I do agree that mental illness, in and of itself, shouldn't disqualify one from service in the church.
I recall at my own "psych exam" when I offered for ordination, explaining my history of depression, and the examiner telling me that most clergy experience depression, so it can be a good thing to ordain people who already know how to recognise it in themselves and seek appropriate help!
I do, however, think that we need to be clear that uncontrolled or untreated mental illness can sometimes leave people in a place where they are a liability to the people they'd seek to serve. It's not wrong to avoid putting an unstable person in a position where their behaviour could harm others.
Absolutely. There are some mental illnesses which are even unfortunately so bad that hospitalization is required. Places like Broadmoor in the UK still exist for a reason. In Canada, there were two psychotic killers over a period of around five years, one of whom decapitated a fellow passenger on a Greyhound Bus (Greyhound Canada just went out of business due to the pandemic; they historically have been the same company as Greyhound in America, and are unrelated to Greyhound Australia, except all three are long distance motorcoach / intercity bus lines), and then more recently you had the notorious case of Luka Magnotta, who filmed himself engaging in barbaric acts of animal cruelty and then committing a violent homicide. Both individuals were found to be extremely mentally ill, but these are isolated cases.
Ultimately, I think we as clergy are kind of like airline pilots, in that we need mental health professionals to tell us as clergy whether or not we are fit to fly, and just as the physical health of airline pilots is monitored, I think we, as clergy, since we are tasked with providing pastoral care, which is not a mental health service, but which can help and also seriously harm people, and church abuse is a thing which in some scenarios, like this one, is due to mental illness.
Also, we as clergy set a powerful example. I loved how earlier in the decade, before their brotherhood became strained, HRH William and Harry set up Heads Together, to destigmatize mental health issues and encourage military veterans and the general public to open up about it and embrace proper health care of the mind as well as the body. If we as clergy were known to make an effort to take care of ourselves with routine checkups, like airline pilots, this would I think help to further reduce the stigma, and set a good example for our congregation.
There are also a great many mental health care professionals who are Christians of all denominations; there is one I quite like who is a board certified psychiatrist and also a priest at a Greek Orthodox monastery. So people who might worry about compromising their faith, because Carl Jung for example was a devout neo-Gnostic who funded the publication and translation of the Nag Hammadi library, needn’t worry, because among licensed mental health practitioners in the modern era, most of the psychiatrists and also general practitioners who treat in the US some mental health issues that do not require a specialist, for example, medicines for anxiety and depression are commonly prescribed by GPs, are following evidence based medicine, and so it doesn’t matter what their religion is; for psychotherapists and counselors, there are many many Christians who are licensed who are available, if someone feels the need. I don’t know if that is the case in Australia; I am of the view that ideally, with professional clinicians, it
should not matter, but there might be cases where it does, due either to unprofessional clinicians who might have a bias against religious people, or in other cases, due to a fear people might have of mental health treatment, particularly by people of different religions. And a lot of that I think is due to the famous eccentricity of Freud, Jung and other pioneers in the genre.
And you also had cults fraudulently get into mental health, for example, Scientology, which to this day, despite being detested by every living psychiatrist owing to the continued libel Scientology publishes about them, using their Hollywood celebrities to attack an entire medical speciality.
So moving back to the hypothetical case of someone who suffers from a mental illness that requires the use of medication in order for them to be stable, this would be a case analogous to some pilots who are required to use medical treatment, for example, wearing prescription eyeglasses to correct their vision to 20/20, and to undergo more frequent medical examinations. In this case, such a person, working for the church in any capacity, even as a church secretary or manager (because if a secretary with a severe mental illness left untreated could, perhaps, have an episode when a parishioner called who urgently needed help, for example, due to a relative who was terminally ill or who had fallen asleep in the Lord, and required appropriate assistance, and such an episode could cause severe harm to all parties involved), would need to stay active with treatment for their condition to the extent permitted by law, insofar as churches are still subject to some forms of anti-discrimination law with regards to hiring and there is the realm of medical privacy; the US has an extremely strict code of medical privacy laws called HIPAA, which are surprisingly robust and modern (usually one expects us to be backwards when it comes to things like privacy legislation, but actually, this is not always the case).
So, within the confines of what we are allowed to do, to avoid illegally discriminating against mentally ill people and violating, in the US, the Equal Opportunity Employment Act, which is enforced by a powerful federal agency, the EEOC, and this is extremely important along with other federal equal rights laws and agencies such as our housing equality laws, which have another agency that enforces them, and our civil rights legislation, which gave the constitution some teeth in terms of ending segregation, and at the same time also avoiding intruding on the privacy people are entitled to medically, we should not discriminate against mentally ill people who actively receive treatment, but where this treatment is required for them to function, we should, in the appropriate legal manner, and this is why churches need lawyers just like every other charitable organization, make sure they get it, for their health and everyone else’s.
In the US, I mentioned how the Episcopal Church, and I should add the Roman Catholic Church, through their charities, represent much of what is keeping various mental health programs operational and accessible, because since the 1970s, on the positive side, we have had de-institutionalization, and now we have a major push for de-stigmatization, but the negative side has been severe budgetary reductions and in some cases criminalization of certain classes of mentally ill people.
