A PsyD Student Asks How Black Pastors Handle Worshipers’ Mental Health Concerns
Montaya Parham is pursuing her Doctorate of Psychology at Chatham University. (Photo courtesy of Montaya Parham)
Montaya Parham, MAP ’21, straddles two worlds.
A student at Chatham University pursuing her Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) in Counseling Psychology degree, she’s also an ordained elder at Shekinah House of Prayer Ministries in Kennedy Township.
“Being a Christian … it’s a huge part of my life, and it has been for some time, to the point that I feel God has called me to this field,” she said. “There’s so many people, specifically in my community, who are struggling in silence with mental illness.”
She sees her roles as a burgeoning psychologist and an elder (a church leader who works alongside the senior pastor) as ways she can serve people in her community and hopefully help their mental health.
Parham first came to Chatham to obtain her Master of Arts in Psychology degree. But she knew she wanted to be a psychologist since adolescence.
“It’s always been my passion,” she said. “Being from Pittsburgh, being African American, I’ve always realized the need for psychology in my community, or the need for mental health, and how there’s barriers to accessing mental healthcare.”
One of those barriers, Parham said, is mistrust of mental healthcare and the medical field in general by Black Americans that stems in part from the historic mistreatment of Black people by the medical establishment.
Parham pointed to examples like the infamous Tuskegee Institute syphilis study, where hundreds of infected Black men were observed by researchers to see the effects of the disease when untreated. The men in the study were deceived for decades; over a hundred of them died from syphilis or related complications as a result.
The revelation of this 40-year fraud in 1972 still impacts Black Americans’ views of the medical establishment. A 2022 study by the Pew Research Center found nearly three-quarters of Black Americans were familiar with the Tuskegee study. More than 60 percent of those respondents said they believed misconduct in medical research is just as likely today as in the past.
How those views impact Black Christians’ access to mental health is just part of what Parham is trying to learn. Now in her third year of her doctoral program, she received a grant for her dissertation from the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
“My main research question is wondering how African American pastors handle mental health issues when they arise in their churches,” she said. “Are they referring out to mental health providers, or are they trying to deal with it themselves?”
Her interests lie in how pastors’ personal perspectives influence their decision-making. She’s looking at measures such as race-related stress, medical mistrust, and mental health literacy.
“My goal is to see what is influencing the pastors’ decisions to refer their congregants out for mental healthcare,” she continued. “If they’re not referring people to mental health resources, what are their reasons behind that?”
The research has only gotten started. She’s going to send surveys to church leaders around the country.
“I’m looking to see, what are pastors actually doing? What are their actual behaviors?” she said. “There are studies that measure pastors’ perspectives or the likelihood of them doing something, but I did not find anything that measures their behaviors.”
Whatever the results, Parham said she wanted people to recognize the Black Christian population to which she has such a strong connection, and to show the barriers that exist between them and access to mental healthcare.
“It just makes me very grateful that my passion is coming before many different people who may not have even known this was an issue or that this population was facing these barriers,” she said.
Chatham University offers many opportunities to study psychology, including a Bachelor of Psychology degree and the graduate-level Master of Arts in Psychology (MAP), Master of Science in Counseling Psychology (MSCP), and Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) in Counseling Psychology degrees.