Pastoral counselors are representatives of the central images of life and its meaning affirmed by their religious communities.
In 1925, Dr. Richard Cabot, a physician and adjunct at Harvard Divinity School, published an article in the Survey Graphic suggesting that every candidate for the ministry receive clinical training for pastoral work similar to the clinical training offered to medical students.
Anton Boisen began a program of placing theological students in supervised contact with mental patients.
Also in the 1930s, the minister Norman Vincent Peale and the psychiatrist, Dr. Smiley Blanton, collaborated to form the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, now known as the Blanton-Peale Institute.
Today, hundreds of mental health centers with links to specific religious traditions may be found across North America.