The emotional health of the clergy

Summary and conclusions The health we seek is creative growth through all the relationships of life. We need an elastic concept of health, with a capacity to accept limitations and to do our best with these limitations in creative efforts to keep growing.We need to be aware of the particular hazards in this vocation, which may endanger the emotional health of the clergyman. Seeing these more clearly we can better prepare to cope with them.We must know to whom we belong, and learn to be at home with those persons and groups who become our living, working, and reciprocal community of outgoing care and forgiving love.If we can see emotional health as a dynamic process of ever-growing outreach and integration, we will value the stresses of our life and work. The pains as well as the joys contribute to the challenge and fulfillment of persons who grow through creative encounter with other persons.Continuing education will be needed for this crucial vocation of ministering to others, as it is in every serving profession where the complexities of life are so baffling. Academic courses and library study, though needed, will not suffice to prepare for effective work with other persons in face-to-face relations. There will be constant need for supervised evaluation of what we are and seek to become to others in the critical moments of meeting, listening, and responding as person to person in the ultimate concerns of our life in community.He is also a member of the Academy.     

Decoupling the Relation Between Risk Factors for Conduct Problems and the Receipt of Intervention Services: Participation Across Multiple Components of a Prevention Program

This study examined whether the link between risk factors for conduct problems and low rates of participation in mental health treatment could be decoupled through the provision of integrated prevention services in multiple easily-accessible contexts. It included 445 families of first-grade children (55% minority), living in four diverse communities, and selected for early signs of conduct problems. Results indicated that, under the right circumstances, these children and families could be enticed to participate at high rates in school-based services, therapeutic groups, and home visits. Because different sets of risk factors were related to different profiles of participation across the components of the prevention program, findings highlight the need to offer services in multiple contexts to reach all children and families who might benefit from them. Ellen Pinderhughes's and Karen Bierman's colleagues in the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group are, in alphabetical order, John D. Coie, Duke University; Kenneth A. Dodge, Duke University; E. Michael Foster, University of North Carolina; Mark T. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University; John E. Lochman, University of Alabama; and Robert J. McMahon, University of Washington.