Mental Health Today

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangelicals—and Americans in general—understand mental health, and for the most part this has been a very good thing. Mental health has lost so much of its social stigma that it’s not uncommon for some people to post frank confessions about their depression, anxiety, or PTSD on social media. Prescription psychotropic drug use is, at least officially, treated as normal and healthy and nothing to hide. To a limited extent, society has begun to see mental disorders like other diseases or ailments. They are things that happen to us. They aren’t the result of weak character, sin, or laziness.

But I also suspect that for the vast majority of people, despair, trauma, sorrow, and mental illness remain hidden. Oh yes, some people are talking about mental health openly. Some even turn it into a brand. But the day-to-day experience of adult life has not changed much. “We each suffer our own ghosts,” and mostly alone. So even as we see greater attention paid to mental health and more emphasis placed on self-care, we still have a long way to go before we have a healthy and humane social understanding of mental illness and affliction.

Human existence inescapably involves suffering. For all of human history we have known this to be true. But it’s hard to recall this truth when we are surrounded by forces that promise us greater and greater explanations, control, and strategies of happiness. So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering.