Amy Simpson is the author of the award-winning books, Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and The Church’s Mission, Blessed Are the Unsatisfied: Finding Spiritual Freedom in an Imperfect World, and Anxious: Choosing Faith in a World of Worry.
Her book Troubled Minds has become an instant classic for its gripping account of her mother’s battle with schizophrenia, frank assessment of the church’s relationship with mental illness, and a giant and super helpful survey of mental illness within the church.
She’s also a great writer.
We recently talked about whether the church is finally getting it on mental illness, how pastors can help reduce the stigma within the church, the dark side of the “victorious living” message, and how spouses can support each other through these struggles.
The Weary Christian: What would say is the state of the church’s relationship with mental health and, more specifically, can you compare what it is now to what it was 5-10 years ago?
Amy Simpson: The book came out in 2013, and the survey was conducted in 2010, but I did repeat the survey in 2014. The interesting thing was that when I got the results of the second survey, they were almost identical to the results I got in 2010.
When I was writing Troubled Minds, I would tell people I was working on a book, and they’d say “What’s your book about?” I’d tell them it’s something about mental illness and the church, and they’d look at me like a deer in the headlights and say, “oh, that’s nice,” and then they’d move on to something else because it really freaks people out.
The interesting thing was by the time it actually came out, that had totally changed. People would say, “Oh, we really need a book on that.” So there was a lot that happened in the time between when I started writing it and the time the book actually came out.
I think most of what happened is that we saw high-profile people in the church lose people they loved to suicide, or acknowledge mental health struggles. I think that made a difference in the visibility of the issue, and it became no longer possible for many people to say, “This does not happen to Christians.”
I think for a lot of evangelicals the one incident that solidified that was the Warren family. For Rick and Kay Warren to lose their son to suicide and then to go public with his life-long struggle with mental illness, it put to death that notion for a lot of people.
Because if this can happen not only to someone I’m familiar with, who I know or trust has a relationship with Christ, who’s authentic, who’s done a lot of ministry in his name, who’s done a lot of good work in the world – if this can happen to them, then how can I say, “No, it can’t happen to Christians.”
Traveling around and speaking, I definitely have seen shifts, but a lot of the strongholds around this issue are still present.
So what are things like in the church?
My answer is mixed. I do see a growing level of awareness of mental health problems in our churches, a growing level of willingness to acknowledge that Christians can and do suffer from mental health problems, and [I see] a growing number of people who are willing to buy that these are not just spiritual problems and that the antidote is not just simply spiritual.
At the same time, we still have a lot of people who see things that way, and are more than willing to preach that message to people who are in crisis. Which is tragic.
I wonder about your own experience. I would guess you probably have experienced some of that yourself, because it’s rare for me to talk with someone who hasn’t had at least one person tell them, “If you’d just prayed more, or increased your faith, this struggle wouldn’t be present in your life.”
I hear stories like that all the time, and I hear them from people in churches where that might be predictable because of the overriding theological message, and I hear it from people in churches where you would never expect that.
WC: Yes, it seems the loudest voices are the ones, saying “pray it away,” who are trying to spiritualize everything.
In fact, your survey noted that 50% of pastors only mention mental illness in their sermons 1 to 3 times per year, and 20% said never. Yet 40% of church leaders said they suffered from a mood disorder.
I sometimes wonder if pastors don’t talk about it because they’re unfamiliar with it, but if 40% have suffered from mood disorders, why don’t you think they’re talking about it more?
Amy Simpson: When you experience a mood disorder, that disorder lies to you all the time. It tells you things that are not true about yourself, about God. And I think pastors can be as susceptible to that as anyone else. And they may actually believe, “You know it’s because my faith isn’t strong enough” or “It’s because God has walked away from me.”
At the same time, there are a lot of church leaders out there who are afraid that if they mention anything about their own struggle with mental health, they will lose their jobs. They feel a lot of pressure to live up to the expectations – whether real or perceived – of people in their congregation, so they keep quiet.
That’s one of the great tragedies – that when people are in crisis, when they most need people, when we most need to reach out to one another, is when stigma raises its head and keeps us quiet.
So I think that’s sometimes what we’re looking at with people in ministry. Their own stigma, their own fear actually keeps them silent and deepens that sense of stigma, not only for themselves, but also for their congregation.
WC: It seems that one of the problems with the stigma is that when there is someone with severe, observable mental illness in the church, and they might be publicly disruptive, it has a chilling effect on other people who have mental illness because they don’t want to be lumped in with that. That’s a pride issue, of course, but I think it makes it more difficult to talk about.
Amy Simpson: It’s a great question, and I will acknowledge that sometimes just the term “mental illness” – the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people is that observable, severe mental illness like psychotic disorders, which are the least common form of mental illness. Yet it’s the one we most often most associate with that terminology.
Maybe there’s other language we can use about it, at times. Maybe the more specific we can be, that can be helpful. Maybe we’re talking about depression, maybe we’re talking about out-of-control anxiety, which is the most common form of mental illness in the U.S. So that we’re being more specific with our language and not using a term that conjures up the most severe kinds.
There can also be other terms we use like “brain disorder” that are also accurate and maybe don’t have so much baggage that come with them.
And of course, the more people talk about their own experiences and are brave to do that, the more we’ll see that really we’re talking about real people who, most of the time, function normally in most ways. They just have parts of them that don’t function at an optimal level. And that’s no different from other people who have other organs that don’t function optimally. It does not fundamentally alter who you are as a person or your value or worth.
It’s tough to speak up in a hostile environment. The more we do that, the more we’ll undermine that hostility.
WC: You talk about the Christian emphasis on “victorious living” in the church. Christ conquered the grave, Paul talked a lot about it, there is a lot about it in the Bible. But you talk in your book about the dark side of the church’s “victorious living” theme.
Amy Simpson: I think it’s the same kind of darkness that comes up with “happiness” and “joy.” When we believe there’s room for our lives and our Christian experience for only one dimension, that’s when we see the dark side. That’s when it becomes destructive and turns against us.
This isn’t just the Christian experience. This is the human experience. We believe that the only thing we have room for in our lives is happiness, happiness will elude us. We will not be able to find it. For one thing, we recognize happiness only in contrast to all the things that aren’t.
I think that’s the same dynamic with victorious living. We recognize it by its contrast with the sense of defeat, and frustration, and struggle of living in a world we’re not made for.
When you take a holistic view of Scripture, nobody can make a case to me that we should only expect only victory, or only joy, or only happiness in our lives. Nobody set that example for us, including Jesus himself. His life wasn’t a constant picnic and stream of joyful experiences.
We have no expectations for that besides what’s formed by our consumerist culture. Not by what God’s taught us.
So the idea that we should only experience victory, we end up living in denial of a lot of what is really true and real of us, and we end up with a bit of idolatry in our life where we’re building our lives around an experience.
I value realism, and want people to be realistic and the more realistic we are, the more we can accept what is actually true, the more we free up parts of ourselves to experience what is beautiful.
WC: You talk about how so many churches talk about their mental health services as “recovery ministries.” What don’t you like about that?
Amy Simpson: There’s nothing wrong with recovery. I’m all for it. And yet the vast majority of people who live with a mental health problem do not experience with what we would honesty say is full recovery.
You don’t sound like you’ve experienced full recovery from your brain disorder. Chances are struggling with depression will be part of your story for the rest of your life, unless we discover some true cure that’s out there.
My mom’s the same thing. Barring the miraculous, she will not recover from schizophrenia. She has reached a point in her life where she manages it well, where she is flourishing and living well with that disorder. She goes through other periods where it is wreaking havoc on her, and frankly, it’s one step away from hell.
So one problem is that it sets up false expectations for people. The problem with false hope is that at some point – usually, it becomes realized disappointment. There’s going to come a point in someone’s life where they realized, “You know, this is not gone, and the church lied to me, I didn’t live up to what God wanted, and therefore I’m not healed.” It sets up this expectation of healing.
Recovering and healing are not necessarily the same thing.
The other problem I have is this unspoken idea that people who are in recovery are the ones who deserve our ministry and attention and the others don’t.
The idea of emphasizing recovery betrays a bias towards the clean and the neat and the positive and the things that don’t threaten our sense of safety. Could you come up with a more striking example of the opposite than Jesus himself? The example we’re to follow is loving people who are themselves difficult, loving peole who have a hard time believing they’re loved. That’s what mental health ministry ought to look like.
WC: One of my favorite phrases that you mentioned was, “Mental illness is the no-casserole illness.”
If you’re pregnant in the church, you get a casserole, if you have a cold, you get a casserole, you get a casserole for everything.
You say that if you have mental illness, you don’t get a casserole. What’s the equivalent of a casserole for people with mental illness?
Amy Simpson: I hear pastors tell me, “Okay, I get it – we need to do more. But what can we do?”
I often use this analogy. Someone comes to you and says, “I was just diagnosed with cancer, and my doctor told me I’m going through this difficult course of treatment. It might take a while until it gets better, in fact, it might get worse before it gets better. It’s going to be experimental, and I have no idea how much it’s going to help me, and I hope I’m going to get better and I could really use some help.”
Chances are you’ll say “Yes, I’ll help you. Let me walk through this with you.”
If someone comes to you and says, “I was just diagnosed with bipolar disorder, my doctor tells me I’m going to be going through a difficult course of treatment, we’re going to be experimenting with medications, it might take a while, and I don’t know how much better I’ll get.”
It’s the same conversation, but you’ll probably say, “I have no idea what to do.”
WE pull away from people when they’re experiencing mental health problems, and we pull towards them when they’re experiencing other health crises. At the most basic, this most casserole thing is about pulling towards people rather than pulling people away.
Providing rides for people who are on a new medication and they can’t drive for a while. Maybe taking care of their dog, or doing their laundry, or providing financial assistance. These medications can be incredibly expensive and people can lose time at work.
The have the same needs that other people in crisis have.
So what are their physical needs, their social needs, their spiritual needs, their emotional needs?
WC: Yeah, it seems like most of the casseroles for people with mental illness seem to be a verse with clouds in the background, like “My peace I give to you.”
And you’d never give that to someone who’s just had a baby and was feeling sick and tired. Oh, you need food? I’m gonna send you this verse “My peace I give to you.”
Switching gears, we read stuff about how significant others and spouses can help the person who has mental illness, but how can someone with mental illness support their spouse?
When I’m depressed and have anxiety, it puts the family in crisis, but what can I do? I can’t make that depression necessarily better, but what can I do for the person who’s having to deal with me?
Amy Simpson: In many cases, it’s easier for non-loved ones to help than for loved ones, because especially family members need each other so much, so that someone is incapacitated, I’m feeling my own need – in addition to my love and care for you.
Whereas someone who doesn’t need you can respond to you only out of your need.
A few things are important.
Acknowledge that when there’s a mental health crisis, it changes the family, it changes the relationship, and some of the ways it changes it can be very unhealthy. They can create unhealthy family systems. And we can set up patterns of coping that work against us in the long-term and end up keeping a person sick.
So [to affected spouses]: be healthier yourself. Take care of yourself. Become healthier. Become better at self-care. Get help and care for yourself. Make sure you’re getting some of your needs met outside this relationship, outside this family. That will always serve to make you a better helper to the person you love.
A lot of times people ask, “How can I get my loved one to see a professional?” You can’t.
We can’t make people do what they don’t want to do, and even if we do drag them kicking and screaming to a psychiatrist, they’re not going to benefit from the treatment, if they don’t want to be there. That’s very hard.
But we can say, “I’m going to consult with a psychiatrist. Would you like to come with me?” Or “I’m going to a support group, would you be willing to come with me? I feel like I need some support. I would love for you to be there too.”
So instead of making it about that person and their problems, you’re saying “We need help. I’m inviting you into that with me.”
Another thing is to get educated. A lot of times we’re operating on instinct, out of our own need, or saying, “I just want you to be normal.” “I just want you to be the person you were before.” Or “I have this vision of the person I believe you are, and I want you to get there.”
And there’s nothing wrong with those desires, but we need to better understand what the person we love is dealing with, and what actually might serve to motivate them. Do they need more boundaries from us, do they need more grace from us?
WC: Thanks so much.
About: Amy Simpson is deeply committed to seeing purposeful people make the most of their gifts and opportunities. As an author, speaker, and leadership coach, she helps people get clear on their calling and fully engage in life with guiding purpose.
She is author of the award-winning books Blessed Are the Unsatisfied: Finding Spiritual Freedom in an Imperfect World, Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission, and Anxious: Choosing Faith in a World of Worry (all InterVarsity Press).
Amy loves to travel with her husband, Trevor, their two teenage girls, and their lovable dogs, Rosie and Sam. She lives with these wonderful folks in the suburbs of Chicago, where she is committed to perfecting her dry sense of humor and reading nearly everything she can. You can find her at AmySimpson.com and on Twitter @aresimpson.
