Map and Pitch a Pastoral Mental Health Referral Network for Southeast Nigeria

In Igboland, mental illness is widely understood as a spiritual problem. Families bring their relatives to the pastor or the native doctor long before they consider a hospital. Pastors at Assemblies of God, Mountain of Fire, and Catholic parishes in Enugu and Onitsha routinely counsel people experiencing psychosis, severe depression, and trauma, with no clinical training and no referral pathway. The result is that people stay in church prayer camps for months instead of receiving medication that could stabilise them in weeks. Your task is to design and pitch a pastoral mental health referral network for the Southeast geopolitical zone. The network's logic is simple: train pastors to recognise crisis presentations they are not equipped to handle, and give them a directory of trusted practitioners to call. But the execution is not simple. You are working in a context where psychiatrists are concentrated in teaching hospitals in Enugu and Nnewi, where families fear stigma, where pastors may see a referral as an admission of spiritual failure, and where transport to a clinic 40 kilometres away is a real barrier. Deliver two things. First, a referral directory template: a one-page format that a network coordinator could use to list verified practitioners, their location, their fee range, whether they offer pro-bono slots, and whether they are willing to work with pastoral partners. Populate it with at least five real or plausibly real entries drawn from what you can research about mental health services in Enugu, Anambra, and Imo states. Second, a ten-slide pitch deck aimed at convincing the leadership of a large Enugu-based Pentecostal denomination to adopt the network officially and fund a coordinator role. Good work will take the theology seriously. A pitch that dismisses pastoral spiritual care as an obstacle will not succeed. The best submissions will find a framing in which the pastor's role is honoured and the clinical referral is presented as a continuation of care, not a contradiction of it.