Mental Health sermon

 

1 Kings 19:1-4 (5-7) 8-15a

Galatians 3:23-29

Luke 8:26-39

 

               Today I want to talk about a subject that we tend to avoid in church, but that is a very important part of our lives, and that therefore needs to be discussed in our faith communities.  All three of these passages deal with it, but in different ways.  What I want to discuss with you today is mental health. 

               And I want to start by asking the question: How do people in faith communities usually deal with mental illness?   

               Obviously, there are many different kinds of mental illness.  And yet I think people can end up lumping all mental health issues, as well as the people who struggle with them, together, very inappropriately I might add.  I have heard people make very fear-based comments that imply, for example, that anyone with a mental illness is somehow dangerous because they are more prone to be violent or unpredictable.  That is a completely unfair prejudicial stereotype that is not, in fact, born out.  Your likelihood of being unpredictable or violent is based on many factors, but a person who struggles with depression or social anxiety, bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia, say, is not going to be necessarily more likely to be unpredictable or violent than someone who does not struggle with those issues.  Until you understand what the person is dealing with in full, you cannot simply decide that they will be more unpredictable or violent.

Today I want to talk to you about mental illness from a faith perspective for two reasons.  First, anybody hurting in our communities is of a faith concern since God cares about and grieves for those who struggle with anything and calls us to care, as well as offer healing and caring as well.  Secondly, mental illness is a growing reality in our country.  Just looking at depression: the rates of depression in our country are hugely on the rise, and there are more suicides in our country every year than homicides.  If we think this has nothing to do with us, we are naïve at best.  In 2020 there were almost 46,000 deaths by suicide, making it the 12^th leading cause of death in the United States.  According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, that same year 12.2 million adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.2 million made a plan and 1.2 million attempted suicide (https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL) .   Estimates are that up to 36% of Americans will undergo a major depressive episode in their lifetimes. That’s over a third of us.  Look around you.  Are you aware of who in your community has suffered serious depression and who has not?  Even if it is a little less than 1/3 in this room who have suffered depression, that is still quite a few people here, in this place, who have experienced debilitating depression at one time or another.  Do you know who those people are?   Are you aware of who might be in this room right now who might be experiencing a severe depression? 

And perhaps the bigger question: if not, why not?  How should we respond to this crisis?  And, as a people of faith, what does it have to do with our faith, with our relationship with God, with our call to serve God’s people?  In the first passage we read today we see Elijah going through a major depressive episode.  Even the prophets struggled with this.  But how are we to respond?

And to point out the obvious, depression is just one of many different mental illnesses.  The church should be a place of welcome, or healing.  And so we must know how to respond to these mental health issues in our community. 

               Theologian Frederick Buechner said, "It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling."  So, in light of that, I choose to share something with you, with permission, that was written by someone I know.  I will not use a name, not because you know the person, but because this could be anyone and I want you to hear it in that light:

               They wrote, “When I was a teenager, I went through a depressive episode that came very close to ending in suicide.  It came close enough that I had a plan, I had acquired the means, I had set a time and place.  The reasons that sent me there don’t matter.  What prevented me from doing it that day also doesn’t matter.  What matters is what I learned from that experience.

               The first is that mental illness is not about being weak.  Depression, which is the illness I struggled with, is not something that you can just “snap” out of or that a happy day can make go away.  It is insidious, it changes not only the way you feel but the way you THINK about life, about yourself, about the world.  I absolutely believed while in that state that the world would be better off without me, that while my family might feel some pain at my loss, ultimately they would be happier with me gone.  I could not shake that thinking.  People telling me to “just get over it” deepened the depression because I was incapable of feeling better.  I could not make myself feel better or have a happier outlook or be more positive.  Sometimes I could name reasons for feeling like that, but other times I couldn’t and therefore nothing in my experience could or would fix it.  I felt helpless, hopeless, and was incapable of eating, sleeping or functioning “normally” in any kind of way.  But I was not weak.  The fact that I got up every morning in spite of those feelings, the fact that I carried on every day in the face of those strong demons telling me my life was worthless was a sign of my deep strength.

               Second, the stigma around it made it nearly impossible to get help.  Granted, this was a few decades back when we did not know as much about depression, but I believe much of the stigma around it continues today.  People are ashamed to admit when they are struggling with any kind of mental illness and that makes it very difficult to get help.  As I said before, mental illness is not about weakness.  It is a medical problem, a medical condition.  And until we start treating it like any other disease, not something to be ashamed of, but something that needs our help and care, it will be hard to treat.              

Third, and along those same lines, mental illnesses are isolating.  I have always heard the biblical phrase, “to those who have much, more will be given.  And to those who have little, even what they have will be taken away” in the context of mental illness, not as something God does to us, but as a reflection on the reality that it is those most in need who often have the hardest time getting the help they need.  People who struggle with mental illness need support and care.  And yet, not only do people with those illnesses struggle to ask for the help they need, when they finally do, they find that often people respond by distancing themselves. Those most in need of the care and attention of others are often the least likely to be able to get it.  I hope this is changing, but as a kid struggling with clinical depression, I learned that if I wanted to be around other people, I had to hide my depression, hide it completely.  I had to learn to put on a “face” that others could not see behind.  Once that face has been learned, it is almost impossible to unlearn.  If I were dealing with depression today, few would know it because that early lesson in hiding that depression remains with me still.

And finally, I learned that the most well-meaning people are often the ones who do the most damage.  Those who say, “cheer up” or “buck up” or “smile” added to the pain.”  I want to pause here and share with you all a wonderful commercial that’s been on the TV recently for an on-line therapy program.  A man says into the camera that he is really struggling with depression, but that “fortunately, those around me are there to help.”  It then cuts to various people saying things like “You have so much to be happy for!” “Just snap out of it!”  “Fake it til it feels normal!”  “Cheer up!”  “It’s all in your head”  “Think of all those who have it worse than you.”  “It’s because you’re a leo!”  And after all of their comments we return to the person struggling with depression just staring bleakly at the camera in complete disbelief as the words “not helpful!”  flash across the screen.

People are trying to help, but you can’t just not feel depression when you have it.  The same is also true of social anxiety or any of the other mental illnesses.  Telling someone, for example, with anxiety to “just don’t worry about it!” will never stop them or help them to have less worry!

My friend’s letter continued, “But the ones who were hardest to deal with were the people of faith who told me that if I just turned it over to God, everything would be fine.  That if I really had faith, I would not be suffering.  That God had blessed me with so much and that my depression was a sign of a lack of gratitude for all God had given me.”

In several of the gospels there is a narrative that describes a “demon” that Jesus says can only be gotten rid of by prayer.  While the demon described sounds a great deal like epilepsy to me, I have also wondered if mental illness isn’t also one of these “demons” that can only truly be cured, at least at this point in time, with God’s help.  It can be TREATED with medication, counseling, friendship, meditation.  But I think it is something that can be CURED only by God.  We don’t know how to fix it yet.  We just don’t.  Even so, sometimes those prayers for cure are answered with “No”.  As my friend continued, “I prayed constantly for God to take away the depression, but it remained.  I asked different people how to pray, thinking maybe I just wasn’t praying right (this idea came because one of these well-meaning people told me if I had been praying “right” that I wouldn’t be depressed anymore).  I tried gratitude prayers, thanking God for removing the depression before it was gone.  I tried surrender prayers.  I tried “not your will but mine” prayers.  I tried everything anyone suggested in terms of praying and nothing “worked”.  But those well-meaning people of faith with their ideas about my lack of faith being the cause or at least preventing the cure of my depression did again a whole lot more damage than anyone else.  Their lack of understanding and compassion, their righteous judgment and impatience with my pain – all of that led me much more quickly to the place of contemplating and planning my own suicide than anything else.”

               So what do we do with this?  As people of faith, how are we called to respond?  People who are struggling with mental illness have a hard time asking for help.  Putting it onto them, demanding that they seek the help they need is like asking a person who is carrying a 100 pound backpack to lift another 100 pounds.  It can be the hardest thing in the world to reach out when you are in that place.  So, as people of faith, we have a responsibility.  We have a responsibility to ask, to look, to see.  We are called to be courageous, and to say the hard words, “are you struggling?”  and then the follow through, “are you considering hurting yourself?”  We have to be brave and start seeing mental illnesses as the diseases they are and offering the help we have to give, not in terms of platitudes about “letting go” or “turning it over” or “bucking up” but in terms of offering to sit with someone, be with someone, listen to them, even when we can’t “fix” it.  This is true of social anxiety as well: just telling someone not to worry fails to recognize that anxiety is not something people CHOOSE.  It is therefore extremely unhelpful to just tell someone with anxiety to simply “don’t worry about it.”  We have to be willing to offer the prayers to God on behalf of that other person, asking what we can do to help.  We also have to be willing to intervene, step in and take the person to the doctor for treatment, even when there aren’t cures.  Mostly, we have to have the courage to not turn away or look away from that which makes us uncomfortable or uneasy.  We have to be willing to put aside our judgments, knowing we don’t and CAN’T understand what someone else is experiencing.

               Mental illnesses – these are struggles that appear to have no meaning.  The loss of life, lives like Robin Williams that were full of laughter and compassion and philanthropy – there is no purpose to these deaths.  But we can help God bring good out of every evil by choosing to learn from those horrible things that have happened, to change the way we interact and care and respond to others, to take a step towards healing our world by being present enough with one another. 

               In today’s gospel story from Luke we see Jesus dealing with the demons, which appear to me in this case to be more about mental illness.  In some ways being able to refer to them as demons made it easier: these mental illnesses were recognized as something the person had, and not the person themselves.  Can we do the same and remember that each person is more than just their illnesses?  Their challenges?  Their struggles? 

I also want to challenge all of us to think about this differently.  The truth is, not one of us is 100% healthy.  We understand this at a physical level.  Each of us has something wrong: we are overweight, or we have osteo-arthritis.  We have need of glasses or hearing aids.  We have high blood pressure or diabetes.  Even as kids, some have broken arms, some have anxiety attacks: whatever it is, not one of us is 100% physically healthy.  And I would say the same is true mentally.  Not one of us is 100% mentally well.  Not one.  Whether you are struggling with anxiety, or fear; whether you deal with your pain by swallowing it down or flying into rages; or if you have a diagnosed issue such as depression or bipolar disorder: None of us is 100% mentally healthy which means that all of us are on a spectrum of mental health.   This isn’t an issue of “us” vs. “Them”.  For some of us the illness might be diagnosed or treated.  For others it might be as simple as being afraid or dealing with anxiety.  But not one of us here is mentally “whole”.  We are on a continuum, and the sooner we can stop dividing the world into those with mental illness and those without, the sooner we can learn to have compassion for those around us who are struggling with serious mental illness.  In today’s passage from Galatians Paul tells us that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free.  He is telling us that in Christ there is NO Us and Them.  This applies to mental health as well.  There aren’t “those with mental illnesses” and “those without”.  In Christ we are one.  We are all connected, we belong to one another.  And the sooner we can remember that, the more compassion, the more grace and the more wholeness there will be, for me, for you, and for the world. 

About a year and a half ago we offered a training here through zoom in how to deal with those who are struggling with mental illness.  I have to give you all credit that the training was well attended.  In many congregations when these things are offered, they are not well attended because people do not want to talk about mental illness.  People are afraid of those with mental illness, seeing them as somehow different, or other. But I think so many of us here were willing to attend the training because we are used to interacting with it, dealing with those who live next door to us, for example, who struggle with mental illness.  None the less, I say again that this is an area in which we have to continue to learn, continue to grow in our ability to address and care for those in our midst who struggle with mental illness.  And that has to start by remembering they are not “other”.  They are us. 

So once again, it comes back to what I said before: Mental illnesses can be demons which seem almost impossible to tame at times.  But we can be present.  We can pray.  And we can learn to stand with and fight with our brothers and sisters in their pain.  I will stand with you if you are there.  And as a community we can make a commitment to stand, as God’s people, with one another.  Amen.