The Atheists Struggling to Find Therapists in the Bible Belt

[Heddi]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/secular-therapy-in-the-south/520914/

The Atheists Struggling to Find Therapists in the Bible Belt
The rise of faith-based counseling in America’s most Christian regions has brought the clash over religious liberties to the therapist’s couch.

.....
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, life in the town of Easley, South Carolina, was tense for Leigh Drexler. Pick-up trucks with airborne Confederate flags seemed more prevalent than ever before, and her grandparents—who had never voted in their lives—registered to cast their ballots for the Donald himself.

Drexler felt isolated. “My family has always directed their point of view at me, but it has been a million times worse than normal,” she told me last October. “Every time we’re in a conversation, it’s either about the election or religion.”

It’s a dynamic that led Drexler, who identifies as a democratic socialist and an atheist, to go online in search of a therapist—someone who would perhaps better understand her lack of faith. She scouted towns within a 20-mile radius, but only “faith-based” practitioners turned up. She resorted to distance counseling over the phone with a therapist a few states away. “I knew there would be Christian counselors here, but I didn’t think that was all I was going to find,” she said.
...
Last April, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed legislation that would allow psychologists and therapists to deny patients based on their own “sincerely held principles.” The controversial move prompted the American Counseling Association to cancel its annual conference in Nashville, on the basis that the law targeted the LGBTQ community. The gesture was political—something both therapists and Christian-counseling networks condemned—but it also exposed a growing conversation, or concern, about the presence of religion in the field of mental health.

...

And then there’s “Grief Beyond Belief,” a support network on Facebook for people who have lost a loved one and want to grieve faith-free. “If you’re grieving without a belief that you’re going to be reunified or that your loved one is somewhere better, your needs are really different,” Rebecca Hensler, the group’s founder, says.

Hensler started the page shortly after the death of her infant son in 2009, and was surprised by the response. She saw stories that read like her own: parents who weren’t comforted by the idea that their baby was now “in Heaven,” or that death might be anything other than death itself. Today, the page has nearly 20,000 likes. Users post daily about what it’s like to mourn alongside pressures from family, friends, or their counselors. “I couldn’t count the number of posts from people who share stories about being in therapy, and then the therapist offers to pray with them or talks about Heaven,” Hensler says. “It’s so profoundly harmful to that therapeutic relationship.”

...
It was for Tiffany Russell. Her decision to seek therapy wasn’t easy; she operated a trucking company in Oklahoma City and only had so many free hours. She had to find a practitioner who accepted her insurance—and had to confront years of emotional abuse for the first time.

“It took me awhile to get the nerve up, but my first couple of sessions were uneventful,” Russell says. “There wasn’t anything to suggest there would be an issue.” The therapist had a Ph.D. in counseling, and never identified her practice as faith-based, so she continued the sessions.

“I was comfortable seeing her, and we were getting more into the issues that I was having with my father. She stopped me at one point and goes, ‘Well, you know, your real Father loves you,’” Russell says.

She never went back.

[Panich52]

1. One paragraph is story of its own:

Last April, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed legislation that would allow psychologists and therapists to deny patients based on their own “sincerely held principles.” The controversial move prompted the American Counseling Association to cancel its annual conference in Nashville, on the basis that the law targeted the LGBTQ community. The gesture was political—something both therapists and Christian-counseling networks condemned—but it also exposed a growing conversation, or concern, about the presence of religion in the field of mental health.

Besides the boycott by ACA on grounds of LGBT discrimination, there's the obvious and blatant breech of separation (encouraged by decisions like Hobby Lobby). Legislative travesties like this are examples to cite when the rabid cry of "war on Christianity" is bellowed.


Found story from last year on NPR:
Tennessee Enacts Law Letting Therapists Refuse Patients On Religious Grounds: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/27/475939114/tennessee-enacts-law-letting-therapists-refuse-patients-on-religious-grounds

[procon]

2. Are these actually educated, licensed therapists?

Isn't the goal to treat the patient, not feed in the counselors own personal beliefs in the supernatural? What kind of legitimate mental health treatment involves religious proselytizing that promotes the therapist's views rather than the standards of care accepted and practiced by the profession?

[Panich52]

5. That's the problem w/ religionists: they're so convinced

theirs is the only way of thinking so that blatant discrimination is the inevitable result.

Exactly why we have to keep fighting so-called christians inroads into politics, education, elected office and judiciary.

[Lordquinton]

7. All religions feed this mentality

They think their interpretation is the correct one, and the other guys have it wrong, both sides agree on that point, and both are supported in the holy texts.

We have to fight all religious inroads into politics, not just the ones we don't like.

[Panich52]

8. Most definitely

[luvMIdog]

3. ugh....

[redstatebluegirl]

4. We are Unitarian Universalists and moved to the bible belt (Oklahoma) over 15 years

ago. 5 years in we needed a therapist, believe it or not many of them asked our religion before they would treat me for depression after my Dad died. We finally asked someone at our church for a referral and found one. It is really hard if you aren't a good little Baptist down here.

[beam me up scottie]

6. It's not just therapists - the first family doctor I saw here went on a rant about gay people.

When he found out I moved here from Vermont he assumed I did so to get away from all of the gay people 'who were moving there to get married'. He went on to repeat some of the things his preacher had said in church about 'teh gays' and I lost it.

Why would I trust an arrogant bigot with my health?

[Act_of_Reparation]

9. Look, to be fair...

...if we're going to consider the shit Mother Teresa pulled legit end of life care, then surely talking to some unaccredited dipshit about gawd can be considered legit psychotherapy.