Why Is Mental Health So Hard to Talk About in the Black Church

Setting down an inherited silence about mental health does not mean throwing out everything you were taught. It means sorting it. Some of what you received was wisdom earned the hard way, and some of it was a burden passed along because no one knew what else to do. This guide helps you tell the two apart, keep what is true, and begin caring for your mind as part of the body God gave you. You can work through it alone over a week, or with a small group across one or two meetings. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone anything you are not ready to say.

The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Christina Jones Davis, who serves as clinic director and teaches pastoral care and counseling at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. Davis is a minister who also trained and is licensed as a marriage and family therapist. Her view of the silence is generous without being soft. In African American communities, she said, “we have come by our difficulty in talking about this very honestly.” That sentence gives you permission to start without contempt for the people who raised you. What you were handed came from somewhere real.

Start with an honest inventory

Before you decide what to keep, you need to see what you are holding. Find a quiet half hour and a sheet of paper. Write down the messages you absorbed about mental health, emotional pain, counseling and faith. Some will be things people said. Others will be things nobody said, which can teach just as loudly.

If it helps, use these starting points. Write only what is true for you.

• What did people in your family do when someone was clearly not okay?
• What did you hear from a pulpit, a Sunday school class or a church friend about depression, anxiety or counseling?
• What were you praised for when life got hard? Toughness? Silence? Prayer? Getting through?
• What story in your family is still only half told?

Do not sort anything yet. Just get it onto the page. This list is yours. If you are in a group, no one will be asked to read it aloud.

What may be worth keeping

Davis names two roots of the reluctance, and neither is foolish. The first is mistrust of health care itself. She pointed to the Tuskegee cases and the sterilization of African American women without consent, and argued that people have warranted reasons for caution. If your family taught you to ask hard questions of doctors and institutions, that instinct does not need to be repented of. It needs to be put to good use.

Davis shows how. She suggested asking a psychiatrist how long intake sessions run, and treating ten or fifteen minutes as a reason to look elsewhere. She suggested asking providers how they account for spirituality and for cultural differences. Caution, in her hands, becomes a set of good questions. You can keep your wariness and still walk through the door.

The second root is resilience, and Davis clearly honors it. She spoke of communities that had to be tough-minded and resourceful, overcoming a great deal without much help from mental health providers. Later she said “it is a miracle that we have made it this far, and that we have been this resilient as a people.” If you inherited grit, you inherited something that kept people alive. That is worth keeping.

The third thing worth keeping is prayer. Davis did not ask anyone to choose between faith and care. “Prayer is still powerful,” she said. She added a qualification that shapes this whole guide: “It’s just to also say that’s not all there is, that God has given us in our toolbox.”

Go back to your inventory. Mark anything that belongs here: caution that protects you, strength that carried you, prayer that held you.

What may be time to set down

Some inherited messages do harm even when the people who passed them on meant well. Davis named the sharpest one directly. Many faith communities, she said, interpret mental illness as the result of something a person did wrong: a sin, a lifestyle, God punishing you. She called that harmful theology. Her reasons were concrete. Much mental illness involves heredity and biochemistry. Environment matters too, and she named economic stress and exposure to violence as stressors that fall disproportionately on African Americans.

Jude 3 holds that spiritual warfare and mental health are not an either/or, and that the church should refuse to spiritualize what is medical or medicalize what is spiritual. That leaves room for the spiritual life to matter in suffering. It leaves no room for the reflex that treats every struggle as a verdict.

A second message that may need setting down is the belief that strength means carrying it alone. Here Davis did something careful. She did not attack resilience. She widened it. The present task, she said, is “learning that we don’t have to carry all these things by ourselves when we have our emotional distress or burdens.” Then: “vulnerability is its own form of strength.” And her reason: “it is harder oftentimes to ask for help than it is to try to grit and bear it on one’s own.” Lisa Fields recognized the pattern, noting how often people assume “you just have to get through it.”

A third message is quieter. It says you are not allowed to need help unless something is officially wrong. Davis rejected that too: “you don’t have to even have a diagnosis to be able to say, I’m grieving a loss right now, and I need some support with that.”

Return to your list. Circle anything that belongs here. Some items may sit in both places. A grandmother’s toughness can be something to honor and something to stop imitating at three in the morning. That is not a contradiction. It is what an honest inventory usually looks like.

Scripture that starts with the body

Read 1 Kings 19:1-8 slowly, preferably aloud. Elijah has just come through a great public victory. Then a threat on his life sends him running into the wilderness, where he sits under a juniper tree and asks God to take his life. He falls asleep. An angel wakes him, tells him to eat, and he finds bread and water. He sleeps again. Then: “And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:7).

This is narrative, so it describes what God did for one prophet rather than handing down a rule. Read it as a story first. Still, notice the order of events. Before any conversation about Elijah’s fear or his calling, there is sleep, food, water and a touch. God does not scold him for being exhausted. The angel names the reason plainly: the journey is too great. Elijah’s despair is not treated as proof that his faith had failed.

That sits close to Davis’s simplest claim: “Our brain, our mind is an organ and we’ve gotta take care of it.” The comparison has limits. A person is more than a brain, and Davis was not saying otherwise. Her point was about shame. Nobody thinks a person with diabetes is spiritually deficient for seeing a doctor. She told her own story here. After her first child she was diagnosed with a postpartum mood disorder. She had sensed “something was not right, but this gave a name for it.” The name pointed her toward support.

If you find yourself where Elijah was, wishing your life would end, please do not wait to finish this guide. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour. Tell someone near you today. Elijah was not left alone under that tree, and you should not be either.

Then read Psalm 34:18: “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” This is poetry, and it promises nearness, not a schedule for recovery. It does not say the brokenhearted must first become composed. Sit with that for a few minutes before going on.

Healing that involves other people

Lisa Fields described a traumatic experience in college that she did not take to a counselor until graduate school, where a licensed counselor became, in her words, a healing place. Later she reread James and saw something she had missed. The verse reads, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). Her observation was that “you could be forgiven and not healed,” and that “that confession piece comes through confessing to other people.”

In its setting, James 5:13-16 speaks to suffering and sick believers. It tells them to pray, call the elders and confess to one another. It is not a passage about counseling, and it does not promise that every illness will lift. Lisa’s reading is an application. It is a fair one, because James pictures healing happening through community and not only through private prayer. A trained counselor is not the elders of James 5. But the movement is similar. Something that stays hidden can be forgiven before God and still keep hurting, and telling the truth to a trustworthy person is one way God brings relief.

Jude 3 holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If your inventory included the belief that needing a counselor means you did not pray enough, this is a good place to put it down.

A practice for this week: care for the organ

Choose a seven-day stretch. Each day has one small, physical task. None of them requires telling anyone your story.

1. Day one. Take the Elijah inventory. How much did you sleep last night? When did you last eat a real meal? Drink water? Go outside? Write the answers down without judging them.
2. Day two. Pick one of those and tend to it on purpose. Go to bed thirty minutes earlier, or eat lunch away from your phone.
3. Day three. Name what you are carrying in plain words, the way a doctor might describe a symptom. For example, I have not slept well in weeks, or I feel flat most mornings. No verdict attached.
4. Day four. Pray about it specifically. Not a general request for strength, but the exact thing you named.
5. Day five. Take one practical step toward care. Davis suggested calling your insurer to ask who is in network, looking for providers with sliding-scale fees, searching the Psychology Today therapist directory, and checking whether a nearby training center or your school offers low-cost or free sessions. Lisa Fields first got counseling through free sessions her graduate school offered. You are not committing to anything yet. You are finding out what exists.
6. Day six. Say one true sentence to one trusted person. It can be small, something like I have been having a harder time than I have let on.
7. Day seven. Return to your inventory. Has anything moved from one column to the other?

If day six feels impossible, skip it and come back later. The practice is meant to serve you, not to test you.

If you are gathering a group

Some people will come to this guide to discuss mental health. Others will come carrying it. Plan for both. Tell the group at the start that anyone can pass on any question, and mean it. Ask everyone to agree that what is shared stays in the room, and that no one retells another person’s story, even as a prayer request. Keep personal inventories private. If people want to share, invite them to share one thing they decided to keep and one thing they are thinking about setting down, and nothing more.

Resist the urge to answer pain with a verse or a fix. If someone says something heavy, thank them and let a moment of silence stand. If anyone discloses thoughts of suicide or self-harm, do not try to carry it within the group. Follow up privately that day, stay with them while they call or text 988 if needed, and help them connect with a pastor or counselor. Davis’s counsel to pastors applies here: transfer the trust someone has in you by saying “let me go with you.”

If you lead, consider whether you have done your own sorting. Davis said counseling students at her seminary are required to have their own therapy, because “we have to take ownership of our own stuff first.” A group learns what can be said by watching the person facilitating.

Questions to talk through

1. Which item on your inventory was hardest to place in one column? What makes it difficult to sort?
2. Davis describes caution about health care as warranted. How might someone keep that caution and still seek care wisely?
3. Where have you seen strength defined as carrying things alone? What would it look like for the strength you inherited to include asking for help?
4. In the Elijah story, God tends to the prophet’s body before addressing his fear. What does that suggest, if anything, about how you have tried to get well?
5. Lisa Fields observes that a person can be forgiven and not healed. Does that distinction fit your experience, or does it raise questions for you?
6. What would need to change in your church for someone to mention a counselor as easily as a doctor?
7. What is one inherited message you hope the next generation in your family does not receive?

Keep the list

Do not throw away your inventory when the week ends. Put it somewhere you will find it in a month. Read it again then. Some items may have moved. Others may still be stuck, and that is information too, not failure. If the stuck ones are heavy, that may be your signal to bring the list to a counselor and sort it with someone trained to help. The people who handed you these messages were carrying more than they could name. You are allowed to carry less, and to ask for help with the rest.