While I found this book quite thorough despite its breadth and appreciated the author's efforts in summarizing and analyzing a wide variety of attitudes and treatments, on the whole I had more issues with the book than appreciations. To be clear, I think Weaver demonstrates his thesis fairly well, and I don't disagree with it, but this book is not quite as effective or as persuasive as it could be.

For my own part, I've had first- or second-hand interactions with just about all the perspectives Weaver addresses. I was raised in a Pentecostal/Charismatic church that practiced "intercession"/exorcism, broke "soul-ties," and the rest. Family friends were nouthetic counselors and Theophostic ministers (though we always considered their practices absurd). I had friends who were members of IFB churches and personally used Abeka and Bob Jones curriculum for much of my homeschooling career. I once skimmed a copy of Pigs in the Parlor, which gave me nightmares. As a teen I was dragged to Acquire the Fire and a conference using The Battlefield of the Mind as a key text. So really none of this stuff was really new to me, though I was fascinated to learn the origins of some concepts which had been taken for granted by my church, friends, or family.

And, as an emerging/ex-evangelical with social anxiety who's dealt with serious depressive episodes, I fully agree that many of the ideas presented by evangelicals as "health care" just lead to the patient feeling worse and more hopeless. Reading Happiness is a Choice only increased one of the worse depressive periods I've ever had in my life, and being in an "apostolic" church where ecstatic conformity was expected hardly helped. Thank God, quite literally, that's over.

But back to the point: Weaver does a good job of covering everything, but in doing so, he overfills the book and his thesis. Closely analyzing just one or two of the streams of thought would make for a good and interesting book: looking at every possible variety is just too much and doesn't allow for equal coverage or equal applicability of his arguments. And because of my familiarity with much of what he covers, I saw some glaring holes and overstatements at times that could likely have been avoided if the focus were narrower.

Additionally, I had some difficulty dealing with the constant MLA in-text citations: while as an English major I appreciate the method, it does not seem appropriate for what is essentially a social science topic. Footnotes would have been much less intrusive. I understand the format is likely due to the author's being an English professor rather than a psychologist or psychiatrist, and that's another drawback from my perspective. If the author had really wanted to make his arguments seem authoritative, he ought to have found a co-author in a psych-related field.

As the book stands, it seems as if the author had a bad experience (which he admits) with evangelical mental health care and so set out with a negative bias to bash the whole concept. The fact that he uses loaded and deprecating language towards most everything he relates doesn't help. The book would have been more compelling, actually, had he used less language telling the reader how to feel about an idea and more explaining it or how it compares with the mainstream version. Along with a narrower thesis and more authoritative weight, more measured language would go a long way to making this interesting and helpful idea into a better book.

The book was ok at best. It jumped around from topic to topic. The scope was too big by trying to cover all of Christian care into a book this size. As a Christian, I was very interested on his take because I agree in some regards. However, portions of the book included nothing more than a bias against Christianity in general. Also, too many Christian over-generalizations and biblical misquotes for my taste.

When I initially read in the preface that the author did not have any background in psychology or psychiatry it made me feel quite skeptical. A book examining mental health care, I assumed, would be a little our of reach for someone with no background in the field. I found, however, that the author did a very neat and thorough job in presenting the issues with evangelical mental health care. The writing was less tedious than I expected. I would recommend for reading all the way through or just for picking out topics you're inclined towards.

This was a very hard book to read. It promised so much, but delivered so little. On the plus side it attempts an exhaustive history of evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal changes in deliverance, healing and biblical counseling ministries for the entire 20th century. On the minus side this reads as very dry academic wanderings without a punchline. Other than the fact that the author has a serious chip on his shoulder, and severely distrusts all these minisitries I could not tell you what the point of this book is. Not recommended unless you are an academic from one of these traditions that needs to attempt to understand outside criticism. ( )

The Failure of Evangelical Health Care: Treatments that Harm Women, LBGT Persons and the Mentally Ill offered no surprises. The author is firmly convinced that religion provides no real help in treating people with mental illness, women, and LBGT individuals. He has placed a bull eye on the evangelical expression of religious belief as particularly deserving of his criticism.
John Weaver targets 3 types of “treatment” methods that have been or are still in use by evangelical Christians. He investigates various deliverance ministries that essentially equate mental illness with demonic possession. He takes offense that homosexuality and sexual abuse are dumped into the same category as mental illness by these practitioners. Secondly, Weaver discusses the “biblical counseling” models, including the nouthetic counseling of Jay Adams and the various versions that have evolved from that basic premise. His issue with this method is that biblical counseling treats mental illness as sin, rooted in behavior that one has the ability and responsibility to amend. The third broad area is the integrationist model that seeks to find commonalities between “God’s truth” and psychological truth. Weaver feels this is a fool’s errand because it still allows for unscientific (biblical) influence to be placed on par with empirical evidence.
Weaver scores well on some points. He is right to show that there have been excesses in some of these approaches. In trying to renounce “the hidden things of darkness,” evangelicals have gone too far in ascribing simplistic answers to difficult situations. Anorexia, for example, does not seem as simple as casting out a demon or confessing the sin of pride. Weaver speaks well of the Reformed branch of evangelicalism for being more open to intellectual honesty.
It is difficult to profit from Weaver’s conclusions given his unashamed and rampant bias. To his credit, he is open about it and makes no attempt to tone it down. He does not believe in spirits, or the supernatural, or anything remotely comparable. Evangelicalism’s fatal flaw, in his opinion, is its presuppositional loyalty to Scripture. Placing biblical truth on the level with science is a major disservice to the mentally ill. Because Christian people hold Scripture in such high regard, they are directed to treat people with gender differences as though there is something wrong with them. Weaver sees no reason for this. Gender issues are irrelevant.
Weaver feels that evangelicals are harmful to women because some have encouraged women to renounce their status as victims when they have been truly victimized. However, one who has been victimized finds no long term mental health by adopting a victim mentality. That certainly does not lessen the victimization. He also feels that evangelicals harm women by failing to encourage a woman’s reproductive rights, namely by failing to offer abortion as a reasonable choice. This all sounds like a politically-correctness driven agenda.
By his own admission, John Weaver was raised in a repressive evangelical home and had a bad experience with biblical counseling. Perhaps that explains the spleen venting in this book. ( )