Our culture marks the celebration of certain movements and ideas during specific months of the year. From Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months to National Bird Feeding and National Pizza Months, there is no shortage of both meaningful and somewhat silly month-long celebrations.
One of the meaningful ones is Mental Health Awareness Month celebrated during the month of May. I say that it’s meaningful because we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the mental struggles and traumas that are real for the people around us. There is sin in this world, and it is always committed against someone. Whether it be children, teens, or even senior citizens, people get broken by mental, emotional, and physical abuse, all compounding and leading to a litany of mental health issues. While there is reason to praise the Lord for the advances in care for individuals suffering with negative mental health, for too long the Christian community has feared the acknowledgement of legitimate mental health diagnoses, and this has led to multiple forms of abuse.
But is it enough to simply identify, label, and treat medically a mental health issue, or is there something missing? I believe there is.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, is the standard textbook in the U.S. psychiatric world for the identification and diagnosing of mental illnesses. This work contains approximately 297 different disorders, grouped together into 20 groups that range from neurodevelopmental and neurocognitive disorders to anxiety and personality disorders. Now, before you attempt to have me drawn and quartered publicly, I believe that there are many accurate and correct observations regarding the variety of ways people are afflicted, mentally speaking. We cannot be so foolish as to believe that the secular and unbelieving world is incapable of making correct and helpful observations, and even diagnoses, of issues regarding the mind.
The thing missing is the absence of the spiritual aspect of problems in the treatment of mental health. This is the point where the unbeliever is likely to check out. Without the eye-opening experience of meeting Jesus, it will be impossible to see things from a truly spiritual perspective, because “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
But for the Christian, who is now indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, and has the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), I would encourage you to lean in and consider what is written here. For the believer, secular psychology may be helpful in identifying, even sometimes treating, the body-level fruit issues of the mind, but it is wholly insufficient in treating the spirit-level root issues. This is where we must consider the transformative power of the Holy Spirit through looking at Christ through both the Word and the world.
The verse I want us to have fixed in front of us is Colossians 3:2, which says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” I don’t want us to become overly simplistic with our application of this verse, assuming that simple modification of the thought life will result in the disassembling of mental illnesses. While I do agree with the need for certain medical interventions, there is, however, the pre-programmed reality in the human body that the spirit of man is separated from God from birth due to sin, and only when it is brought back into union with its Creator through faith in Jesus and the indwelling of the Spirit can we ever hope to create eternally-lasting change.
What we find when we think in a Christian manner about mental health is that the turning of the mind upward, and upward meaning God-ward, results in turning the heart God-ward, which begins to melt away the heart-level issues that breed what the DSM-5 calls “mental disorders.”
Yes, they are real things, these mental health disorders; yes, they do require medical intervention; and, yes, we really do recognize your struggle with that issue, but the only way to avoid identification with that issue is the recognition of new life in Christ.
For so many people, a mental health issue doesn’t remain an issue but becomes a lifestyle. No longer do people simply have deep-rooted issues that need to be sorted out and sanctified by God, but now they have lifelong and irreparable character traits that are actually areas of their life that have not been reached by the purifying and healing light of Jesus Christ. When we fail to recognize the spiritual component of mental health issues, we rob God of glory by denying him the opportunity to do the healing work in us through our renewing of the mind by the washing of the water of the Word.
When we fail to recognize the spiritual component of mental health issues, we end up celebrating and championing sinful patterns of behavior because we treat them as merely disorders and illnesses that are foundational to who we are as people, rather than real struggles that need real repentance to overcome.
When we fail to recognize the spiritual component of mental health issues, we end up doing a disservice to fellow image bearers of God by denying them the life-changing truth of the Gospel that could radically change their lives, rather than putting them on the hamster wheel of placing worldly band-aids on other-worldly wounds.
As Christians, we have the opportunity to love our friends and neighbors in a way that is transformative, healing, and God-glorifying when we give them the truth of who God says they are, not who the unbelieving psychiatric world labels them as. We have the answer to the endless naval gazing that secular psychiatry considers a solution, and that answer is to take the mind to God, bringing his opinion and his power to bear on the very real, but very redeemable issues of mental health. This requires love and truth, a potent mixture that, when administered correctly, is revolutionary.
So instead of celebrating sin and lionizing brokenness, let us speak the truth in love for the sake of the life of the world.