VAST MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS
COVID-19 Mental Health Response
At our Spring Retreat, associates working in the mental health sector shared a grim picture of their host country’s needs. Mental health care is slowly improving, but stigma and politics still get in the way. Many people cannot access help, especially outside first tier cities and in rural areas. Furthermore, the country needs not just more counselors but psychiatrists. There are only 2 psychiatrists per 100,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion, compared with 13 per 100,000 in the US.
The impact of losses suffered in 2020 don’t just go away because it is now 2021: Loss of lives and livelihoods. Loss of more freedoms when the government issues quarantines for domestic travel, and lockdowns for residential compounds, districts and whole cities when a few cases are cited. Teachers and students are banned from returning to their home provinces for the Lunar New Year. Some students are campus bound, classes running from morning till night in order to occupy them.
Pressures for the young and old are unimaginable. During the pandemic, some families benefited from time together that they did not have before. But many more marriages ended in divorce. One associate, who is a clinical psychologist had to deal with the suicide of several boys within the span of a week. The families did not see it coming. These are families who could afford crisis intervention.
It is no joke that counselors and psychologists are themselves seeking counseling. Take GLS associates Gordon and Leah for example. Gordon heads the Mental Health Dept. of an international clinic. He and his team are overworked. While his department is bringing in top revenue, they’ve been given bigger and bigger revenue targets. Soon it felt like they were firing bricks for the Pharaoh’s pyramid without being given the raw materials for it. Emotionally and mentally exhausted, Gordon has been losing his cool at work. His wife is a school counselor and coordinator of services for two campuses. She is under the gun too because schools are eager to keep things under control and meet parents’ concerns and demands. Gordon and Leah then come home to their own children and family needs at the end of each day, and are trying to still do ministry.
At the retreat, Gordon and Leah were challenged to remember their vision when they first went overseas: to serve, train, and heal. For a while, they were overwhelmed in the face of giants in their own lives and in this promised land. But when the speaker recommissioned everyone for 2021, they were invited to receive the peace that Jesus gave when He sent His disciples out just as the Father had sent Him, breathing on them the Holy Spirit (Jn. 20:21-22). They would choose faith and not fear, press on and not retreat, believing not in what they can do, but what God would do supernaturally in and through them.
Pray For:
Gordon, Leah and the Christian counselors in country to be restored and revived in the Lord
Bilingual counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists to be raise up and sent out
The Church to be a place of comfort, counsel, healing and support for those who are hurting, and for mental health workshops for pastors and lay ministers
Spiritually and emotionally healthy Christian families to be a light and witness in a society drowning in all kinds of dysfunction despite its shiny exterior of strength on the global stage