This week is Mental Health Awareness Week.
I saw this morning a campaign to get men to speak out if they need help. This has led me to share that at crisis points in my life I have found counselling a life saver. Someone else has had to say to me “I think you need help” because I am one of those people who will just carry on and I’ll say everything is fine when it isn’t and it clearly isn’t fine for those around me as I either go in on myself and become even more introvert than I usually am, or my mood becomes irritable and I will not be very nice, or perhaps worse of all I will worry until I am ill because I don’t want to face what might need unravelling.
But I want to say those times when a counsellor has enabled me in a six or twelve week block of sessions to tell my story of where I found myself each time and gently ask me questions so I could put myself back together, have been life giving.
Whether it was dealing with my upbringing, or after a time of being bullied or when my first marriage broke down or more recently dealing with my loss of identity having found myself unwell and having to cease Circuit ministry for a while, I was made to see there was a way forward. Often the best bit of advice given to us is what we all forget: “you have forgotten to look after you, haven’t you?”
Mental well-being begins when we can look after ourselves, when we can love ourselves. But when we are at rock bottom we don’t think there is much in us to love. So we beat ourselves up with thoughts that we are worthless and useless and when things go wrong it is all our fault.
I’ve suffered at times with mild depression and being so unwell a year or so ago I used to sit in the manse in Hailsham with no purpose and couldn’t see the point of anything. I even gave up on the Church. I made every excuse not to go on a Sunday morning. Lis had to drag me back saying if I didn’t go back soon I would never go back.
It’s no accident Jesus says we are to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. If we don’t love ourself, we cannot give out to others. But like the times in my life when I’ve been very low, there are people around us who can’t see anything good in themselves. For some, they suffer with desperate mental unrest and anxiety every day and need help. The charity MIND is literally saving lives as over the past few years government funding for mental health has been savagely cut. We need to lobby our MPs that mental illness is equally as debilitating as physical illness. The trouble is you can mend a broken leg, you cannot see what someone is suffering with inside, and there is still a tendency in society to say to people “pull yourself together and get over it.”
Which brings me to the other side of what needs saying in a mental health awareness week. We need to be less cruel as a people. I’m acutely aware when I lead public worship that in front of me are a group of people, who have all come to church with different needs and problems. And in that group, will be someone facing things no one else may have a clue about. We easily label or want everyone to be happy, and we will often say “I know how you feel.” We don’t know how they feel. We all deal with things differently. We need to walk alongside people with patient caring concern, and our care unless it is dangerous not to share something we discover, should be confidential. I’ve sat in too many prayer meetings where prayer has been a string of things someone has found out about someone they were not meant to share! I keep saying now and after this crisis is over we will need to be with people who need help in picking up the pieces of life again or to mourn what they have lost.
We binge watched the series Normal People on the I player. Without giving a spoiler if you are watching it each week, one episode at a time, it is brilliant the story includes a sensitive dealing of a breakdown one of the characters has. That mental health is in a drama on prime time television can only improve our awareness of a subject many still choose to pretend isn’t there. I remember telling a group of pastoral visitors we would be having a training session on mental health — they were horrified! Almost like saying “we don’t have and don’t want those sort of people here.” We have come a long way from when we locked people away in an asylum and we called them imbeciles, lunatics and idiots, but there is still an unkind stigma out there.
I ask tonight please pray for people who are struggling. I ask tonight we might become a safe place where people can find what they need to be the people God intends them to be. I ask tonight we might take time knowing what agencies and resources there are to refer people to if they come to us in distress and we need more expert help for them. I ask tonight most of all we might just be more kind.
I therefore commend two pieces of writing to you both of which I found this morning. One is in the form of a picture of a discussion someone had with the author Charlie Mackesy, and the other is today’s poem by the wonderful poet, Brian Bilston.
Brian has it so right. If we spread kindness where might we be then. Enjoying together a world where everyone matters and where people struggle that’s okay, because we will not judge them we will care for them.
“Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counsellors there is safety.”
Proverbs 11: 14
That verse calls us to care and then for ourselves when we struggle ourselves and feel worthless there is this one, also from Proverbs.
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