8 minute read
Connecting Faith and Mental Health
by Jennifer Kerr
When it comes to discussions of mental health, many Christians today aren’t sure how to respond. This summer, for example, I was invited to speak on mental health at the IMPACT Youth Gathering in Grand Forks, B.C. When my subject was announced online, a woman named Nicole asked how the talk would connect to the Bible and Lutheran faith. (I mention this story with her permission.) Nicole noted that mental health is a mainstream topic to which her kids were already well-exposed. I appreciated her concern. While we hear a lot of talk about mental health today in Canada, much of that talk does not honour God as the Way, the Truth, or the Life that we know Him to be.
I understand how that can make many Christians feel that the mental health conversation is not for them, or that it has nothing helpful to say to them. But we do not need to be wary or suspicious of mental health discussions as people of faith. In fact, as Lutherans, we are uniquely equipped to enter into the discussion to share, serve, and love.
I am a marriage and family therapist, and I studied at a Christian institution where each course of my degree integrated the history and practice of the counselling field with biblical concepts and a ministry focus. One of my goals in becoming a marriage and family therapist was to serve the mental and relational health of the Christian community, especially my Lutheran faith family. It is very important to me to ground my work in who God is and who He created us to be. I grapple with what that looks like and how it works every day, just as all of us do in our own vocations. It is not an easy journey, but I am so grateful for the chance to serve and care for others.
There are many points of connection between faith and mental health, which teach us how our faith can help us better understand and nurture our mental health experience—and how the wider conversation about mental health is better when God is the foundation. I have chosen three points of connection to share in this article.
The first point is that mental health is not simply an individual issue, but one best understood systemically. Each of us lives within many different systems: family, culture, religion, economics, employment, education, social network, and more. Each of these systems impacts how our lives feel to us. If there is health, support, and opportunity within these systems, it impacts us positively. If there is abuse, isolation, lack of support, and by-products of sin, that hurts our overall mental health experience.
This systemic understanding of mental health is very much in line with who we know God to be and how we understand His creation. Our God is Trinity—God in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, indivisible and irreducible. God created in the natural world all sorts of interrelated systems that cannot function without one another. Think of our solar system, our water, nitrogen, and carbon cycles, even the digestive, respiratory, and circulatory systems within our own bodies.
God also created us to be community, part of a system of believers. As Romans 12 reminds us, we are called to be the body of Christ, sharing our gifts and abilities with others and belonging to one another. This is connection language, calling us to understand ourselves as part of a whole. Our God is a God of systems!
When the discipline of counselling began, it was very much seen in individual terms. The goal of psychoanalysis, the school of mental health work that started with Sigmund Freud, was to help people heal by exploring the content of the unconscious part of the mind and bringing it into our conscious awareness. Psychoanalytic concepts and strategies are still used in certain kinds of counselling today, but many researchers and practitioners see their application as limited.
As a therapist, I can help clients connect their unconscious motivations with their conscious experience, and it may help them a great deal. But if they go home to parents who are fighting and to schools where they are bullied or ostracized, if they do not feel safe and cared for within the systems of their lives, they may still be in a lot of pain. As a systemic counsellor, I help clients explore the impact of systems like these, acknowledging that our systems make life beautiful in some ways and very difficult in others.
It may seem discouraging to acknowledge the complexity of mental health, because it means there are few simple fixes. But learning to view our mental health systemically can help us be more compassionate to ourselves and others, to work together to realize healing and growth in our systems, and, above all, to trust in the presence, peace, and power of God to work in this complexity in ways we never could on our own.
A second connection point between faith and mental health is related to this systemic understanding, but it takes our systemic awareness from what surrounds the human self to what makes up the human self. As intricate and beloved human beings, created by God, each of us is an incredible system of systems, all working together to live the life God has given us. Each of us is a body, a mind, and a spirit, all in one. All our self-systems are impacted by one another.
Have you ever been stressed and experienced muscle tension or a stomachache? Have you ever gotten some physical exercise and felt calmer and more positive? Or received Word and Sacrament in a wonderful worship service, and felt worry and pain melt into the background? Proverbs 17:22 says: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” What happens in one part of the self-system impacts the whole.
Even though I am a mental health counsellor, I recognize that what happens in the minds or spirits of my clients affects their bodies. It is very important to realize that care for our spiritual and physical health is also care for our mental health; the systems are indivisible from one another as part of our human self—a self that is wholly created, beloved, and redeemed.
The third connection point is the concept of both/ and. This is a simple way of expressing how complex our experience of human life is. When it comes to our emotions, we can be both happy and sad at the same time, or frustrated and grateful, or excited and anxious. When it comes to a person who has hurt us, we can both have compassion for them and their struggles while also being deeply angry for the pain they have inflicted. When it comes to personal growth, we can both be proud of ourselves for where we are and still challenge ourselves to learn and be accountable.
As helpful as holding a both/and can be, it can also be difficult. We often experience cognitive or emotional tension when we are trying to hold a both/and, as we feel a pull or pressure to simplify the experience into an either/ or. This is a concept I discuss and practice with many of my clients, and it can be quite difficult for them at first. As Christians, however, I believe we are primed to understand this idea more than most.
As Lutherans, we encounter many both/ands. In his commentary on the epistle to the Romans, Martin Luther reminds us that we are both saints and sinners. We believe that the Kingdom of God is both here now and also not yet fully realized, as that will finally happen at Christ’s second coming. Perhaps the most integral both/ and is the complete divinity and complete humanity of our Lord and Saviour— something so important to our faith that the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds were all developed to help the Church hold this truth well. As Christians, we accept both/ands all the time—and that practice can aid us in applying the concept to our mental health. These three connections are not the only ways we can bring our faith and mental health together, but they are a great place to start. It is my hope that, as with many challenging cultural topics, we can reflect on how our faith gives us important wisdom to share. May God give us the words to say, the heart to love, and the Spirit to sit with God’s children in their difficulty.
