An epidemic of care
By Jessica Brodie
I’ll never forget how hurt she was when she confided in an adult about how anxious and depressed she felt, only to be asked, “What do you have to be anxious and depressed about? You’re just a kid.”
As if kids can’t experience depression. Trauma. Anxiety. Pain. As if kids are immune, somehow, to the broken world in which we live simply because they haven’t transformed yet into adults.
When she told me, though, I listened—I heard her. I accepted her truth, and I promised to walk with her. I got her the help she needed. Still, she remembers how rejected and minimized she felt when she bared her soul to another, only to be dismissed. The pain of that dismissal has remained. Today, she wonders if someone will make her feel that way again, and she’s careful about who she confides in. Will they believe me? Will they listen?
I wonder how many other kids her age experience something similar.
We’re living in an epidemic far bigger than COVID, and just as deadly. It’s a mental health epidemic, and it’s affecting kids in elementary school all the way to the elderly—depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, addiction, trauma, attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder… the list goes on, and on, and on. How we got here doesn’t matter nearly as much as what we do about it.
Because here’s the thing: our kids, our loved ones of all ages, are hurting. And they need help. They need to feel heard and seen in the midst of their pain. They need allies to come alongside them to love and walk with them in their journey to health. They need Christians at their side who can represent the hands and feet of Jesus, helping them and guiding them to help.
Mental health statistics are troubling, and what’s even worse is what happens if these issues are left unchecked.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year, and 1 in 20 experience serious mental illness each year. Perhaps scarier, 1 in 6 U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year. They also report 50 percent of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and 75% by age 24, and that suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 10-14.
Let that sink in: suicide. Among people ages 10-14, suicide is the second leading cause of death.
And then that question, once more: “What do you have to be anxious and depressed about? You’re just a kid.”
My friends, it doesn’t matter if we think a child should or shouldn’t be depressed, or anxious, or traumatized. It doesn’t matter if we think a grown man or woman “seems fine.”
People are hurting all around us. And staying quiet about it doesn’t help the problem—it actually makes it worse.
This applies not only to the person contemplating suicide but those around them, who recognize they’re upset but don’t know what to say.
An important truth we must understand is that it’s OK to talk about suicide. Asking someone if they are feeling depressed doesn’t suddenly “make them” depressed, and asking someone if they’re considering suicide doesn’t suddenly “plant the idea” in their mind. What it does is lets the person know you care enough to have an uncomfortable conversation—you care about them.
If they share that, yes, they have thought of it, be kind and keep talking. Ask if they’re making a plan about it, and let them know you care about them and want to help them.
Help them speak with a mental health professional about this so they can get the help they need, and let them know you are here for them and want them to get better. Let them know they matter to you.
Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 talks about how a man had been left dying in the road. All sorts of good, upstanding religious people walked by him, but only one person—a Samaritan—stopped and cared for him properly. The Samaritan could have worried about how it looked to others, or he could have felt like proper care was too expensive or inconvenient to provide, but he didn’t. That caregiver modeled the sort of neighborliness Jesus taught we must have.
Later, in Matthew 25:34-46, Jesus talked about how, when we visit those in prison, welcome a stranger, feed the hungry, or clothe the naked, we’re actually doing that for him. We could decide it’s “too uncomfortable” or too scary to go visit someone in prison, or too expensive to buy clothes for people. We could decide the stranger doesn’t “deserve” to be welcomed into our safe harbor, or that we’re “perpetuating a problem” by giving a hungry person food that she “should be working for.” But that’s not the point, is it? Jesus said we’re supposed to help those who don’t have what we have, whether that’s freedom or a home or clothing or nourishing food. Period.
Now let’s apply that to people struggling with mental illness. Would Jesus hold back from listening to someone’s pain? Would he try to convince them their trauma was because of a lack of faith or because they weren’t praying hard enough? Would he decide it was too awkward or personal to ask a hurting soul if they’re OK, or if they’re contemplating suicide?
Jesus would have helped them—just as we are supposed to do.
So friends, look around you. Who do you know who’s suffering in your world? Who could use an open ear and a supportive shoulder?
We can’t assume everything’s OK. Loving others well sometimes means going deeper and asking hard questions in the name of love.
Let’s create an epidemic of care to counter the epidemic of mental illness.
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THANKS TO MY SPONSORS: MATT BRODIE, EMILY DODD, KATHLEEN PATELLA, BILLY ROBINSON, AND LANNY TURNER.
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