Why is the church so bad at talking about mental health?
And what can we do about it? (Part 1 of 4)
On one of many evenings I wish I could do over, a friend walked into my dorm kitchen and asked if I “ever felt sad. Like, for no reason, and it just doesn’t go away.”
This was junior or senior year of undergrad and I was in the midst of a not-yet-diagnosed depressive episode, which at the time I was attempting to self-treat with a particularly unhealthy version of “everything happens for a reason” — if I could just reason through why the things I was sad about were actually good, the depression would go away and everything would be fine.
I’m not certain where I got this idea from, but it was definitely harmful in the context of clinical depression. My clumsy attempts to describe this almost certainly made things worse for a friend who tried to reach out to me for help. I was wrong, and I am sorry about it.
I am starting with this anecdote because I think one of the saddest things about the church’s overall failure to speak truth about mental illness is that you don’t have to have bad intentions to cause a lot of harm. I am one of the luckiest people I know when it comes to people in my life being supportive about my mental illness. But even I’ve had church-y experiences that make me hesitant to bring up depression in Christian circles.
There was the church leader who sent me four hours of videos on “treating depression biblically”, the upshot of which was that depression was a sign that I just didn’t love God enough and I needed to repent. (And the ensuing conversation where he insinuated that my dislike of the video was because I trusted the liberal media too much instead of the bible.)
There was an entire sermon whose main message seemed to be that we wouldn’t be depressed if we just donated to the church building fund. There are quiet whispers that real Christians should go to “biblical counselling” instead of “secular therapy.”1 There is the repeated inclusion of “pastors” like John MacArthur in mental health discussions, even though he’s famous for killing one of his congregants by refusing to refer him to a real counselor to treat his suicidal thoughts and still hasn’t repented of this decision.
This is the first of a series of posts in which I’d like to go more in depth into why the church as a whole seems to struggle to properly care for those experiencing mental illness, and hopefully what we can do to change. The next three posts will (God-willing) go in-depth into what I think are three of the biggest reasons:
The “Pastors as Experts” model: Most contemporary Christian churches put the entire role of teaching/spiritual formation on the shoulders of a handful of individuals whose opinions get to be preached from the pulpit. This can create problems when we ask these individuals to speak on all sorts of topics (as the church should!) because it takes a lot of time and effort to become an expert (or even decently-informed) on an issue. As a result pastors feel like they have to speak into issues like mental illness even when they haven’t had time to properly learn about them, which leads to a lot of unintentionally harmful messaging.
Distrust of Therapists: the two biggest complaints I hear about therapists in institutional Christian settings are that they lean too far to the left, and that they teach people to be selfish by focusing on their own feelings when they should be focused on following God’s commandments. There are definitely bad therapists (I’ve had a few!), but I think these fears are primarily rooted in fears that people might come to the “wrong” (read: liberal) answers about certain questions, as well as misunderstandings of what “selfishness” in a biblical sense actually is.
But what about the soul? a lot of contemporary Evangelical theology implicitly separates the “real” us (our souls, often conceived as our minds or our consciousness) from the “merely physical” body we inhabit. We then interpret “free will” to mean something like our disembodied souls making decisions all by themselves.
This view gets tricky to uphold when you introduce something like psychiatric medication. If a person is violent and a medication stops their violent impulses, has their soul “really” repented, or have you just treated a “symptom” of the “underlying sin”? A fully orthodox theology of the importance of physical bodies is much more reconcilable than this dualism with what we now know about the brain, but it also raises uncomfortable questions about why we aren’t doing more to care for the physical needs of our neighbors and the global poor.
I do want to be clear that there have also been really healthy conversations about mental health in church groups I’ve been a part of, and so I’d like to share three sermons that I have found helpful in my own mental health journey. (Disclaimer: depression is complex and manifests differently for different people, so I can’t promise they will be what you need right now in the way they were what I needed when I heard them.)
(cw: sexual assault) Kobe Campbell’s “God and our Deepest Wounds” — an in-depth and unflinching look at King David’s assault of Bathsheba in light of his childhood trauma. Campbell is a licensed trauma therapist, and her sermon is a really powerful look at how hurt people can really hurt other people. It helped me a lot to understand the really hurtful ways a few people in my life were treating me, as well as to take seriously the importance of understanding where I am hurt and how that might impact the way I’m treating other people.
Kaitlin Ho Givens’ “Lent: Waiting in Hope” — this sermon explores what it means to hope for God when we’re suffering, finding joy in the power and beauty of hope without minimizing the very real pain of sadness. It made me cry the first time I listened to it.
Craig Selness’s final Menlo Church sermon2 on discouragement. After a full career of preaching, the pastor I grew up with revisited his first sermon about “how not to get discouraged”, and concludes that his past self got it wrong. He shares that he’s learned the question is not if we will get discouraged, but what we should do when we get discouraged. He shares some practical advice from his own experiences with chronic pain that I’ve found very helpful with my headaches!
Come back soon to read more! If you like, you can sign up here to receive All of it Again directly in your inbox:
“Biblical counselling” can refer either to seeing a therapist who is a Christian and is willing to talk about faith (like mine!) or (in this case) the disturbing movement formerly known as “Nouthetic counseling” where pastors pretend to be therapists and “treat” people for mental illnesses in supposedly “biblical” ways that at best don’t help and at worst are deeply harmful. There’s a lot of overlap between this movement and the conversion therapy movement.
I’m not aware of a public link, sorry! But if you are in the Menlo Church San Jose Facebook group you should be able to find it from August 24!