Nine months after she lost her 18-year-old daughter in a 2003 boating accident, Denise Brookman knew she needed help. It had been just three years since her other child — a son — had died, also at age 18. Heartbroken and devastated, Denise needed help working through overwhelming grief.

She found it when a friend suggested she contact Brite Divinity’s Pastoral Care and Training Center.

“It’s by the grace of God that everything has come about,” Brookman said. “Brite Divinity School helped me a lot.”

She met three times with a young pastor from an area Church of Christ who was working on his graduate education at Brite.

“He had such an open heart about it. The level that [Brite counselors] are able to talk to you is different than a psychiatrist, a psychologist, your friends, your wonderful family. I think it’s very good to be able to talk to someone who is not on a level that’s just medical. Because it’s spiritual. And they help you deal with it in a way that really is spiritual.”

Since its founding in 1968, Brite’s Pastoral Care and Training Center has helped train more than 265 student counselors and ministered to about 150 clients a year, including individuals, couples and families. One of the nation’s few seminary-operated counseling centers — staffed entirely by graduate students — the center’s purpose is threefold: provide counseling to the community, on-site training for pastors, and conduct research in pastoral theology, counseling and care.

The center’s staff specializes in short-term care, with most counseling completed within 10 sessions, although longer-term care is provided for those who desire and can benefit from it. And unlike most secular mental health providers, the staff integrates therapeutic skills of psychotherapy with theology and spirituality.

“National surveys demonstrate that many persons who sense the need for mental health care prefer to receive care from a person who will respond to them from a faith-based perspective,” said Nancy J. Ramsay, Brite’s executive vice president and dean.

The extent of the spiritual focus is up to the counselor. “We’re still using a theological lens to understand their situation and to decide how we’re going to intervene or work with them, but we are not going to force people to engage their spirituality unless they want to,” said Duane Bidwell ’88 (MDiv ’97, PhD ’03), director of the Pastoral Care and Training Center.

The center addresses an array of problems, the most common being depression, followed by couple conflict, stress and work difficulties.

“People come with a wide variety of concerns, ranging from, ‘I need to make sense of my child’s illness and grieve my losses in order to be a more effective parent,’ to, ‘We have to find a way to stop fighting about this in front of the kids,’” Bidwell said.

The center does not treat people struggling with substance abuse, violent behavior, suicide or an impairment that wouldn’t allow them to benefit from psychotherapy. Nor does it treat children under 13 (except as part of family therapy).

The recipient of the 2003 Distinguished Program Leadership Award from the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, Brite’s center is one of the few such outlets in town that provides counseling on a sliding scale ($20-$70 per session), and it will waive the fee in some cases.

“As pastoral theologians we understand that God is already at work to make things better,” Bidwell said. “We help people identify that work to collaborate with God in ways that make change more successful and more rapid.”