Are Church Incivility and Clergy Self-Criticism Associated with Depression in Active United Church Ministers? A Mental Health Update during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study examines 184 active United Church ministers from across Canada who volunteered to participate in an anonymous, online survey during the COVID-19 pandemic Fall of 2022. These clergy responded to survey items regarding depressive symptoms as well as their perceptions of church-based incivility and personal, destructive self-criticism. Would United Church of Canada (UCC) ministers have elevated depression risk prevalence compared to national norms as in other clergy depression studies? Would their depressive symptoms be predicted by church incivility and destructive self-criticism? Could such self-criticism be understood as a form of internalized incivility? To answer these questions, the study used a cross-sectional design, psychometric measures, and multiple regression analyses. Also, for the first time in a clergy depression study, measures of test response bias were employed and revealed UCC ministers as straightforward test responders. The majority of UCC ministers had a psychiatric history. Most were taking psychiatric medication but not those at high risk for depression. Nor did those at risk find professional counselling very helpful, and half of them rated EFAP counselling and Spiritual Direction as entirely ineffective. Statistical analyses confirmed the pattern of elevated depression risk prevalence found in other clergy depression studies using the same depression measure of the study. Indeed, UCC ministers produced a depression risk prevalence of 16%, the highest to date using the depression measure of this study, including three studies undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in a surprising twist, the same UCC ministers scored well below Canadian population rates of depression risk using the same depression measure of the study. Furthermore, church-based incivility was a strong predictor of depressive symptoms among clergy at high risk of depression, but not destructive self-criticism – another surprising finding. Implications for both pastoral clergy care and professional counselling treatments were discussed, along with a modest suggestion for UCC policy, limitations of the study, and recommendations for future research now underway. Overall, during a time of considerable pandemic strain on Canadian mental health, the UCC ministers of this study showed remarkable resilience but also areas of vulnerability. UCC clergy women defied all expectations by showing no greater depression risk than clergy men.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".