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Clergy in the UK continue to provide health and social care services. However, collaboration between mental health services and clergy may be problematic, particularly in the resolution of conflicting beliefs and therapeutic modalities. For example, belief in demonic possession and other supernatural causes of mental illness, which are contentious among secular medical practitioners, remain prevalent in many ethnoreligious communities. Thus, interpretations of illness by clergy within health systems may be crucial to appropriate intervention for people with mental illness. However, clergy conceptualizations of suffering also reveal something about the secularization within religious institutions through the despiritualization of particular phenomena. This paper on Christian clergy beliefs and attitudes to supernatural explanations, describes how the negotiation of such beliefs are complex and often equivocal among mainstream clergy but integral to the Pentecostal churches and evangelical clergy in the mainstream, institutional churches. These beliefs and their implications for collaboration with psychiatry are discussed in the context of a rapidly changing religious and cultural landscape.
Gerard Leavey (Wed,) studied this question.