Read within Paul’s letter, and alongside the passages it is usually grouped with, the verse says something different. Scripture shows faithful people who are crushed, afraid and sorrowful, some to the point of asking to die, and it never treats that distress as proof of unbelief. Nor does it set God’s care against the ordinary help he provides through food, rest, physicians and other people. A Christian can struggle with depression or anxiety and still be faithful, and seeking therapy is consistent with that faithfulness.
That conclusion has to come from the texts, so the passages come first here. The people who help read them have spent their working lives where Scripture and suffering meet:
- two trauma therapists who are also ministers
- a practical theologian who once worked as a mental health nurse
- a Yale neuroscientist
- a seminary professor of pastoral counseling
- a social work scholar who is a Baptist minister
- the leader of a network connecting Black men with therapists
- a writer who went through years of panic attacks