People often ask "What's the difference between Christian counseling and goi g to a psychiatrist?" It's a valid question and the answer is, "just about everything." The three primary departures are that we think people are different things, that people should be different things and that we have different understandings of how to get from here to there. Besides that, our knowledge comes from different sources, our traditions have different histories and means of self correction and even a different understanding of "healthy", "good" and "evil". Christianity has a 3000 year tradition of dealing with the conflicts of the human soul and guiding toward inner and outer peace; personal and relational. Psychiatry is a collection of different schools of though and methods at odds with each other as to theory and method that goes back about 120 years and has a tendency to explain every complexity of human suffering and emotional conflict by reducing them to either animal instinct hidden beneath unhelpful religion or civilization, genetic expression or unexpressed selfishness. People are complicated and perhaps the Christian faith as applied through the historical church has an uneven history of counsel? Still, the value of the methods and the understanding of good ends and means seems irreduciblyvaluable. Christopher Neiswonger with Lindsay Brooks