The Mercy Girls
At Slate, Jennifer Miller investigates Mercy Multiplied, a Christian counseling organization founded by Nancy Alcorn and supported by a host of prominent evangelicals. The network’s facilities treat young women with mental illnesses, but in recent years a group of them have alleged that the organization mistreated them and mishandled their care, leaving them worse off than before they enrolled. Miller writes that “the booming field of strictly Christian counseling is almost entirely unregulated by the medical and psychological establishments, in part due to a lack of consensus among Christians about what ‘Christian counseling’ should look like. It is here that a program like Mercy can flourish, by harnessing Christian skepticism of the country’s secular mental health system while simultaneously taking advantage of that system’s language and regulatory holes.”