Theology in the Raw - Mental Health and The Gospel: Live from Exiles 26

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Watch Part 2 for FREE on Patreon! Dan Allender, Brook Keels, and Chinwe Williams joined me in Minneapolis to help the church better engage mental health trends, Gen Z, trauma, anxiety, and more. Each gave a 15-20 minute talk, then they joined Preston on the couch for a panel conversation and audience Q & A that you can watch free on patreon. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I've been working primarily with people who bear the consequences of sexual violation for about 48 years. And I have never seen the last five years to be comparable to any other period in my work with people. The level of despair is so much greater than ever before. We cannot ignore the reality. Things have a severity, at least in the last five to eight years, that is simply beyond what most of us professionals have seen. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Rah. The following episode is the session on the gospel and mental health from the recent Exiles

26 conference featuring this session featured Dan Allender, Brooke Keels, and Chinway Williams. Absolutely incredible session, as you will see. Yeah, I would be prepared to take lots of notes, hit stop, rewind, take more notes. This was an absolutely incredible session. If you would like to hear the rest of the session, which includes a panel conversation and a Q&A from the audience, it is available right now for free at my Patreon site. Okay, so patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw, or you can hit the link in the show notes and watch the full conversation.

You don't have to pay anything for it. You don't have to enter a credit card. You just have to sign up for a free Patreon account, put in your email, and then you can access the rest of this session for free. So without further ado, please welcome to the show, back to the show, to the show. I don't know, Dan's been on here before. Brooks been on here. I don't think I've had Chinway on, but either way, you're going to hear these three amazing voices. So yeah, please welcome to the show, the one and only, the ones and only. I got to stop. Welcome, Dan Allender, Brooke Heels and Chinway Williams.

Very excited about our second second. session mental health and the gospel this is a session i've been wanting to do for years really um and so i'm yeah really really excited to dive in and learn this is an area that is way outside of my area of expertise so i'm not one of the speakers and you're very thankful for that uh i think it's pretty well established that there is a growing has been a growing and is a growing there is growing mental health crisis, at least in the United States. Maybe it's more global or maybe it's just a Western part of the world. I don't know, but at least in this country seems to be well established. I did look up some stats and, you know, stats differ, but one set of data says that

nearly the growing mental health crisis, especially among youth. And this is where if you have a heart for like Gen Z, I think this topic is particularly pressing. So recent data suggests that nearly 40% of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. About 18% experienced major depression and roughly 10% have attempted suicide. And maybe there's a, That seems so high to me. Even if that's in the ballpark or even if it's a little lower than that, that's still terrifying. And maybe I always think, like, what's causing all this? You know, is it social media?

Is it the pandemic? Is it isolation? You know, there's probably multiple factors that are going into this. And also, and this is something we have talked about at previous conferences, but it's related to this. topic, I think, is just the perennial issue of sexual abuse. Yeah, I just, I'm constantly just stunned when I read stats on this. Forty-five percent of women experience some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime. About one in five, about 20 percent have experienced attempted or completed rape.

Men are less, not excluded. About 17%, one in six of men, experienced some sort of contact sexual violence, and about three to four percent experienced attempted or completed rape. That's kind of its own topic, but I see these two kind of merging often. And I just, if we're not talking about this as the church,

what are we doing? I mean, these stats, this is a significant part of the population of the church that is dealing with serious, serious issues that if they aren't addressed in a gospel-centered way, I mean, that that's just a major barrier to flourishing as a disciple of Jesus. And so we're going to talk about this morning. I've got lots of questions. And I, you know, just in general, how should Christians think through this in a gospel-centered way? That just sounds so cliche. You know, is that even the right way to frame it?

I don't know. I think so. We need to think through it. What is the root cause of the rising crisis in mental health issues? Is it social media? I think that's part of it. shown that that's contributing. Is that the only thing? What do we do about that? We just take it away. You know, I don't know. I'm sure there's other things that play a role. What's the role of therapy?

You know, I grew up in an environment where it's like, therapy bad, you know, just memorize verses, you know. And then there's, then there's a pendulum swing like, don't open your Bible, just go to therapy, you know. What role does medication play? Some avoid it altogether. Others might medicate for every adverse feeling they have. Are we undermedicated or overmedicated? Are we underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed? Like are some people diagnosed with things that are just part of the normal diversity of human behavior and the normal ups and downs of human life?

I mean, I'm a Gen Xer, so my generation's very underdiagnosed. to think we have all kinds of issues that we just push down and don't deal with, you know. Is there, and this might get too political, maybe this will come up in the talks, I don't even know. I don't know what they're going to talk about, but is there such thing as like a pharmaceutical industrial complex where people in power are making billions and trillions of dollars off of perhaps over diagnosing, over-medicating? Or is that just a conspiracy theory that flat authors drummed up?

No offense to flat-earthers, you're welcome here? We are not doing a session on that. So, and I can keep going, going, going. And again, I'm not even sure these are the right questions asked. These are just when I look broadly at the crisis, these are some things that come up. So I'm excited to have actual experts. help us think through this.

So Dr. Dan Allender has a PhD in counseling psychology from Michigan State University. He's the founder of the Allender Center at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where he serves as a professor of counseling psychology. His work focuses on the intersection of story, suffering, and spiritual formation in the Christian life. And I like to refer to Dr. Dan Allender as the master Yoda of this entire conversation. So I can't believe he's here. Thank you, Dan, for coming. Really appreciate this.

Dr. Chinway Williams is a licensed and board certified therapist whose expertise spans a variety of domains, including child and adolescent development, women's wellness and anxiety and trauma management. And then my friend, Dr. Brooke Keels, serves as a partner and chief clinical officer at Lighthouse Recovery, a Dallas-based addiction and mental health treatment center. She's also a partner and co-founder of kind psychiatry.

So psychology and psychiatry, a practice focused on accessible, ethical, and evidence-based care. So all three speakers will give a 15-minute talk. We'll take a break. We'll jump on the couch for a while and have a good time. So please welcome to stage, Z1 and only, Dr. Dan Allender. It's a great honor to be here. And, Preston, I'm very fond of you. But I do question something of your wisdom.

to invite me. If we're talking about mental health, I was and would never be considered to be a paragon of mental health. And the reality is anyone in our field, generally, I'm with two remarkable colleagues, Chinwe and Brooke, deeply wise, good, brilliant, therapists, writers, thinkers. But I would say of the three of us, I would be unquestionably the most disturbed.

And actually, that will be a very important point that I want to make. As we begin to deal with the reality, as Preston said, so very well, we're living in a world in which whatever was true about living east of Eden is now even more aggrieved and has a severity that seems truly I've been working primarily with people who bear the consequences of sexual violation for about 48 years. And I have never seen the last five years to be comparable to any other period in my work with people. The level of despair is so much greater than ever before. We talked about depression, and there has been an increase, almost double increase, between 2018-19 and today.

What was severe before is far greater. If we're looking at post-traumatic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, again, we cannot ignore the reality. Things have a severity, at least in the last five to eight years, that is simply beyond what most of us as professionals have seen. Here's the complication. When I talk to people about the nature of what they understand to be mental health, if you were to say, what does it mean to be mentally healthy?

What would be descriptors of someone who is mentally healthy? I have many friends, good friends, and I've asked them. So it's very anecdotal. But what they have often said, and this is often the key word, it's kind of a good balance life. You know, you're not too high. you're not too low there's a certain stability

maybe even a certain serenity and those descriptors of what it means to be mentally healthy I believe sets all of us up for not only even greater

mental unhealth but actually takes us further away from the drama and something of the nature of what it means to be mature so what I'm actually actually going to be spending most of my time talking about is what does it actually mean to be mentally healthy in a way that holds the reality of what it means to live east of Eden, what it

means to live in the context of a fallen world, as a fallen person, interacting with people who struggle with loss and anger, which if we understand the nature of lost and anger, it's actually Jesus taking the words to a point that seems somewhat hyperbolic, and that is a adultery and murder. How can there be mental health when you're married to an adulter as an adulter, as a murderer with another murderer? How's your marriage? Well, if your marriage is not taking into account the reality that if you say you have no sin, Scripture says very clearly in 1 John, you're a liar. So if we own the reality of the nature of what it means to be broken human beings who are also stunningly beautiful by virtue of being made in the image of God, but also

remade in the image of Christ. So when we talk about mental health, and I agree with the figures that you brought, Preston, but here's the dilemma. This seems to be segmented for people who are suffering greater anxiety, greater depression, some of the effects of post-traumatic stress. And indeed, our conversation is taking that in that population into account. The reality is this is true for every one of us. How is your mental health? Not well. That's the answer.

Not well. Not as well as it one day will be. Not as well as it could be. But how are you defining what it means to be mentally healthy? And what I'd like to do is to give you a paradigm. Most of my work, as I said, is primarily with people who have suffered significant sexual violation, sexual abuse. And we know the nature, nature of trauma involves three core realities. First of all, fragmentation.

When you're in any form of trauma, your left frontal lobe, particularly what's called Broca's area in your left frontal lobe, that manages language, manages the ability to speak, and therefore the ability to remember gets fragmented. When we're in trauma, due to the gift God gave us of a vagal nerve that runs from our occipital lobe all the way through our brain down into our viscera, to our lungs, to our stomach and below, we go numb.

When we're in the middle of significant trauma, we lose the ability to think clearly, rationally, deductively. We also internally go numb. There's something about the nature of trauma that requires the ability to move rapidly, fight and flight. Our sympathetic nervous system prepares us to be able to move with some degree of ferocity. But in the middle of that, tragically, as we numb, it doesn't mean we don't feel. It means that oftentimes anger, anxiety pulses through our body, and we found countless ways

to be able to numb ourselves. And that is looking at reels. That's staring out into space. That's looking at pornography. We numb through an addictive process. So we're looking at the reality that we're living in a world where fragmentation is actually occurring through algorithms, set by financial institutions creating a need for you to be addicted. The growing rise of one of the hardest addictions I've ever had to work with others.

Gambling is taking the souls, let alone finances, of people away from God. So when we're beginning to fragment and numb, we isolate. And in that isolation, we cut off the one community that has the greatest potential to bring about change. And that's fellowship, the fellowship of suffering, the fellowship of celebration. So we need a model, and I'd like to present one to you. If you have a Bible, I think we have slides coming up, it's Jeremiah. Jeremiah is living in an age of dark idolatry. He's living in an age in which injustice is simply part of the parcel of all the governmental choices being made.

very similar to an age like ours and if you know the story Jeremiah has been invited by God as a na'ar nahar in Hebrew is likely someone between the ages of 13 and 20 he's a boy being asked by God

to bring judgment to the people of God and he says I can't do it I'm too young God promises I will put words in your mouth and I will protect you. If you know the story of Jeremiah, he ends up in a pit of dung for 40 days. He ends up being scourged, beaten, run out of his own home,

rejected by his own family and friends, hated. Here's a model of maturity. You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived. I'm not going to read through the whole passage. There are about 14 verses, but I want you to get four premises that I'm making. Your mental health depends first on your capacity for honesty. Can you tell the truth about what's happening in your body?

Can you tell the truth about what's happening in your relationships? Most importantly, can you tell the truth about the nature of your relationship with God? Jeremiah who has been promised by the virtue of an almond tree being present and the word amen in Hebrew is just one small syllable different than the word to protect so God has given a pun as provision for the protection of his body, soul and spirit

and then what occurs he feels betrayed. And if you have been living in the body of Christ for longer than likely two or three days, then you have something of the experience of what the psalmist says. Not you, not you, my friend, whom I used to walk to worship with. And now, I want to flee to the desert because our relationship. relationship is broken. So the reality is we need to have the honesty and the community of God to be able to use language that actually is so disturbing that it calls into question the goodness of God. You have deceived me and I've been deceived. I am overwhelmed and you prevailed against me. That is language of sexual violation. You seduced and groomed me. You set me up, and then you took advantage of me.

Does your notion of mental health and maturity hold the reality that there is anger within you, questions within you, doubt within you, with regard to the goodness of God when you look at your own life? We must be honest to be mature. Secondly, what I want you to note further in that passage is Jeremiah is saying, when I attempt to shut you out, when I choose to not speak your word, it is like a fire that burns within me.

If you've not attempted to escape God, I don't trust your trust of God. The ability to know that the passions within us are such like Peter when he says to Jesus, to whom else shall we go? Meaning, don't think I haven't looked. For you are the one who has the words of life. That's passion. The nature of passion is it will always take you into an awareness that something burns in you

and you cannot escape the goodness of God. You cannot escape his death. You cannot escape his resurrection. You cannot escape his ascension. It burns within you. Do you see the interplay? Honesty actually takes you to a point of acknowledgement. You can't escape, and you don't want to.

The third section, if you follow this passage, he begins to say, you are my dread champion, you are my mighty warrior, and I sing life onto you. This sounds like a typical church testimony. I was drunk, I struggled, I found God, everything's good. Yes, there is for those who are growing in their mental health and maturity a deep confidence in the goodness of God. But I want you to hear the final point. As you read this passage, what you will see,

is after the praise of God, what he moves to is this, I'd still rather be dead. Does that sound like the testimonies you've heard in church? I was broken. I found God. I'm healed. And I'd still rather die. Do you hear the complexity? We have little place in the body of Christ for ambiguity, for nuance. for ambivalence. For Paul to be able to say in 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 10, I live in my body every day the death of Jesus so that I might live in my body every day, the life of Jesus.

We have got to be able to hold in our bodies, our doubts, our accusations, honest. yet our passions that we have been won and our praise, but also our desperate desire for what only his arrival our death can achieve. We need to be hungry people who do not look to the world balanced, but caught up in the glory of God. Thank you. Did you know that 30% of Americans grind their teeth at night?

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Ah, there it is. Peter said, I do not know this man. And immediately the rooster crowed. And Peter remembered Jesus's words that he would deny him not once, not twice, but three times. So he went outside and wept bitterly. So friends, in this passage, we find Peter sitting. In despair, in grief, in darkness, he had just publicly denied knowing Jesus just before Jesus was crucified. So following this public denial, Peter was overwhelmed by guilt.

This moment of fear-driven betrayal fueled him into an emotional darkness and also led to one of his lowest moments. When we read the stories of so many people in the Bible, very human people, a couple of things happen, at least for me. We see them or I see them in a new light based on what I'm struggling with, right? And how the experiences that they had often mirror our own. So in this moment of Peter's life, he felt extreme guilt. he had fulfilled Jesus' prophecy. He responded to this fear and shame by going outside and weeping bitterly. So friends, we're going to come back to Peter's response because I think that there's a

lesson here about how so many young people, and if we're honest, how so many of us, as Dr. Dan, beautifully stated, respond to our own circumstances and human failures. and fears. So as a therapist, one of the awesome things that I get to do or I like to do is listen to the stories that people tell about themselves, right, based on the struggle that they're currently facing. So I want to tell you a story about a 15-year-old that I met with name, Sophia. Well, that's not her name. That wouldn't be right, right? I just thought that was a nice But this is a real story. So I was talking to Sophia, who by all accounts, is considered a leader at school and at church. Sophia is amazing, but Sophia doesn't consider herself as a leader.

She doesn't see herself that way at all. In fact, she describes herself as a warrior. And Sophia's anxiety or her worries were often triggered by social situations, which is not uncommon right now. And so she would worry for days, sometimes weeks before any sort of social event, even with kids she'd been to school with her entire life. When faced with completely unfamiliar situations, Sophia would grow more tearful, more panicky, and also more avoidant. So we're in session and I ask Sophia, as I often do, to tell me the story of her worry. And she said something that I will never forget. She said, Dr. Chenway, it feels like my brain is pressing the accelerator and the breaks at the exact same time.

Has anybody ever felt that way before? She went on to say that I feel simultaneously revved up and stuck. She said, I feel alone and I feel like I'm failing in life and I'm failing God. So one day, well, I'm actually going to keep going. You may know of a Sophia in your life because chances are you've heard about a youth mental health crisis. And maybe you're not even sure that it exists. But I believe because you're here at the Exiles of Babylon Conference, You know that it exists, right? And so this isn't breaking news. The past few years have left

unprecedented mental health challenges in teenagers and young adults. And in fact, this reality extends far beyond the U.S. I want to share with you that mental health, and Preston mentioned this earlier in the opening, right, wondering if this is just a U.S. thing, is it us in the West? Actually, mental health is now the number one concern across the globe. So I got the chance just last month to teach and train in Hong Kong. I was able to teach counselors and train leaders, ministry leaders, and I got the opportunity to speak to 300 young people in Hong Kong. And the stories that they shared with me after the talk mimicked so many,

of the stories that I hear here in the U.S. And by the way, we talked about how their brain was created by God. So I was able to talk to parents and leaders and educators. And this is what they shared. Very common sentiments, right, that we have here. Teens are hesitant to take on risk and opportunities. They're nearly paralyzed by what we would consider normal stressors. or hardships, those risks that normally we would sort of take and feel the butterflies but still

go forward is becoming harder and harder for Gen Z. For instance, do you realize that many young people are afraid to get their driver's license when they become first eligible? My daughter included. It took her some time. So do you remember how we couldn't count down the days before we can get in the car and drive away from home? and go to the mall and hang out with our friends. But guess what? Mals are closing. Mals across the country are closing because they're no longer seen as like the go-to hangout as they once were for so many teens before their social life moved to online. So my friends, these concerns are significant, but I actually want to share some more sobering stats. So do me a favor.

Dr. Dan, Brooke, and I specialize in trauma and stress. So if this is hard for you, take a couple of deep breaths, okay? But let's look at the sobering reality of what's happening with our young people. Anxiety is now the most common mental health diagnosis among teenagers. When I was a school counselor, 18 years ago, it was depression. And by the way, don't I look 25? You can't believe it. Thank you. Rates of teen anxiety. have risen sharply with diagnosed cases increasing 60% between 2016 and 2023. This comes from the NCBI database. Since 2012, we've seen a spike in self-harming behaviors,

with rates tripling for girls between the ages of 10 and 14, and doubling for girls between the ages of 15 and 19. While youth suicide rates, and I praise God for this, we're starting to see a decline, right? While those rates are starting to decline in recent years, like the last two years, there's another group that's in crisis, that remains in crisis. Black kids and teenagers, specifically black males between the ages of 10 and 19 years old, the rates for suicide for them have surged shockingly 60%. Friends, I have a just turned 11-year-old and just turned 15-year-old.

So I've been sitting in these stats, but every time I read it out loud, I feel it. Four out of 10 high school students report persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness. Four out of 10, let's think about that for just a moment. Think about any basketball court, right? Teenagers on a basketball court, almost half of them are sinking into despair at a time in their life when they should be rising into their dreams. So we can all agree that these stats are disturbing and yet another reminder that we have a generation that's more anxious, more distressed and depressed than ever. before. So while some of these patterns can be attributed to pandemic-related disruptions, absolutely, I've actually been watching these trends for the past 10 years, actually 10 years prior to the

pandemic. So yes, COVID accelerated this crisis leaders, but it didn't create it. We are living in a time filled with challenges, and yes, deep, deep divisions, some of which we are tackling at this conference and for that I'm so grateful. But this feels overwhelming to 13, 14, and 15 year olds and 10-year-olds who have access to social media. So I want to keep going and share with you that there's some good news and there's some bad news. So here's the good news. Actually, I'm going to start with the bad news first. Is that okay? Yeah, I like, as a therapist, I like to end on the good. I write a lot about something called emotional resilience, which is, I'm actually going to go back, which I call sort of the soul muscle that enables us to pick ourselves up after a really tough

situation and recover from adverse or stressful situations. So back to the good news and bad news. The bad news is 2026 is hard. Being a teen in 2026 requires a tremendous. amount of emotional resilience. Do you want to hear the good news? We can help young people to build it. And it begins with this. This is a statement from Dr. Thomas Insel, who is the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and he says it quite plainly. He says, we do not just have a mental health crisis. We have a crisis of care. What does that mean? Well, there's simply not enough therapists to meet the need. The need is too great. Even with clinical care from a physician, a psychiatrist, or a therapist, a young person needs another caring adult to help

them feel seen, loved, and supported. So that's where you come in. Leaders, shepherds, many of you are caregivers. We, the church, are uniquely designed for this need. So in our remaining time together, I'm going to kind of try to go through this pretty quickly. I want to share a couple of areas where you can immediately step in. So here's the first piece. Name what's normal. I've been in the mental health field for over 18 years, and one of the most common questions I get, especially from young people is this. Am I normal? Is this thing that I'm going through, the stressful situation is what I'm feeling normal. So building resilience in teenagers means helping them see that their struggles are human, not shameful. They need to know that nothing they're facing is unique to them.

Every human experience has been lived before, including by our Lord and Savior, who is fully divine and fully human. So remind them that they are not alone in their pain. This matters because anxiety has a way of isolating them and reinforcing the message that they're broken or somehow defective. So remind them that to be human is to feel and that the spirit actually will use those very feelings to nudge, to guide, and also to come. comfort. Now here's one of my favorites because I believe in the spiritual tools as well as the

practical tools. So I'm a somatic trauma therapist. So I believe that the body, the body is impacted in trauma, but it's also useful through the course of healing, right? So help teens to move out of their heads and into their bodies. So I want to share a story with you a few years ago, my kids and I and my hubby who took this picture, we went to the fair. That's kind of what we do in the fall in Georgia, and it was so fun. I always say that we go for the funnel cakes and the giant turkey legs, but we stay for the fun. And my daughter, she will, has given me permission to share that she struggles with anxiety. And at one point at 13 years old, deep, deep despair. She's doing so much better now. We praise God for that.

So during this time, she was going through a lot of anxiety. And she was really excited about the roller coasters. So myself, I am not a fan. They make me quite anxious. And there was one particular ride that she really, really enjoyed. To me, it's nauseating. The noise, it's overstimulating. I want you to take a look at it.

Let's stop right there because I'm nauseated. Family, she went three times. So my son Braden, who actually is autistic, one of my sons, he was looking up fascinated. My husband was like, ay, y, y'all. And my youngest, he didn't have a carrot in the world. He was eaten. A big giant turkey leg, because that's what he does. His name is Noah, by the way.

I don't know the correlation. I could not wait for my daughter to get. get down because I had some questions. So I was like, babe, what was that like for you? What were you experiencing? You went three times. We could barely get you out of the house in this season. She said it was weirdly calming. She said, mom, I don't feel anxious on rides because those things are actually threatening as opposed to the lies that are in my head. So what my daughter discovered that day mirrors what neuroscience shows us. Movement quiets the mental chaos. So this now brings us to the most important tool, which is helping teenagers to build a strong faith identity.

And this is where we're going to land. So in our work as mental health advocates and professionals, We use a variety of tools to help people manage their anxiety and recover from trauma. And those tools matter. Many of those tools are very effective. But for me, as a believer, the most important tool is scripture. Because scripture goes deeper. It doesn't just address symptoms. It addresses to the root problem, which oftentimes is fear.

So I want to read this scripture to you very quickly. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves torment. And he who fears has not been made perfect in love. This comes from 1 John 418, New King James Version. So imagine for a moment, my friends, that fear and love are two voices competing for the microphone in a teenager's heart. Only one can dominate at a time, right? So when teens think that they have to fix themselves, they have to compare themselves, they have to earn their peace, anxiety doesn't shrink, it magnifies. But here's the hope.

And it lies in that phrase, perfect love. It doesn't mean our perfect love because we are imperfect beings. I mess up all the time. Not as much as my husband, but I'm teasing. Love you, honey. He's watching right now. Love you, babe. Do you like my shoes?

But it's also not about a teenager being perfect. It's not about them performing more or working harder or believing harder, right? It's about God's perfect, steady love. Because when we genuinely believe that we are, deeply loved, friends, something powerful happens. And this is from a nervous system, polyvagal perspective, but it's also exactly as God designed. When we believe that we are perfectly loved and we can receive that love, guess what happens? The nervous system starts to settle. Self-condemnation decreases. So let's teach teenagers, Gen Z, ourselves, our community to fight anxious thoughts by soaking

in the truth of God's love. Thank you so much. Good morning. Oh, I love when people say stuff back. That's so good. I'm going to go ahead and preface this by letting you, though, that I've never communicated anything clearly in 15 minutes. So Preston knew this. So prayers are appreciated. I have been in the field of mental health and addiction treatment for about 18 years now. And every week, so two different businesses I'm going to refer to, so try and stay with me on this. I also don't have any slides. That's it, just the pretty art that our CEO did. So, But every week at Lighthouse, which is a men's addiction treatment center in Dallas, Texas, I sit with men whose lives have completely fallen apart from addiction, from untreated mental illness,

from years of pretending they were fine in spite of slowly killing themselves with alcohol or snorting cocaine off surfaces that if we talked about it, it would make you feel very uncomfortable. Many of them were Christians, right? So it's not a faith-based treatment center. Many of them are Christians. Most of them have tried to get help before. In fact, the young men in our program have been through treatment on average nine times before coming to us. And I think it's important to say our age range is 17 to 35.

Okay. So I also want to tell you briefly why we started kind psychiatry. For any of you that have ever dealt in the psychiatric world at all, I think this will make sense to you. So we started kind. It took us about a year and a half to get this going. and we started it because we could not find what we needed. We could not find psychiatrists who were, this is going to sound incredibly mean, but it is what it is,

who were smart, who cared, who were not over-medicating, who were not sanely expensive, and who also accepted insurance. Okay. So maybe you can find three of those things, but to get all of those things is pretty impossible. And so we decided that we could do all of those things,

all of them. And we built it ourselves. We built a team of incredibly brilliant, thoughtful people who wanted to do the thing that they were passionate about and went to school for. And so that has been just such a gift as a counselor on my side. I'm not a medical doctor. And, you know, the tandemness, if you will, of what counseling and psychiatry play in health is so important. So this has been something that's been very meaningful for me. So just some context. But here's the question I want to put forth to you guys for a few minutes. And it's really not if Christians should go to therapy.

And it's not if Christians should take medication. I think the church has been stuck on those questions for decades. I think the question that I want to ask is, what is the church's job informing people who can pursue good mental health care wisely? and why are we so bad at it? So there's something I have to tell you, and I want you to sit with this for a moment. I should also tell you, if I offend you, we can talk about it in the back. I'm fine with that. So in my experience, and this has been consistent across every clinical setting that I have been in in the last 18 years, is that Christians are some of the most difficult

people, clients, families to treat. Not because they're more bright. not because their problems are worse, but I think it's because they have been shaped, often unintentionally, to do the very things that make healing more difficult. So just in the past year, we have had several families, and I will say it's very hard to come up with examples that are specific because, again, if any of you are familiar with addiction treatment, all of my examples are like bananas. And if I said it, the person would be like, that's me. I did that.

So we're going to speak in general about families who were going to be like, we did that. So we've had several different families from all over the country. So at our facility, our guys are with us for a long amount of time, and we have guys from all over the country. So we had several families. Just in the past year, three specific families whose sons were in our program for nearly a year. And the entire extended family and church community, and they, their community were told that their son was off to college. That was really the reaction I was hoping for. I'm actually glad to hear y'all aren't good with that. They would even request, so we

would go home and you need to see your family and we're working through all of those things. And the families would specifically ask, can they come home around spring break or Memorial Day, things that aligned with a college break? Right. In each of these families, one or both, of the parents served in leadership positions in the church. Two of these young men overdosed in their parents' home with their parents, finding them. Pretty horrific, traumatizing situations, if you can imagine. And the parents felt more comfortable telling their church community

that their son was off to college than telling them the truth of what had happened. So that means that the family and therefore the client are living two separate lives, which makes healing almost impossible, right? So I think that the church's failure on mental health isn't that we have become to pro-psychiatry or anti-psychiatry or protherapy or antithotherapy. I think it's that we have trained people to be reactive instead of responsible.

And I think reactive can look two ways. We can spiritualize it or we can outsource it. So on one side, you have the camp that says mental health is fundamentally a spiritual issue, right? We just need to pray harder. Trust God more. If you were walking with the Lord truly, you would not need to go to therapy. Medication is a crutch. Counseling is worldly wisdom. Be careful. Be afraid. Right? And my personal favorite, can't you just stop it? Right. And I think this sounds spiritual, but it's actually refusal to do the work. because the work is hard.

It's pretending, pretending that faith is the problem is easier than admitting that it's a human problem that requires human solution. On the other side, you have the camp that is fully outsourced their healing, right? So therapy will fix it, medication will fix it.

I can't help it. It is my fill in the blank diagnosis, right? And this can sound enlightened, but it's actually the same refusal to do the work. Because you're waiting for an expert to fix you or really partnering with that diagnosis you have, right? Like it's an old friend. It's easier than taking responsibility for your own healing.

And I think both extremes have something in common. They let the person off the hook. Neither requires them to become an agent of their own care. and the church, instead of forming people who can navigate the middle, who can pursue good care with humility and discernment and grit, has often pushed people towards one extreme or the other. I think we confuse grace with enabling. I think we confuse conviction with rigidity. I think we treat psychiatrists as if they're either all-knowing or a very expensive drug dealer. and counselors as if they're either saviors or villains depending on the week and how our session went, right? We don't teach people to think, we teach them to react. And the cost of that is showing up in treatment every day.

As Dr. Dan mentioned, the last five years, I have seen something I've never seen before. I am seeing the sickest of situations, the sickest of families. we're seeing families letting their children die because they are worried they will be mad at them if they intervene. So let me tell you what good care actually looks like because I think that most people don't know and in my opinion the church should be one of the places

that teaches them. Who was that? Thank you. Yes. A good therapist has a model which means that they can tell you what they're doing and why. Right? they're supervised they consult with peers they know when to refer out and don't be offended if they refer you out that just means there's somebody that can help you that has more skill they work with

you and not on you and I'm just going to give you a hot take here if you have no idea what you have been doing with your therapist if you have no idea what you've actually been working on you were paying somebody a lot of money to talk to you and there are people in this room that would happily take half that price. Just to chat with you. A good prescriber spends more than 12 minutes with you, which is the industry average. They know your history. They don't reach for the prescription pad first. They don't treat medication as a tool and not a default. And they know what they don't know. One of the really cool things I have to tell you that we inadvertently found out when big data people, right?

When you run a business, you have to be. And we ran all this data that, for all the patients that have come into our facility, which is telehealth, so it goes across the entire state of Texas, and we're moving into other states right now. People are coming in on average on 11 medications. That's crazy. Okay. And what's really cool, this was not a directive or anything like that,

but what we have found is that all of our, providers have been getting them down to one, two, three medications, which is pretty incredible. And for me, it meant so much, right, that they're being intentional. The other thing is your prescriber knows what they don't know, and they're not insecure to tell you that. Good care also takes work to find. You may have to try several therapists before you find a fit. Super uncomfortable, right?

You may have to switch prescribers until you find somebody you trust. You will have to advocate for yourself in a system that does not always reward it. And you will have to do research. You will have to ask questions and you'll have to trust your own judgment. Okay. And this is where I think the church should be it as best. We are the people who are supposed to be formed in wisdom, in discernment, in humility, and in perseverance.

These are the exact qualities that pursuing good mental health care requires, right? The Christian tradition is 2,000 years of teaching us how to be the kind of person who can do hard things well. And I don't know how, but we have somehow translated that into everything except for the area of mental health.

Personal responsibility is not the opposite of grace. It is actually the fruit of it. And if we believe what we say, we believe that we are loved, that we are not alone, that the war has been won, then we have every reason to do the hard work of healing. You have every reason to take it as seriously as you would a cancer diagnosis.

You have every reason to seek good care with the same diligence that you would seek any other thing in your life that mattered. But most of us don't, right? We seek God when we're desperate. We seek treatment if it's easy. And in between we coast. I have noticed over the years that the men in our residential program, often six months in or healthier than everyone in their life, right?

And not because they're better than them or like have some special gift, right? But they had no choice, right? They had to take radical responsibility for their lives. They had to do the work. They had to swallow their pride and listen to people that they did not want to listen to. Because fun fact, I am not a fun person to talk to when you just got out of detox. They love me in the end, though, you know? They had to swallow their pride.

They had to accept that healing happens slowly in community and with people who tell you the truth. Okay. So there's a phrase that my husband says that I think about often, which he loves more than I can tell you. And he says, you know, he often talks about the tyranny of a pretty good life. A lot of us are not desperate. A lot of us have lived lives that are working well enough that we never. have to ask the hard questions about our own healing. We have just enough comfort to coast and just enough pain to stay distracted.

And the church instead of disrupting that has too often blessed it. So if we want to be the people that we say we are, people of wisdom, of stability, of formation, then I think that we have to stop reacting to mental health needs and start responding to them. Thank you.