Turning the corner on mental health will take more than awareness …

The soft-spoken man stood at the back of the church, hands folded, waiting for prayer. He was a deacon. He taught Sunday school. But this time, he was the one asking for help. “It’s getting harder to keep smiling,” he admitted, trying to force one anyway. “I’ve been depressed for years. But I didn’t know I could say that here.”

His words capture something many Christians feel but rarely say: that the church is supposed to be a place of healing but too often, when it comes to mental health, it becomes a place of hiding. After a month of Scott Free Clinic sharing an array of powerful insights, data, theology, and tools for national Mental Health Awareness Month, there’s one unavoidable question: now what? How do we actually turn the corner?

The courage to stop pretending
If we’re serious about seeing change, we have to be brutally honest about what hasn’t worked. Cultural avoidance has cloaked itself in spiritual language for too long. We’ve told people to pray harder when they needed a therapist, or quoted scripture at them like it was a tranquilizer. But even scripture doesn’t ask us to live in denial.

King David wrote, “O Lord, why do you stand so far away? Why do you hide when I am in trouble?” Psalm 10:1. Elijah reached a point of such mental and emotional despair that he begged God to let him die (1 Kings 19:4). Jesus Himself — our Savior, Redeemer, and Deliverer — sweated blood under crushing anguish and told His disciples, “… My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death …” (Mark 14:34, NLT).

Real healing begins when we stop punishing people for being human.

Understanding what healing actually means
If someone breaks a bone, no one questions their decision to see a doctor. Yet if someone is struggling with panic attacks or a trauma history or depression, we still hesitate to call that real suffering. But science confirms what scripture shows us: the brain is part of the body, not separate from it. What affects our brain affects our soul, and what affects our soul affects our brain.

Paul didn’t shy away from this complexity. He wrote, “We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure …” 2 Corinthians 4:7a. We are image-bearers of God and vessels of weakness at the same time. Healing doesn’t mean pretending the weakness isn’t there. It means letting Christ’s power be made perfect in it.

But to participate in that healing, the church has to do more than quote verses. We have to learn how trauma reshapes the nervous system. We have to understand how anxiety disorders work. We have to recognize when someone’s brain chemistry has been altered by chronic stress, grief, or neglect. And we have to know when and how to refer them to professionals who can help.

What it looks like to turn the corner
Turning the corner doesn’t begin with policies or programs. It begins with language. Words are the first building blocks of culture, and culture determines whether people feel safe enough to speak. We need to start saying things like:

• • “You don’t have to pretend here.”
  • “God’s love isn’t withdrawn in your depression.”
  • “Getting therapy doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re wise.”
  • “You’re not broken beyond repair.”

It also means we stop platforming people who mock mental illness or make it sound like Christians are immune. That is not only harmful, it’s false doctrine. The early church didn’t preach triumphalism. It preached resurrection after suffering. It taught that “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it …” 1 Corinthians 12:26a.

Turning the corner also means training church leaders to recognize mental illness and equipping churches with real partnerships with competent Christian therapists, with crisis counselors, with psychiatric providers, and with brain health experts who see the mind through a biblically grounded lens.

There is no going forward if we remain uninformed.

We have something the world needs
The truth is, our culture is making real gains in mental health awareness, therapy, brain science, and trauma-informed care. The secular world is leading in these areas not because they have better truth, but because they’ve been more willing to talk about it.

But the church has something deeper: the unshakable hope of the gospel. We can take the best of what science and therapy offer, and root it in something eternal. We don’t have to choose between God and psychology; when psychology aligns with God’s truth, it becomes a helpful ally.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus moved toward the suffering, not away from them. He healed physical bodies, calmed anxious hearts, and restored minds that were tormented. When He saw people in distress, “… He had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). That kind of compassion must define the church as well.

If we speak truth with compassion, hold fast to sound doctrine, and embrace the tools God has provided for mental wholeness, the church can be a faithful witness in a broken world and a place where those suffering are not ignored, but genuinely helped.

Scotty