After decades of belittling counseling, the church now needs to fix the harm it caused …

When you make bad decisions, you won’t reap positive consequences.

Take, for example, this story retold by James Helfley:

“Harvard anthropologist William Howells tells about a near disaster for the residents of Cape Cod. The trouble began when boys shot the insulators off Cape Cod’s power line. Immediate confusion reigned. Few had water; the electric pumps stopped. No one could get gasoline; again, no pumps. Those who did have gasoline had no traffic lights to stop and go by. Some had to eat raw food, and some babies got colic because the electric ranges wouldn’t heat. Amidst all the pandemonium stood a herd of bawling cows, their udders near bursting point. The electric milkers couldn’t milk and apparently no one knew how to milk by hand.”

A bad choice of behavior made by a few boys generated chaos for an entire community.

Some professing Christians, and many church leaders, long ago made a BAD decision to publicly (and privately) belittle, ridicule, and otherwise denigrate the study of psychology and psychiatry in general, and the idea of anyone going to see a mental health professional in particular. Today, the church is reaping the results of decades of contributing to stigmatizing those who suffer from a mental illness or mental health issues.

The number one reason why people today who need clinical counseling don’t get the help they need is due to stigma.

I’m NOT saying the church alone is responsible for this problem of stigma (far from it), but it has made significant contributions to it. When pastors say from pulpits that people who think they have a mental illness need to have more faith, need to pray more, and need to read their Bibles more and trust God, and that they would never recommend someone see a counselor, such declarations from trusted spiritual leaders made to the congregations they lead create a stigma about mental illness or mental health issues that no one would want to be branded with.

Over the last few years, we finally have several prominent church leaders (but certainly not all) speaking out with a different message — that mental illness is real, that even Christians AND church leaders suffer from mental illness and mental health issues, and that there is no shame in but that it is wise to seek clinical help from competent, skilled mental health professionals. Mental illness and mental health issues have become so pervasive that church leaders can’t ignore it any more. Here are some basic statistics that expose the scope the issue of mental illness has reached in America:

• • In the United States, almost half of adults (46.4 percent) will experience a mental illness during their lifetime.
  • 5 percent of adults (18 or older) experience a mental illness in any one year, equivalent to 43.8 million people.
  • Of adults in the United States with any mental disorder in a one-year period, 14.4 percent have one disorder, 5.8 percent have two disorders, and 6 percent have three or more.
  • Half of all mental disorders begin by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24.
  • In the United States, only 41 percent of the people who had a mental disorder in the past year received professional health care or other services.

A bad decision to denigrate the competent practice of clinical counseling is reaping the consequences of people afraid to admit their need or get help. While some church leaders and some churches are better today about not stigmatizing people who have a mental illness, much more needs to be done, such as:

Make sure your local church is a safe place where the mentally ill are welcomed, loved, and served.

Talk about mental illness. Multiple studies show one of the things those with mental illness and their families most want from the church is for church leaders to talk with their congregations about mental illness to help them gain a better understanding about mental illness and mental health issues.

Work at educating your congregation and community about the realities of mental illness and mental health issues. This will require partnering with competent and skilled mental health professionals who can provide such insight and education, but many of these professionals would welcome an opportunity to partner with churches to provide educational opportunities to congregations and communities.

Help connect people to professional resources. Church leaders need to do their homework in identifying the professional mental health resources in their community so they can refer people to those resources as needed.

In addition to these steps, church leaders and churches can partner with and support ministries such as Scott Free Clinic that work to eliminate the barriers of cost and access to biblically-based, clinically-excellent Christian counseling services. Most people who need clinical counseling don’t get the help they need because they can’t afford it; in some areas, access to quality services is lacking.

Church leaders, and the church as a whole, needs to make a concerted, conscious effort to remove the pall of stigma over mental illness and experiencing mental health issues. If the church would exert a purposeful effort in this regard, it could impact our communities and our society to encourage and support people getting the help they need resulting in positive outcomes from doing so.

Scotty