In order to investigate the relationship between psychiatric diagnosis and pastoral ministry with women, this dissertation engages ideas from interviews with eighteen chaplains in three psychiatric facilities in a northeastern state in the U.S. Interviews revealed that psychiatric chaplains were united in their assertion that they aimed to see and honor the "whole person" in a system (and on a team) that tended to reduce women to their diagnosis. Yet this existed in tension with racial dynamics that were often invisible to many chaplains, as well as with deficiencies in training that resulted in uneven assessment practices.

This dissertation combined the voices of psychiatric chaplains with the disciplines of feminist and womanist Christian social ethics and feminist, liberationist, and intercultural pastoral care to create "Just Care," a feminist approach to pastoral care that accounts for both institutional-personal and societal-systemic factors in its praxis of ministry within a psychiatric institution. Just Care, at its core, proposes that ethical pastoral care that addresses the entirety of the person necessitates a commitment to justice as foundational for ethical pastoral care, as well as attention to cultural dynamics. It argues that psychiatric pastoral care must begin with an awareness of the chaplain's own social positionality and embedded theology, while honoring the communal and individual nature of care, as well as intersections of culture, gender, race and class. Just Care aims to impact the training, praxis, and method of pastoral caregivers as each pertains to women with mental illness. It addresses the ways in which the field of pastoral care conceptualizes ministry with and for those with mental illness, proposing concrete, ethical action for pastoral caregivers based on the components of Just Care.