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What are the connections between religion and mental health? What are religious communities doing to respond to mental illness, and what more can they do? Following the launch of our new report

, Christianity and Mental Health: Theology, Activities, Potential, we have invited a range of guest bloggers to offer their perspectives.

I was talking recently to a senior academic with a top leadership position, when suddenly he mentioned that he had had time off work for a mental health breakdown. He spoke candidly about the frustrations of depression and his ways of coping with work and stress to prevent another episode. 

I work professionally in health and healing ministry, so I shouldn’t be surprised at his story, it is one that I often hear. I am a pastor and ordained priest, and I should be used to the way that deep listening to another person’s story is both a humbling and costly experience, so, again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I have also suffered periods of serious depression and anxiety, sideswiped by a mental health issue that I hadn’t seen coming, so his story of breakdown is one that I can relate to. But surprised I was, and rather humiliated with my internal shock that the clever and wise might have health issues with their mental function.

Mental health is still an area of taboo and fear. One of the clear ways that we can work to improve this is through the study of mental health conditions, public health education and providing money to bring services to those who suffer. Media campaigns and policy changes at national and local government level are also vital. 

But I think there is some deeper spiritual healing that we can all involve ourselves in. We need the stories of the ill to be told, and those stories need to be head. I am quite happy to talk about my physical illness, but I have never, until now, publically acknowledged my own mental health problem. But I do so, confident in the theory that stories heal, that when we are honest we have the possibility of making connections.

The idea of storytelling of illness and suffering is not a disguise for Me Generation self–interest.  Narrative medicine suggests that our stories of suffering are an integral part of our potential for healing. For our stories shape our identity, and never more so when we have a story to tell of suffering and loss. So unless we tell them, we are not being honest about who we are, and if we don’t express who we are, we cannot connect to other people fully. 

Church has always been a place where stories of suffering are brought. Indeed, the Christian faith is founded on a story of suffering and pain, and the resurrection that followed. At best, they are places of acceptance and hope, where people meet God and God’s love and desire for relationship. But this should not mean that churches are simply places for the ill. There are demands, and ideals that these beacons of hope and healing should aim for.

In the language we use around health we often fall into denoting our health along a scale from good to bad; You are either in good health or bad health, or somewhere in between. By the words we use, we might even be imparting an entirely unmeant moral judgement on the state of our mind and body. To counter this, I wonder whether churches need to reinvigorate their healing potential where the emphasis is less on moving up the scale from bad health to good, and more on promoting God’s promise to bless humankind with relationship and grace. 

The Christian vision of healing is about human flourishing, where the ill are celebrated and valued whatever the state of the body and mind. This is not to say that we shouldn’t pray for suffering, nor that suffering is not terrible. However, if the focus is simply on healing as a route to ‘getting better’, then we deny a much greater potential. To help people find out how to flourish, whether that is in their relationships, their spiritual life or how they love, then the church will make a bold move away from a consumerist attitude of health and healing. If this is how the church can add to the debate and offer a different voice in those speaking about mental health, then the church will offer profound healing and hope to God’s people irrespective of what their medical notes say about their body or their mind.  

Gillian Straine is the Director of the Guild of Health and St Raphael a Christian ecumenical charity working in the healing ministry of the Church and an ordained priest in the Church of England. For more see www.gillianstraine.com | @GillianStraine ‏ @guildofhealth

Image from MaxPixel available under the Public Domain