The Gospel and Mental Health
The Gospel is woven through with issues of mental health. It does not make a case for just spiritualising and praying away important things such as depression or anxiety. God has a deep interest for matters that express our deepest concerns and emotions, and the Bible teaches us to cry out to him when we’re in distress.
He also has a deep concern to connect people together, where we find compassion and love for each other. Our crying out and being heard and comforted by someone with empathy and compassion when we are anxious, depressed or traumatised is proven critical for recovery. Good news: this is the nature of God. He wants to come close to us. He wants to reveal himself to us. He wants to anchor us through relationship.
The Gospel is written not just to “me” but to “us”. In both testaments it is about the collective experience: the children of Israel, the Jews, and the church. These are the entities that the Spirit speaks to within Scripture. And confirmed in modern neurobiology is the “strange” finding that the individual brain is wired more to understand, react to, and preserve relationships than just about anything else. It confirms the Bible’s focus on the “we” not just the “me”. We live life and work out things as “togetherness”. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel writes of us that:
We don’t “own” our minds— we are not individual “selves”. We are interdependent on others for the functioning of our minds … Our mammalian brains are profoundly social, and … relationships have a huge impact on neuronal function from the earliest days of our lives.[1]
Neuroscience educator Sarah Peyton writes: “As social animals, people get caught up in one another’s cascading nervous systems.” [2]
What the psychiatrists and researchers are saying is that mental illness is a lot about losing interest, motivation and ability to connect one-to-one at a heart level with other human beings, especially when stressed. With the level of stress currently all around us, no wonder our high levels of disconnection with each other.
The parable of the Good Samaritan in many is a description of God’s character through the Bible. The Good Samaritan witnesses distress and doesn’t walk past it. He comes close, sooths, tends to wounds, and makes arrangements for future care. The bit that we need to add to this is that God also reveals himself to us. The matter of “Getting to know God” in the midst of mental health issues is profound. Truth-finding and meaning-making when someone is in the valley of distress is pivotal for future wellbeing. It constitutes part of what we call our testimony or our “lived theology.” It becomes the basis of how we see life, God and other people as we go into the future. This is part and parcel of post-traumatic growth.
Dr Jeremy Baker
[1] Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind
[2] Sarah Peyton, Your Resonant Self
