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We are worried about the state of our mental health as a nation, and rightly so it seems. According to a 2014 report from the National Centre for Social Research, about one in five women and one in eight men in the UK had a common mental disorder (CMD), the rates increasing, particularly among women, over the last decade.
Our awareness of the problem is also, thankfully, rising. This Monday was World Mental Health Day, which focussed on psychological first aid and supporting those in distress. Earlier this year, in May, the Mental Health Foundation’s Mental Health Awareness Week looked at the theme of relationships. It is no longer (such) a difficulty in admitting to experiencing anxiety, depression or other problems.
Christianity has long engaged with issues of mental health, both negatively and positively. In the former, people with deep-rooted mental health problems have sometimes (and sometimes still are) told that their problems derive from a lack of faith. Lifeway Research, as US based evangelical research organisation, found in a 2013 study that “nearly half of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians [in the US] – believe prayer and Bible study alone can overcome serious mental illness.”
While this is demonstrably wrong and harmful, the other end of the spectrum – that mental health issues are wholly unresponsive to ‘faith’ – is equally untenable, and this comprises the positive side of Christianity’s engagement in the topic.
In Theos’ recent Religion and Wellbeing project, which assessed the academic literature on the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘wellbeing’, trying to disambiguate the terms in the process, the correlation between religion – particularly practised religion – and good mental health was strong. We found around 50 studies dealing with the relationship, the majority of which evidenced a positive correlation between the two.
The relationship between mental health and religious group participation (worship services, voluntary activities etc.) was especially strong, and that between mental health and personal religious practice (prayer, meditation, scripture reading etc.) was also good. By contrast, while religious belief had some positive correlations, it also had more mixed results – perhaps because it’s not a matter of whether you believe but also how you believe (anxious or culturally coerced belief being potentially harmful) and what you believe (a punitive vengeful God being similarly disturbing).
In short, the academic research strongly suggests that whereas some mental health conditions are amenable only (or primarily) to medical treatment, others can be helped through forms of religious faith, practice and commitment.
This, however, has provoked a further question: what are Christians and churches doing about this? Over the last few months, perhaps simply because I have been more attentive to the area, I have stumbled on various impressive but seemingly disconnected initiatives, such as Epsom Mental Health Week’s 'Love me love my mind', with its many activities at St Barnabas Church; FaithAction’s 'Friendly Places' initiative; Livability’s 'Happiness Course'. These tend to be large, well-organised and sometimes long-standing initiatives – there are doubtless many more, albeit less formalised, ventures.
We are keen at Theos to explore this territory in greater detail – not least as the feedback we have informally received has uniformly been that (a) it is important; (b) it is pressing; and (c) it hasn’t been done.
What are Christians and churches doing vis-à-vis mental health issues today? What initiatives, large or small, long-running or recent, are underway? What aspects of mental health (and, indeed, well-being) do they focus on? What are the objectives? What are the methods? What are the results? We want to see what’s going on out there and hopefully, in the long run, turn this into a bigger project that will offer a picture of the landscape of Christianity and mental health in the UK: an assessment of what is going on, what is doing well, what is best practice, how its success might be assessed, and what we – church, communities, society, government – can learn from it.
If mental health is something you are concerned about and if you know of any Christian engagements with mental health issues, we'd love to hear from you (drop us an e-mail at hello@theosthinktank.co.uk)!
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. His most recent book is The Evolution of the West.
Image by amenclinicsphotos ac, Flickr, available under this Creative Commons license
