'Too Blessed to Be Stressed'

IN A GIVEN YEAR, about one in five U.S. adults will experience mental illness of some kind. And though mental illness does not discriminate, African-American adults are more likely to experience serious mental health problems, but less likely to seek treatment, than white folks, due in part to the lasting effects of slavery, segregation, and other forms of race-based exclusion—effects that translate into socioeconomic factors such as poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse which are, in turn, risk factors for mental illness.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the factors that keep African Americans from receiving mental health services include a lack of health insurance, a distrust of the medical community, and conscious or unconscious bias among practitioners resulting in misdiagnoses. But NAMI also named another barrier to African-American mental health: the church. While one’s “spiritual leaders and faith community can provide support and reduce isolation,” explained NAMI, the church can also “be a source of distress and stigma.” The report noted that even when medical care is necessary, African Americans turn to their families, communities, and churches rather than turning to health-care professionals.

None of this comes as a surprise to Monica Coleman, a professor of constructive theology and African-American religions at Claremont School of Theology in Southern California. Throughout her new memoir, Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith, Coleman navigates the challenges of race, gender, and the church as she heals from rape (committed by her then-boyfriend in seminary) and wrestles with a faith that ebbs and flows like the cycles of severe depression that began as she entered adulthood.

Sojourners assistant editor Betsy Shirley spoke with Coleman about mental health, social justice, and how the church might become a place that more fully fosters both.

Sojourners: Growing up, what kind of messages about mental health did you receive from your family and church?

Monica Coleman: The messages I received were none—no messages. People had other words for [mental illness] like “grief” or “the blues” or “crazy,” but it wasn’t something that was talked about. Sometimes there were coded messages—“Oh, she’s always been sensitive” or “That person is ‘touched’”—but these euphemisms displaced mental-health challenges on to other people who are unlike us. So I didn’t have a real language for mental-health challenges, even though I was suicidal.

What did the church’s silence on mental illness communicate to you? When you don’t hear your experience in a church, especially from the pulpit, you think you don’t matter, that God doesn’t care, that your church doesn’t care, and you feel lonely and isolated.

Do you hear harmful messages about mental illness in the church today? Yeah. The one that bothers me the most is when people say “I’m too blessed to be stressed,” as if they were opposites. So you can’t be blessed and stressed at the same time?

We also say these things that come from the Bible and sound good—“all things work together for the good of those who love God”—but what if you love God and things aren’t working out? The end result is that if you’re true to your experience, you blame yourself for not having enough faith. And I think that’s probably the most damaging thing churches can do.

I’ve noticed that when Christians talk about mental health, they often emphasize the promise of healing. What do you think is the good news of the gospel for people facing long-term mental illness? Immanuel—that God is with us, even during ongoing, long-term, I-wish-this-would-just-go-away suffering. When we hang too much of the gospel on “It’s going to get better,” then it’s like “When? How long? How?” And there are all those variables, and it’s different in every situation. The good news is that God is here with you now, loving you, holding you, being with you, and desiring your healing.

So how can churches be safe places for people who experience mental distress or disease? Talk about mental health. And don’t just do a special program on Thursday evening that no one’s going to come to; talk about it from the pulpit. When people see their spiritual leaders working on their own ongoing mental health, it lets people with mental issues know you’re not afraid to talk about it.

The other thing is “referring”: Anyone who’s been in religious leadership knows that we always get things that we cannot manage. But don’t just say, “Here’s a number for someone you can call.” Develop relationships with mental health professionals in your area so when you need to refer someone, you can say, “I know this person, this person is my friend, they will take care of you. Let me call them right now.” Really go the extra mile, and check back the next day. And don’t just drop ’em off when you give them a card; pastors should let congregants know that they’re still available to walk with them and pray with them.

Finally, don’t have bad theology. We don’t need to have these theologies that suggest if your life isn’t perfect, it’s because you lack faith. No one’s life is perfect; faith wanes, it ebbs, it flows, we lose it, we gain it again.

What can the church learn about mental illness from how Jesus responded to those who were unwell? What I like is that in the stories of Jesus healing people, there are other people around. These aren’t private sessions; it’s very much a communal act. Sometimes you hear Jesus condemn the community for judging someone too harshly, and there are other times when Jesus is saying, “Hey, do you want to be better?” It’s a reminder that our souls need to be healed and our attitudes need to be changed, and that’s very much a collective thing. So healing is an act of justice because it takes the entire community, not just one person with special powers, to make it happen.

Yet when the church talks about issues of social justice—climate change, immigration, poverty, racism, for example—mental health isn’t often included. Why do you think that is? There’s still very much an idea that [mental health] is just a privatized issue between an individual and a therapist. We don’t see it as a public health issue, and I think that we should because there are so many factors that cause poor mental health. If you’ve lived in poverty, if you’ve lived in fear, if you’ve struggled to survive and had to deeply worry about your safety or your livelihood or whether or not you or your children will be fed, is it really reasonable to think that somebody is going to be okay?

If we recognized mental illness as an issue that is connected to social, economic, and political forces, what might change? If we thought about it that way, we might treat it more as a public health issue: talk about it more, have PSAs about it, and have more accessible ways of getting treatment.

Ironically, Christians who care about social justice—especially activists, organizers, and those in helping professions—often have great mental health needs by virtue of their work. When you’re working in a social justice field, you become last because we’re helpers: the last person to get fed, the last person to get what you need—even though we intellectually know that if I’m not okay, the whole thing falls apart.

So how can people involved in activism and ministry maintain their own mental health? You have to make self-care required. It’s a hard thing even for me to say, because then something else won’t be done. There are a limited number of hours in a day, but my self-care has to be in there. It might not be first, but it cannot be last. Unfortunately for many of us, it takes everything falling apart to realize that, but it’s better if you don’t let everything fall apart, if you don’t have the breakdown and you don’t have the burnout.

What other practices can be helpful? I’m a fan of therapy: Group therapy for social justice workers, individual therapy—if you can get to it, I think it’s a great practice to begin. When I had these jobs in Nashville, there was a local retreat center for people in helping professions. And you could just go and unplug; nothing worked, there was no Wi-Fi or internet; just walk around nature, sleep, and eat. To decompress and read some Howard Thurman and get it together again. And that was perfect.

Christian leaders sometimes point to Jesus’ selflessness and sacrifice as an excuse to ignore their own needs and self-care. What would you tell these leaders? We have to remember that Jesus went away by himself to pray; other times, Jesus was just hanging out with his friends eating—so you need to hang out with your friends and eat. That’s healthy! It’s a spiritual practice, and it will restore you. While we may be wounded healers, we want to be people with scars, not people who are bleeding and projecting our own challenges on to other people.