opportunities to do so. The Church is good at the level of the spiritual, but the emotional has been neglected for too long. CPT is keen to work with church leaders and clergy to attempt to balance this out. 

CPT, at its base in the extraordinarily beautiful surroundings of Fulham Palace, once home to the Bishops of London, trains clergy and church leaders to look out for and help with mental illness. The Trust offers counselling in groups or individuals, and other services in the mental health arena. It also tends to be the place where stressed-out clergy end up when they have tried everything else. 

New centre launched

The CPT's new centre will be launched at a morning workshop at St James on October 15th. From then, stressed-out City workers some of whom are practising Christians who also hold positions in church leadership, will be able to attend weekly individual or group therapy sessions to help with difficulties such as feelings of depression, anxiety or confusion, concerns about relationships at home or work, excess drinking and other issues. They will turn up for an hour of therapy, once a week, for a year or longer, before hitting their desks in the morning. 

One example might be a Porsche-driving investment banker who also leads prayer groups and has a position in ministry at a prominent evangelical church, yet who suffers from a strange, angry compulsion to overtake or make obscene gestures at other road users who annoy him. Another might be a high-flying director of an insurance company who is also active in her local church but who drinks an entire bottle of wine each night, and feels in her heart, that life is meaningless. 

Such problems might not qualify for standard mental health medications such as those used for schizophrenia, but the condition can still destabilise a family life and cause immense suffering.

Dr Sullivan and her team are aiming to train as many as 400 clergy and lay leaders a year in how to intervene before a member of their congregation reaches crisis point - a point which can sadly sometimes result in a suicide attempt or other drastic action. Clergy often need help in understanding how it is possible to appear spiritually healthy but not emotionally healthy. 

The key is relationships

Mental illness is associated with the fear of mental illness and the fear of feelings can be worse than the feelings themselves, according to Dr Sullivan. The key is relationships, but her approach involves a micro rather than macro approach, paying close attention to the detail of an individual’s unmet emotional needs. She believes that, like the software on a computer, a mentally troubled mind can be re-mapped to make it healthy. 

‘Relationships are of paramount importance in ways we’ve not understood before,’ she says. ‘In a religious setting, people think about spirituality and tend to think less about the emotions, and what God thinks of the emotions. Research has shown that human beings who face the world alone experience the greatest problems.’ 

She continues: ‘God has given us an amazing design. The brain changes throughout life. Neural pathways can be changed by new experiences. Rewiring takes place.’

Interestingly, as a committed Christian herself, she says: ‘Research shows that when people come to see a counsellor, the counsellor’s faith is not as important as the level of skill of the counsellor.’

The importance in Schema Therapy, of ‘Limited Reparenting’ in which an individual’s core emotional needs are met within the safety of a therapy relationship has been shown to be profoundly curative. Once and for all, patterns that are the source of significant distress or impairment in social, work or other areas of functioning, can be alleviated.

Fundamental to the success of the CPT and Schema Therapy is faith in the fact that behaviours can be changed for good. The workshop next week will focus on what the Church can do to help heal relationships, with guidance on dealing with resentment and hopelessness, leading to forgiveness. This emotional healing then creates space for an uplifting of the spirit - the highest reward of all.