Religion: The Mental Ministry

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As the divinity student entered the ward, a girl patient flung her arms around his neck and pinned him to the wall. "Bathe me, bathe me," she demanded. The future minister responded with a monumental understatement: "That's not what I'm here for." Then he bolted.

Another seminarian sat down confidently to interview a woman patient who had just been admitted. "Are you a Protestant?" he began. "None of your goddamn business," she shot back.

Such awkward moments are a commonplace each summer at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. St. Elizabeths, a Government hospital, is a summer laboratory for a new and growing part of modern ministerial training among the mentally ill.

The Wilderness of the Lost. Last week at St. Elizabeths, the Rev. Ernest Emile Bruder said goodbye to his tenth class of minister-trainees under the auspices of the nationwide Council for Clinical Training. Episcopalian Bruder was appointed to St. Elizabeths by the Washington Federation of Churches as what he considers the first real minister to the mentally ill in the U.S. During 3½ years as an Anglican parish minister in Canada. Pastor Bruder felt that he was failing some members of his flock through lack of understanding. Then he heard of the Council for Clinical Training, founded in 1925 by a Congregationalist minister named Anton T. Boisen, who had once been a mental patient himself. Anglican Bruder took one of the council's twelve-week courses, found the work with patients so absorbing that he went on to further study in hospitals and prisons.

Like ex-patient Boisen, he was shocked at the casual insensitivity of the clergy who bothered to visit mental patients at all; they would preach on such irrelevant subjects as foreign missions or potentially explosive texts, e.g., "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out." But there was more to it than simply giving the patients understanding, says Bruder. "I found in what Boisen called 'the wilderness of the lost' you discovered the needs of people at the ground level, naked both emotionally and physically. It was a whole new field."

Converging Fields. In 1945, a year after his appointment to St. Elizabeths, Bruder set up the Clinical Pastoral Training course. Trainees must have sound qualifications, both educational and emotional (some students have become neurotic on exposure to the mentally ill). If accepted —as were 150 this year throughout the U.S. out of some 225 applicants—they are charged $100 for the course and assigned to a hospital.

The 14 who last July assembled at St. Elizabeths (7,500 patients) included eight Episcopalians (the course is required by the denomination's nearby Virginia Theological Seminary), four Methodists, one Presbyterian and one Seventh-Day Adventist. For twelve weeks they were exposed to a full program: lectures by the hospital staff, diagnostic conferences of doctors, psychodrama sessions, at which patients are encouraged to act out their problems and aggressions (TIME, May 30). Each averaged ten hours a week with the patients themselves, chatting, playing games or discussing spiritual problems.