Why Faith Is No Substitute for Honesty About Mental Health

This is A Cure for Fear, a monthly column by Laura Turner on working, creating, and living with anxiety.

To be given the space to exist completely as you are is one of life’s great gifts—to be available to your pain and your gratitude, without the need to hide. It is a precious gift in part because it is so hard to come by; because it is such hard and constant work to be totally honest with ourselves, let alone with our communities.

When you are a member of a religious community, the irony is that the very beliefs that are meant to bring joy and belonging often act as fetters that restrain. “Never worry alone,” my pastor father told me again and again when I was a nervous child. “God calls us to trust in Him,” one of my small group leaders told me when I was a teenager, “so if we worry, we are actually sinning against God.”

I worried constantly, and learned that my worries might be offensive to God. I understood that this community, so important to me, was not a place where my fear was welcome. And fear, like nature, often grows in direct proportion to our need to suppress it.

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My friend Laurie was twenty years old when she ended her life. She drove to downtown Chicago on a cold March day and parked her car near the Adler Planetarium, a hulking gray building on Lake Michigan. She left a long letter—a journal entry—the details of which I do not know, but the gist of which was that she could not handle the stresses of the world.

Laurie had been the queen note-writer in high school, always signing off with a heart and a cross and a reference to her favorite Bible verse, 1 Peter 3:15. I keep my notes from her bundled in a desk drawer along with the program from her funeral. She was beautiful, the kind of person whose attention made you feel attractive and alive. She drove a Jeep, played Ultimate Frisbee, deferred her first year of college to work for a missionary organization in Queretaro, Mexico. Laurie was quick to pray for her friends, for the world, for revival. Her faith was a living, burning thing. Something changed—maybe during that year in Mexico, or maybe when she returned home; I don’t know. By then I was two thousand miles away at college, and we didn’t keep in close touch.

She and I were both church kids. We could wrap our heads around theology and bullshit around a bonfire for hours into the long Midwestern summer nights. What we never quite had was a vocabulary for fear.

I thought it was my job as an individual to figure out what I needed and ask God for it, with just the right amount of faith: Suffering was a private affair, and so was anxiety, depression, and grief. In our evangelical megachurch, the idea that God knew us and loved us was matched with an implicit expectation that if you were faithful enough, things would turn out okay for you. We listened to people who had been through terrible ordeals—cancer, car accidents, the loss of loved ones—and, praise God, had made it through to the other side. We never heard from people who were still in the midst of suffering. No one talked about depression or anxiety, just as no one really talked about the people who smoked cigarettes outside or the teenagers who were having sex. It happened, whether anyone acknowledged it or not.

We had our whole lives ahead of us, but that isn’t always a comforting thing. Laurie’s body was found in Lake Michigan two days after she was reported missing. She was hardly recognizable at her wake.

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On bad days, when I am most anxious, God exists in inverse proportion to my pain. The more I fear, the more I am convinced that faith is a huge lie that billions of well-meaning individuals have bought into. I wonder what my place is, as a person who is constantly anxious, in my faith.

I do not believe that worry is a sin against God—in fact, I believe that God understands worry better than even I do. It was not long after Laurie’s death that I began to understand this, because I knew instinctively that God did not hold her suicide against her, and that it would make sense to believe that God wouldn’t hold my fear against me. I wonder how an entire faith system could exist without making room for anxious minds or depressed spirits. The stigma of mental illness is pervasive in many Christian communities, a rich irony because the stigma, or the marks of Christ, are the injuries we are called to bear, and Jesus was certainly acquainted with anguish.

That is the shame of the religion of positivity that has infiltrated some Christian circles. Now the Great Commission is to make your life happy, no matter what you have to ignore to do so. Evangelical leaders write inspirational books; Christian radio plays only “positive, encouraging” music; a certain strain of Christian blogs festooned in flowers promise a full life if we would just pray boldly enough. People sublimate a nagging sense of meaninglessness into pop psychology, and cheerful productivity, and it takes hold because it feels good not to have to acknowledge our suffering, to believe that with enough faith we will be spared the trials of Job. These are not inherently bad things, but neither are they substitutes for rigorous honesty about our mental health, or an understanding of our fears and apathies and the unfair stigma that marks unhappy people. If Laurie’s death taught me anything, it is that faith that does not place suffering at its center will have nothing to say to people in pain—which, at some point, is all of us.

Religion has saved my life many times over. It has also taken lives, both in how it has not seen people with mental illness and in how it has not supported them. And here I’m speaking not just about Christianity, or any religion in particular, but also the lie that turns mental illness and suffering into stigma; the notion that we earn value through what we do rather than who we are; the false positivity that says you are not worthy of the gift of life if you are not happy.

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After Laurie died, I wondered—we all wondered—what we could have done differently. We knew it wasn’t our fault, but we still couldn’t help thinking that if we had just reached out one more time, just answered the phone the last time she called, just known somehow, we could have done something. As far as I know, Laurie never reached out to anyone in our group to ask for help. As far as I know, she kept most of her pain to herself.

Eventually we began to realize that there was no one dramatic gesture that could save Laurie, no number of what-ifs that could bring her back. What we could do, and some of us did, was give each other the gift of existing as we were. We were newly delicate with each other and with ourselves. We made a promise that if any of us ever felt how Laurie must have felt, we would call someone in that circle; we would say something.

Laurie’s death is what made me want to write and speak more openly about my anxiety. I am still afraid, nearly constantly, of a future I cannot see or control. All I can do, most days, is follow my dad’s old advice to never worry alone, and hope that all the communities of which I am a part can be places where people gather together to worry, just as they do to pray or seek friendship or find support. Our humanity depends on it.

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