God Doesn't Believe in Therapy?

I have sat across from women who described panic attacks like they were confessing a crime. Heart racing, hands sweating, and convinced something was wrong with them at a spiritual level, not a chemical one. Almost every time, somewhere in the conversation, they would say some version of the same sentence. If my faith was strong enough, I wouldn't feel this way.

I have heard that sentence in so many ways, so many times, that it stopped surprising me. What still gets me is where it comes from and it doesn’t come from ignorance. It comes from church, family, people who love them and were taught the same thing themselves, passed down like a family recipe nobody questioned.

There is a belief running through certain corners of the faith community that says if you truly trust God, you don't get depressed or anxious. You certainly don't need a therapist, because a therapist means you didn't pray hard enough, you’re not relying on God, you didn't have enough faith, didn't fully surrender, etc. I have watched people externally and internally fight their way through clinical depression with nothing but scripture and shame, because somewhere along the way they were taught that reaching for help was reaching away from God.

Then there is the other version. The one where mental illness isn't a medical condition at all, but a spirit. Something to be cast out rather than treated. I understand the instinct because Spiritual warfare is real to people who believe in it, and I'm not here to argue anyone out of their theology.

Stay with me as I digress to tie into what I’ve learned and applied from my own marriage… I did not know my husband as a father until we walked through it.  I’ve had to learn him as a father to a three-year-old, versus the father to a one year old, and have had to grow with him as parents into the next version of who he was becoming and who I am becoming.  Every stage required a different kind of understanding, and I only got there by living through the one before it.

Now here’s where it ties in, I think a relationship with God works the same way. There are levels to it. Discernment is not something you arrive with. It is something you develop. The same way you learn to recognize your husband/friend/partner/parents silence to know when something is wrong versus, when they’re just quiet. That kind of knowing takes years. It takes proximity. It takes getting it wrong sometimes and learning from it.

Back to the Question

Why do we act like science and faith are on opposite teams? Why did we decide that believing in God means you can't also believe in serotonin and science? That trusting scripture means you can't also trust a licensed clinician who spent a decade studying the brain? Nobody tells a diabetic that insulin is a lack of faith. Nobody tells someone with a broken leg that a cast means they didn't pray right. But mental illness gets treated like the one condition where medicine and faith have to fight for the same chair.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and posture that the difference in the previous examples is that you can’t see mental illness, and you can see the other medical issues.  But you can’t see God, demons, angels, or the Holy Spirit, but yet we’re all clear that they exist. Am I crazy?

As usual, it is at this point that people like to selectively use the bible as their choice of weapon and compare mental illness to confusion by stating, "For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints."  1 Corinthians 14:33 (KJV). My bible (NIV) actually uses the word “disorder” rather than confusion, but for those of you that do this, in case you didn’t know, regardless of the version you read, the very next sentence says, “Women should remain silent in the churches.” Thoughts or explanation for that one?

That passage was about order in worship, not a blanket statement that anyone experiencing confusion, grief, or a mental health crisis has somehow fallen out of God's will. Confusion is not always evidence of sin. Sometimes it's evidence of being human. Sometimes it's evidence of a mind that needs support the same way a body does.

I think about the number of people who left the church not because they stopped believing in God, but because they stopped believing the church had room for their pain and sometimes church was the source of their pain. They needed a space that could hold both their faith and their diagnosis at the same time, and too often they were only offered one or the other. No one should have to choose.

I don't think God is threatened by a therapist. I don't think faith and science were ever supposed to be enemies. I think somewhere along the way, people confused certainty with faith, and anything that introduced nuance, or a diagnosis, or a professional opinion, got treated as a threat to belief instead of a tool that could sit right alongside it.

Progress will never replace God. Neither will Science, Technology, or mere Intellect and none of it was ever meant to. None of it is inherently good or bad, it depends entirely on what it's used for and who is using it. The same Bible that has been used to free people has also been used to justify owning them. The tool doesn't determine the outcome. The hands do, human as they are.

If you believe God ordained the men who wrote scripture, and you build your whole life around that belief, I don't understand why it becomes so hard to believe God can ordain a doctor or therapist. The same God who moves a pastor to pray over your illness can move a physician to diagnose it correctly and a therapist to help you process what the diagnosis means for your life.

We talk about vessels like it's reserved for the pulpit or the exceptional, but God doesn’t always call the qualified, sometimes He qualifies the called. A surgeon's hands, a prescription written by someone who studied the brain for years, can all be examples of a vessel. I don't think God only works through robes and altars. I think he works through anyone willing to be used, and some of them wear scrubs instead of a collar or well-meaning ankle length dress.

I don't have a tidy answer for how we get there. I just know a lot of people are carrying both a Bible and an unspoken diagnosis, and they are exhausted from pretending they can only hold one. If you've ever felt like you had to hide the struggle to keep your faith intact, I wonder what it would take for you to believe you never had to choose in the first place.