5 Ways Churches Can Minister to Those with Mental Illness

It is an honour to welcome back Therese J. Borchard as a guest blogger to Brownblog. Therese is the author of the hit daily blog “Beyond Blue” on Beliefnet.com, which is featured regularly on The Huffington Post and was voted by PsychCentral.com as one of the top 10 depression blogs. Her first guest blog post was Growing Your Faith as a Person with a Mental Illness, seriously worth checking out if you missed it. In this wonderful post Therese writes on how churches can minister to those with a mental illness.

She writes,

Awhile back Mark Brown asked me to write two blog posts: one about how you grow your faith as a person with a mental illness, which he published awhile back, and one about what churches can do to help those who suffer from mental illness. This article has been much more challenging to write.

Granted, it’s been several years since I’ve stood up in the middle of a homily and walked out: the priest going on and on about how the faithful should flock to the confessional instead of a psychologist’s office because the real battle is fought in the soul, and a bunch of diagnoses and medication prescriptions only legitimize the behaviors and thought patterns that we should regard as sins. But I haven’t really heard anyone address it. And that could be just as bad.

No. Wait. The going to hell stuff was worse. But it would be refreshing to hear the word “anxiety” in church other than the prayer that follows the Our Father: “In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Here, then, are just a few ways that churches might begin to help those who suffer from mental illness.

1. Get educated.

One of the members of Group Beyond Blue, my online depression support group at Beliefnet.com, recently posted the thoughts of John Clayton, a well-respected author and speaker who was interestingly enough a devout atheist until his early twenties. He wrote this:

The first thing the Church and its leadership must do is become educated about the mentally ill. Education will remove misconceptions, fear, and prejudice. There are many in the Church that can help us in this education, especially those in our Christian schools and in our larger congregations who are full-time psychologists and psychiatrists. The worst mistake we can make is to expect preachers and elders to be able to solve all the problems the mentally ill and their loved ones have. Doing this is analogous to expecting a preacher to do bypass surgery, and the damage done can be equivalent.

It can be as easy as browsing some mental health websites, like Psych Central, MentalHealth.com,Web MD, Revolution Health, and Everyday Health; checking out nonprofit groups such as NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) or DBSA (Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance), and others; visiting a library to see what kinds of literature they have available on mental illness; attending a lecture by an expert in the field at a nearby college; tuning into one of the top 10 psychology videos found on YouTube.com; visiting an expert’s website or blog; and finally, making an appointment to speak to a psychiatrist or psychologist in the area. Continue reading »

Growing Your Faith as a Person with a Mental Illness

It is an honour to welcome Therese J. Borchard as a guest blogger to Brownblog. Therese is the author of the hit daily blog “Beyond Blue” on Beliefnet.com, which is featured regularly on The Huffington Post and was voted by PsychCentral.com as one of the top 10 depression blogs. I invited Therese to write on growing your faith as a person with a mental illness, in part to encourage you if you have a mental illness, but also to reveal the challenges faced by those around us with a mental illness.  What follows is stirring stuff.  Therese writes,

This morning was fairly typical: I was both inspired and ticked off by the reading of the day, in Mark’s gospel, when Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever. Jesus grabs her hand and her fever immediately leaves.

“Nice, Jesus, good going with that one, ” I said to the Son of God, half sarcastically and half sincerely. Because all of us who live with severe depression, bipolar disorder, or any mood disorder know that our illness is chronic. Even on the good days, we wade through some pretty thick crap, and sometimes it feels like we spend the entire day on our knees, begging for that tap on the hand-when the negative thoughts will painlessly evaporate and our hippocampus will stretch instead of shrink, when all the cells housed in the prefrontal cortex of our brain get ready to party, and tell our nervous system that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

But that’s not the way faith works when it comes to a mental illness. At least not in my life and in the lives of most of my readers.

The healing process is slow. Really bloody slow. Most often we take three steps backward for every four forward. Continue reading »

Honesty Openess and Accountability: why not?

A rather bizzare event in Australasian politics occurred the other day when a staffer for the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd accidently gave the New Zealand media a briefing paper on the New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, that was intended for Kevin Rudds’ eyes only.  It included a brutally honest opinion on Helen Clark that was less than flattering.

I found this burst of honesty rather refreshing: getting beyond the disingenuine and saying how it is.

And then the news broke that pastor Michael Guglielmucci, the superstar pastor of Planetshakers in Australia admitted to fabricating a terminal cancer battle over the past two years which he states was to assist him in dealing with his 16-year obsession with pornography.  In a statement Michael shares,  “I’ve been living a lie for a long time, I’ve been hiding who I am for so long. ” He goes on to say, “I’m so sorry, not just for lying to my friends and my family even about a sickness, but I’m sorry for a life of saying I’m something I’m not … from this day on I’m telling the truth.”

How can this happen?  What is happening within this hugely inspirational Christian leader that he can lead such a double life?  Continue reading »

Bush Walk Strategic Management

The temptation in ministry is always to focus on the immediate at the expense of the strategic or the long term. The immediate challenges of today and later in the week need to be attended too, no doubt, but it is also important to dream and plan for next year and the next decade. Without intentional long term thinking we can lose sight of why we are doing what we are doing. So we need to do both, we need to attend to the here and now and we need to from time to time lift our view to the horizon. How do we do this practically? Continue reading »

TV Mad

It would be fair to say that I am a big fan of technology, but I am also acutely aware of the dangers as well. Back in early March I wrote a piece called Unplugging where I shared my need to have some computer free days (check it out here). I recently came across the following statistics around TV.. which are plain alarming: Continue reading »

Unplugging

On a typical day I rise before 6am and literally the first thing I do is turn on the computer. Once my shower is complete, with a bowl of cereal in my hand I have my first ‘monitor and me’ session. I check out my email, facebook, my blog(s) and if I have time, scan my news reader. And so begins a typical day of mostly staring at a monitor. I have become convinced that I must be available and ready to respond. Whether through instant message, email or a comment on this blog, the expectation is instant interaction.

It is amazing to think that not that long ago people sent letters to each other; how bizarre to think that you would write a letter and 4 weeks later you would get a response! Now everything is Continue reading »

The Middle Class disease

I am middle class. I have a nice house, a nice car, an iPod and a nice set of golf clubs. I am also suffering from Comfortitis: the number one disease amongst the middle class.

Comfortitis can cause severe bouts of ambivalence which eventually results in the sufferer doing very little for anyone other than themselves and their immediate network.

But most serious is a range of delusions that plague the individual. Continue reading »

A matter of balance

There is so much I want to achieve and so much that needs to be done. At times I can drive myself quite hard which inevitably leads to a unhealthy level of stress. This sort of stress manifests as Continue reading »

Ministry leader burnout: the Anne Jackson interview

I remember the shock I felt when I heard my old pastor had cheated on his wife. A number of years later I asked him why he had done it, he shared that he had been struggling for years under a weight of expectations about his performance as a pastor, and that his affair was a form of escape. And this is not an isolated case. In this post I interview Anne Jackson who is currently writing a book, Mad Church Disease about what she calls the burnout epidemic in the western church. Continue reading »

How do I deal with Stress?

This past sunday I preached at The Street City Church as part of Continue reading »