Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Just Care: Ethical Anti-Racist Pastoral Care with Women with Mental Illness

What does it mean to engage in ethical, anti-racist pastoral care with women with mental illness, particularly if these women are residents of an inpatient psychiatric hospital? This book draws on interviews with eighteen chaplains in three psychiatric facilities to examine psychiatric chaplaincy with women in the context of a state psychiatric hospital. It combines the voices of the chaplains with the disciplines of Christian social ethics and feminist, womanist, and intercultural pastoral care to create Just Care, an approach to pastoral care that accounts for both personal and societal-systemic factors in its practice of ministry. Just Care proposes that pastoral care that addresses the entirety of the person necessitates a commitment to justice and an attention to cultural dynamics as foundational for ethical pastoral care. It argues that psychiatric pastoral care must honor the communal and individual nature of care-both the particularity of the caregiver and care seeker as well as intersections of culture, gender, race, and class. Review Leah R. Thomas's work brings the experimental and experiential together, yielding an insightful, new ethical approach to respond to racial and gender disparities in pastoral care. Her commitment to center chaplaincy work with and for women of color uncovers biases inherent to psychiatric diagnosis, care, and healing. Just Care is Christian Social Ethics at its best as it richly describes, attentively analyzes, and concretely transforms pastoral practices toward justice infused practices of care.--Kate Ott, Drew University Drawing on open-ended interviews and years of chaplaincy, this book addresses one of the toughest questions in the spiritual care of women--how to affect genuine healing of mental illness that accounts for a woman's faith and the realities of patriarchy and racism amid a highly medicalized diagnostically-oriented world. Leah Thomas's answers fill a serious gap in feminist and womanist research while also offering wonderfully concrete suggestions for transforming care in psychiatric institutions.--Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Vanderbilt University Thomas reveals exciting strategies for antiracist thinking and doing by pastoral care providers that departs from the more common individualistic mode that is indifferent to the pervasiveness of white supremacy. Just Care's distinctively liberationist approach to pastoral care for some of the most vulnerable within psychiatric institutions is conveyed with gripping, sometimes startling, narratives and detailed ethical analysis. With clarity and uncanny timeliness, Thomas broadens the horizon of urgency about the plight of state institutionalized women of color, awakening readers to the crucial role of chaplains and providing innovative suggestions for more just modes of intervention and support.--Traci C. West, Drew Theological School About the Author Leah Thomas is visiting professor of pastoral theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary.