COVID did not invent or invite mental illness

​A growing number of headlines I read related to the Covid 19 health crisis in our country speak to a growing mental health crisis.

On one hand, those headlines encourage me. There are finally conversations suggesting mental health is as important as our physical health. On the other hand, it demonstrates how blind we've been to a crisis that's been snatching the life out of too many people and families long before Covid 19 showed up.

Long before Covid 19 showed up, hundreds of thousands of young people and middle aged people and our elderly friends and neighbors were waking up each and every day with a sense of impending dread, a sense of hopelessness, with a fear that they are trapped.

The fact that many Americans are waking up now experiencing some of this for the first time doesn't mean 50,000 people didn't take their lives by suicide last year because they were feeling those same things. It doesn't mean 70,000 people didn't overdose on drugs last year - many of them tied to feelings of hurt and depression and hopelessness.

Both of these numbers are rising rapidly. Every. Single. Year. Combined, they took far more lives last year before Covid arrived than Covid itself has taken to date.

Long before Covid got here, more middle school and high school students than ever have been saying they seriously considered suicide last year. Here in Virginia, on the most recent youth survey, 10% of our students said they seriously considered ending their lives last year.

I'm simply saying that just because many Americans are waking up imagining how much easier life would be if they weren't here for the first time in their lives doesn't mean a whole lot of Americans haven't been waking up with that feeling for a very long time.

Many Americans are discovering there is a difference between feeling down and a little nervous about life than being downright depressed and anxious. For many years, that is what has killed the mentally ill - this notion that 'well I've felt down before and I found a way to get out of bed so why can't they?'

This notion has robbed people of the help and resources people who wake up and say I have a fever or a swollen ankle get.

People are discovering how depression and anxiety works. It runs deeper than a bad mood or a bad day. It's like swallowing a 150 pound weight. You read a "you can do it" inspirational meme on Facebook and feel like, sure, that is all well and good and I'm ready to jump out of bed, but who is going to come take care of this weight I swallowed that has me pinned to it?

I think that weight sometimes becomes 300 pounds if you're a Christian. We've painted this picture that as Christians we're immune to swallowing weights. We have God on our side so if Jesus can rise from the dead surely we're able to rise from the bed after swallowing weights. So we have Christian guilt on top of the mental illness.

Well Christians, have you ever read Psalms? How many weights did David swallow? How many days did THAT guy struggle to get out of bed, crying out to God, I just can't do this God.

Being a Christian doesn't mean we are immune to the pain and suffering of anxiety and depression, it just means we always have someone who gets it when a lot of the world around us doesn't.

That is always the starting point to getting rid of that weight. Knowing someone knows you are buried alive under it. Knowing that because they do know it, they are going to give you a hand. They are going to tell you "I know you can do it," but not without giving you a hand or a hug or a phone number or a crane if that's what you need to help you get up and help you find the help that will help.

I love that Goff says anxiety doesn't leave a ransom note when it steals our lives. Because it doesn't. It doesn't send us some demands we have to meet before it sets us free. But just because it doesn't send one doesn't mean we don't know what that note would say.

It would say you need a friend. You need a friend to know you're not in a bad mood or just having a bad day - you need a friend who knows you feel trapped and buried. You need a friend who goes beyond cheer up and says let me pick you up.

As Christians, we know God is always handing us his hand. It's just often harder to see it when that hand doesn't look like a friend's hand who completely gets your struggle.

This Covid 19 virus - it may be novel. But the mental health crisis we're talking about that's coming with it - it is by no means novel. My hope is, though, that by calling this mental health crisis a new crisis, by sounding new alarms, we'll discover for the first time just how much some of our friends need social connection far more than social distancing.