Social prescribing for whole person care

Responding to an anxiety epidemic, there’s a growth in social prescribing with a spiritual wellbeing element. Esther Platt explores how it's working out locally.

Esther Platt

Esther works as a Senior Consultant for the Good Faith Partnership. She sits in the secretariat for the ChurchWorks Commission.

Two people sit at a table with their hands resting on top of it. One speaks to the other

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Since 2001, Mental Health Awareness Week has been marked once a year in May. This year, the theme was anxiety - an increasingly relevant topic in a country that has endured three years of world-changing crises and the soaring cost of living. Research from the Mental Health Foundation has found that 1 in 10 UK adults feel hopeless about financial circumstances and more than one-third feel anxious.

For centuries, it has been recognised that spiritual well-being is closely tied to mental well-being. By spiritual wellbeing, I don’t mean organised religion. I mean our sense of relationship to a higher-power or reality beyond our own, and our sense of purpose and meaning in life, as Craig Ellison outlines it as in his paper Spiritual Well-Being: Conceptualization and Measurement.

In Man’s Search for Meaning holocaust survivor Victor Frankl compellingly makes the case that in a world of suffering, our survival depends on our sense of purpose, meaning and hope. Frankl coined the term ‘the self-transcendence of human existence’ by which he explained that human beings look for meaning beyond themselves, either in a cause, a person to love, or a higher power.

With an increased understanding of the holistic nature of wellbeing, and the value of spirituality, a new way of looking at health is emerging.

While modern psychologists are still building a clinical-grade evidence base on the value of spirituality, there is clear agreement that spiritual wellbeing is crucial for a good quality of life, especially for those who are facing adverse life events, as you can read on the US National Library of Medicine web site. Traditionally, health provision in the UK has focused exclusively on the physical, and more recently the mental. However, with an increased understanding of the holistic nature of wellbeing, and the value of spirituality, a new way of looking at health is emerging.

Social prescribing is one way in which this is being done, and across the country.

In social prescribing, local agencies such as charities, social care and health services refer people to a social prescribing link worker. Social prescribing link workers give people time, focusing on ‘what matters to me?’ to coproduce a simple personalised care and support plan. This involves ‘prescribing’ individuals to local community groups such as walking clubs, art classes, gardening groups and many other activities.

Churches are playing a crucial role making social prescribing happen. St Mary’s Church in Andover, offer a wellbeing course to members of the community who have been directed to them through the local GP surgery.

Members of Revival Fires Church in Dudley have been trained to offer Listening and Guidance support to those who are referred by a GP.

Beyond social prescribing, St John’s Hoxton in London offer the Sanctuary Mental Health course to their community which gives people an opportunity to share their experiences and find solidarity in their struggles.

Church provides a space where the breadth of our wellbeing, our desire for purpose, community and hope can be supported in a way that the NHS does not have capacity or experience to deliver. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, writes

"The issue of mental health is one that requires a holistic approach on an individual basis, incorporating as appropriate psychiatric, medical and religious support’.

Olivia Amartey, Executive Director for Elim, an international movement of Pentecostal churches adds,

‘I am convinced that there is no other organisation on earth that cares for the whole person, as well as the church. Its engagement with the statutory authorities, focussed on individuals’ well-being, provides an invaluable opportunity for a synchronised partnership to the benefit of all our communities.’

Jesus told his followers, ‘I have come so that you can have life and have it to the full’. This is the hope that animates churches. Christians find meaning and purpose in the hope of life, peace and justice that Jesus gives. Church can be a space where the complexity of hurt and suffering is acknowledged, and where we can find solidarity and support in the presence of those who can help us find purpose and meaning.

At ChurchWorks, a commission of leaders from the 15 biggest church denominations in the UK, we are excited by the prospect of more churches providing this space. On 18th May we held ChurchWorks for Wellbeing, in which we gathered over 300 church leaders to explore how the church can bring hope to our communities in this time. We shared stories of small and simple conversations, where offering a listening service, an art class or a food pantry enabled churches to give people in their community space to be, to grieve, to process and to grow. From the conference, it is our hope that we will see hundreds more churches start to engage in social prescribing and welcome their communities to access holistic wellbeing support.

At a time when anxiety is rife, and it is so easy to feel despair and hopelessness, the church offers a vital resource to us: a place where our spiritual wellbeing can be nurtured, where we can find purpose, where we can find community, where we can find hope.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Music

5 November 2025

4 min read

Deliverance in the dark: Springsteen’s Nebraska and the scars that shaped it

His starkest album emerged from a season of pain, where family, faith, and music collided

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

An actor playing Bruce Springsteen walks down a dark street, hands in jacket pocket.

Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen.

20th Century Studios.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen-White as the titular rock star, follows Bruce Springsteen's attempt to make possibly his most unconventional album, Nebraska. This also happened to be one of the most difficult times of Springsteen's life, battling with mental health. Before the film's release, let's briefly explore some of the root causes of Bruce's depression, and find out what part family and the church had to do with it.

When it comes to Springsteen's discography, there's something of a disconnect between the casual fans' favourite and the album favoured by critics. Born in the USA is the monster hit album, with its era defining hits and blue-collar Americana. But Nebraska is the one that musicians and writers wax lyrical about. Written and recorded in a small bedroom in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, Nebraska is an album filled with acoustic melancholy folk tracks. With no conceivable singles and no chance of getting radio play, this was not the album that Columbia records wanted him to make, but it's the album Bruce felt he had to make.

"Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U.S.A. was the arrow's release" writes Warren Zanes in his 2023 book, Deliver Me From Nowhere. In it, Zanes tracks with loving detail not only the technical problems of turning recordings that were only meant to be demos into songs that you could feasibly release, but also the mental health struggles that had driven Bruce to focus on such dark subject matter. It marked a moment of the artist unpacking his issues and answering the question: what do you do when you realise that the things you've loved most have begun to do you harm?

That harm can be traced back to Springsteen's early life in 1950s New Jersey. His father, Douglas 'Dutch' Springsteen, also suffered from mental health problems, at a time when there wasn't even the vernacular to describe such things. Dutch would grow to become jealous of the attention that his young son would get from the women in his family, which would exacerbate his existing paranoia. As well as being neglectful and demeaning, Dutch would also become violent towards his son. Springsteen describes in his autobiography how on one occasion, his father was teaching him how to box when Dutch threw a few open palm punches to his face that landed just a little too hard. "I wasn't hurt" Bruce writes "but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. […] I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment". If this was young Bruce's experience at home, little respite was found in the outside world.

Springsteen grew up quite literally in the shadow of the Catholic church, and it permeated every aspect of his community. Bruce attended a Catholic school, where on one occasion he was hit by another student as a punishment from one of his teachers. This was compounded during his time as an altar boy, when the priest he was serving at a six am service gave him a public thrashing for not knowing his Latin. So before Springsteen started high school, he had been physically abused by his father, his school, and his religion. When these pillars of his life (who were meant to represent God to him) treated him this way, is it any wonder that young Bruce's take away from all this is that God is not a safe person to be around?

Years later, when Springsteen finally takes a break from the constant recording and touring cycle, he has no way to escape the damage done to him by the experiences of his early life. In Nebraska he illustrates the lives of down and outs, blue collar workers striving to get by, and even serial killers. The subject matter was so dark that when his manager Martin Landau first heard it, he started to worry about Springsteen's mental health. Thankfully, Springsteen would get the help he needed and forty years later, is a terrific example of someone who has done the work of tackling their own issues.

Where Bruce has landed on his relationship with God some forty years later is still quite hard to pin down. He's reluctantly adopted the adage of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' even if he admits he doesn't participate in his religion all too often.

There's no clear delineation point between him going from being a non-believer to a believer or vice versa, but that has not stopped him from creating some truly magnificent art with intense Christian themes. References to Jesus and the gospels pepper much of his musical output. Songs like Devils and Dust show the conflicted faith of a soldier in Iraq, whilst his song, The Rising, written in response to the terrifying events of September 11th, re-imagines the firefighters climbing the stairs of the twin towers as souls rising up to meet their maker. The finished product is a compelling anthem that would give even the most heartfelt worship song a run for its money.

It's quite possible that Bruce is interested in Christianity only in as much as it is woven into the thread of American life. How much the upcoming film will focus on his relationship with God or lack thereof is unknown, but the influence the church has had on him, for better or for worse, is undeniable.

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