Do we even need a month for mental health awareness?
May is Mental Health Awareness month. Do we even need more awareness around this issue anymore?
Yes.
Here’s why.
Mental health is just as important as:
Spiritual health
Nutritional health
Brain health
Cognitive health
Hormonal health
Social health
Physical health
(thank you, Brittany Moses, faith and mental health leader, for this clean list.)
All of these things influence a person’s mood and behavior.
Yet, particularly in the Church, we may still be more comfortable discussing all the topics on this list openly among our Christian peers except for mental health. We’re scared of what it means to struggle with our thoughts/emotions. We still want to say things like “you can talk about a mental health struggle, but only to a certain extent. After that [ambiguous] limit, it must be a faith/strength of relationship with Jesus issue.” We make it about a flaw that should be easy to correct if our faith was strong enough, rather than accepting that a person can have a health issue and a strong faith at the same time.
We sit with people in mental health therapy at our clinical counseling centers inside our church partners, and many times, especially shortly after we started doing this work with churches, clients would ask if we would be trying to pray away their problems or if we would be quoting scripture to them when they do something wrong.
Oof. Doesn’t just reading that deflate you? Can you imagine how much that would almost immediately breach trust with them and cause that person to lock themselves up, becoming very careful about what information they share in the future and what they don’t? And friend, please don’t get us wrong. There are so many times when the best thing we can do for someone is read scripture over them, to remind them of their strength and worth in Christ. To remind them what the Word says about who we are and what’s expected of us!
But not when it’s used as a weapon to force change and control behavior.
Weaponizing scripture in the past may be the reason why people feel they cannot be fully accepted in their church. Why they feel unsafe to talk about certain things or to seek prayer/pastoral counseling for what they are really struggling with. And what’s worse, statistics show that active Christians are much less likely to seek help for mental health concerns than those who are not actively involved in a church. And not because they do not struggle, but because they believe they shouldn’t struggle. So, they do it alone…or silently.
Allowing space for people to dig into their beliefs and get to their own conclusions that making specific healthy changes in their life would walk themselves toward healing, toward living a fuller, more abundant life, THAT’S when change really does lead to lasting inner and outer healing. And who does that kind of space holding sound like to you? ‘Cause to me, that sounds like what Jesus does for us. Let's talk about how the Church can lead in changing this.
