Hawzah News Agency –According to the director of the General Counseling Center, Dr. Reza Azarian, the special counseling facility “started in 2018 in a bid to expand counseling services to pilgrims, which are grounded in religious counseling and teachings given the nature of the environment and its spiritual ties with the holy shrine”.
He added that attempts had been made to refer all counseling-related professional and scientific activities in the holy shrine to the General Counseling Center to avoid working in parallel.
Azarian further named four special counseling clinics active in the center as ‘Holy Shrine Clinic’ for pilgrims in the Holy Prophet courtyard, ‘Qadir Clinic’ for pilgrims adjacent to the holy shrine, ‘Be’that Clinic’ for the staff on Be’that Blvd., and ‘Razavi Guesthouse Clinic’.
Speaking about the expansion of counseling and psychological services in ‘Astan-e Mehr’ specialized clinics, the director noted that services cover a wide range of areas as “children and young adults, legal, occupational and educational counseling, pre-marriage counseling, clinical disorders, and psychometrics”.
He concluded his remarks with a note on the acceptance rate of services among the pilgrims, declaring “Astan-e Mehr clinics have offered over 40 thousand cases of specialized counseling to pilgrims so far this year in the Iranian calendar (beginning in March 2021)”.