Robert Vore is a writer, podcaster, and therapist with a particular focus on mental health among adolescents and young adults.
He travels, speaks, trains and consults for churches, and thus, has unique insight into the challenges facing the next generation of Christians.
I was particularly interested in talking with Vore about a slowly simmering tension within the church.
There is, on one hand, growing awareness (a good thing) of the problem of mental health among teenagers.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of energy among the youth around a more charismatic form of Christianity – one that seems more prone to spiritualize mental health. You know, “pray it away.” You know, “Go to a hip conference with great music, get up on stage, get prayed over, and voila, your depression is gone for good and you’ll experience ULTIMATE VICTORY EVERY DAY.” That brand of thinking.
Where, then, is the church headed?
Are we truly stepping forward to a more scientific and nuanced view of mental health, or are we stepping back to an era when the world (and Christians) ignored the physical components of the disease?
I talked with Vore about this and much more, including talking publicly about mental health in church, and thereby, giving people the incredible gift of “going second.”
Thanks to Vore for his tireless work, and let’s pray for it.
WC: Should we talk about mental health at church?
VORE: Everywhere I’ve ever given a talk where I’ve talked pretty openly about my mental health or just mental health, in general, the people that work there have pretty soon afterwards say, “We’ve had a bunch of conversations we’ve never had before.”
I heard someone talk about “giving people the gift of going second.”
You say, “Hey, I’m going to open this door so that everybody here knows it’s open.”
Maybe no one ever said that you can’t talk about depression here, but nobody said you could, and these things are so shrouded with taboo and stigma and social isolation anyway that you need somebody to say “I’m staking ground here that says, ‘This is a place where you can talk about it’.”
Then people don’t feel like they have to be the first ones to do it.
If you say “no one in my church is walking through this,” you’re wrong, statistically.
Amy Simpson’s book gets into that, there’s Lifeway Research on that, we know ¼ adults in the United States have some type of mental health concern. We know the rates of anxiety, depression, suicidality in youth are higher than they have been previously.
To say it’s not a thing? That just means people don’t feel safe enough to tell you yet.
WC: Christianity seemed to be fairly unanimous, 30 years ago, that mental illness was largely a spiritual problem. They often said therapy is Freud, it’s of the devil. Now the church is moving in a more progressive direction where they’re more open to mental health as a physical problem rather than a spiritual problem.
But there seems to be a growing charismatic movement in the church that’s going the other way on mental health.
When I hear the charismatic movement talk about it, they often immediately apply a spiritual cause to depression and anxiety. Obviously, there’s a lot of energy in the charismatic movement and a lot of youth involved.
As someone who works with so many young people, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a more progressive view of mental health or a reversion to this view that mental health is a spiritual issue that we can just pray over?
VORE: I think there’s a decent amount of both.
The “pray it away” mentality is probably always going to exist.
But the church is largely a product of the environment that it’s in, as much as we like to say it’s not.
So as you see more and more mental health advocacy and organizations trying to get rid of stigma, you see that happening in the church, as well.
The whole culture is saying, “these are real things,” and people are coming into youth group and saying they’re having panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.
It’s pretty hard to say, “Never mind, we’re just going to ignore that.”
I think there’s a lot of good work being done within church walls. Amy Simpson, Kay Warren. Grace Alliance. What we perceive as trends tend to be the loudest voices, but when I talk to churches in Atlanta and youth pastors, their response is typically, “We’d love to do more. We just don’t know what to do.”
They have kids coming into their youth group, talking about depression and self-injury, and have no idea what to do. That’s when they ask if I can come in and talk.
So it feels like there’s a big battle going on [between the two camps], but I think most people fall somewhere in the middle.
WC: Teens are having more mental health problems. How can the church help?
VORE: There are a couple big things.
First, learn a little more. We’re not trying to train every pastor to be a counselor, but there are things as simple as following some good mental health organizations on social media. So things pop up and the young person will say, “Oh, I’ll read this article.” Even poking around on NAMI and getting a general sense of what these disorders are.
We also need to be more intentional with our language and more aware of how things come across.
You mentioned earlier a sermon where someone says, “Just find peace. Jesus will give you peace.”
Okay, so what does that mean to folks listening who have a diagnosable anxiety disorder? Maybe you believe Jesus should bring some sense of peace to your life, but we should be aware of how that’s coming across to different people based on where they are. It may be true, but there are times you may need some anxiety medication.
You can add clarifying language so someone doesn’t listen to that service and say, “Well, either I’m out of this church or I’m doing something wrong and I’m going to stop going to counseling because if I were a good Christian, I wouldn’t be having this problem.”
WC When someone comes to church leadership with mental health problems, should the church leader say, “I’m not qualified in mental health issues, so I’m going to send you to a therapist,” or should leadership address it themselves?
VORE: If someone comes to you and says “I’m feeling really overwhelmed with this problem,” you shouldn’t refer everything out necessarily, but there’s obviously a line.
Typically, the phrase in the mental health world is “functional impairment.”
If you’re so anxious that it’s impeding your work or your social life or you’re doing significantly worse at school, then that’s the hard line of “You need to refer this person out,” but also keep walking alongside them.
When in doubt, refer out.
But we shouldn’t just say, “Here we go, I gave you this referral, and now I’m done.”
We have this weird dichotomy where it seems people think the options are “refer” and then you’re done, or “don’t refer” and then it’s all on you, and that’s a harmful breakdown of things.
Do both of those, and then walk alongside them.
WC: Would you recommend Christians only go to Christian therapists? That’s something a lot of Christians ask.
VORE: It depends on what you’re looking for.
I heard someone say the other day, “Not all Christian counselors are good counselors, and not all secular counselors will know how to work with faith things.”
If you want a Christian counselor, because you want your faith to be part of the process, you should still look into that person’s credentials and make sure they work with whatever your presenting concern is.
If you say you really want to work on faith things, as well, it might be in your best interest to look into some Christian counselors.
But a lot of people who don’t brand themselves as “Christian counselors,” like myself, if you come in and say ‘I want to talk faith things,’ we can definitely do that.
I’m much more interested in that person’s qualifications to help you in whatever way you’re looking for versus how they brand themselves.
QUESTION: You wrote an article arguing that taking medication doesn’t make you less spiritual. In fact, you even make the point that taking medication you need is using a gift that God gave us.
VORE: We put up these weird barriers between things, and say only things over here are spiritual and only things over here are physical, only things over here are mental and emotional. And I just don’t think that’s necessarily how God works.
We see throughout Scripture that God works through people. Plenty of miracles happen through people.
Let’s say you’re in a bad car accident and you’re in surgery and come out after awhile and see people posting, “We prayed and prayed and God helped guide the doctors and nurses to help our sons recover.”
It’s interesting that we can apply that lens there, but if you say “I’m going to a psychiatrist, or a counselor, or inpatient facility,” it seems much more taboo to apply that same lens.
That doesn’t make sense because these people [psychiatrists and therapists] have been given giftings and passions.
I take medication for ADHD. I meet with a psychiatrist who is good at what he does and passionate, and there are thousands of scientists over the last 80 years that have developed things with the gifts they have, so to say that that doesn’t count as something that God could have worked through but the antibiotics do?
There’s this weird barrier where we say “These things don’t count, but these things do.”
For me, being prescribed ADHD medication has been a huge blessing and gift for me in the way that I function, in the way that I can be successful in a lot of ways I couldn’t before.
To say that God couldn’t have been involved in that is a mistake.
WC: One of the things I love about your saying openly you still take medication (I do, too) is that when people fess up to depression in the church, they tend to say, “I went through it and now I’ve recovered!”
I think it’s really important to hear from people who are currently battling it. I always liken depression and anxiety to an autoimmune condition where you have bad periods and remissions, but at some level, you have it most of your life, and I think when the church broadcasts loudly people who say, “I’ve been through this and I’m recovered now,” I think it sets people up for false hope.
VORE: I think it gets into broader cultural things about how we like finished stories. We don’t like it when there’s not a neat and tidy ending as a culture, and particularly the church.
We spend a lot of time in songs etc., on the victory we have, the hope, the healing.
All of those are good, I’m not knocking that.
But for most of the room, they’re in a spot right then where they say, “This doesn’t feel like victory” or “what does victory feel like?”
Does it mean, “Poof, I believe in Jesus and now everything’s great forever?” It doesn’t.
There’s a broader cultural conversation about how we point to hope versus what Jesus said, “You’re going to have trouble in this world.”
That doesn’t detract from the victory or hope, but they can coexist. There’s a tension there. We live in the grey where there is hope, but a lot of days where we say “This sucks.”
