One in four of us in the U.S. live with a mental illness.

That’s what Brain & Behavior Research Foundation reports. Twenty-five percent of Americans suffer from anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, depression, PTSD or other mental illnesses. In all likelihood, either you or someone you know struggles with mental illness every day.

It’s crucial that we have information on this to help us love, with grace, those who suffer with a mental illness. What should we know?

Pastors Suffer Too

A recent report by LifeWay titled, “Study of Acute Mental Illness and Christian Faith,” provides a glimpse of mental illness within the Protestant church. Over 20 percent of pastors “have personally struggled with mental illness of some kind.” Seventy-four percent of pastors admitted to personally knowing one or more people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression (family, friends, church members) while 76 percent of pastors know one or more people who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (family, friends, church members). So pastors are aware of parishioners having mental illnesses, but is the topic taboo from the pulpit?

According to a separate LifeWay Research study, only about 7 percent of pastors regularly address mental illness from the pulpit. Twenty-six percent do so a handful of times per year, while 66 percent address mental illness rarely to never. Are pastors afraid to take on the subject?

The Church and Mental Illness

Maybe people don’t want to talk about mental illness in the church. “Nearly everybody has a family member that is having mental health issues and nobody wants to talk about it,” Jaque Coulson, Director of Care at Ankeny First United Methodist Church in Des Moines, Idaho, commented in a 2014 Guardian article. “It can be freeing, in a sense, to have a safe place to talk about it.”

Ed Stetzer, in his article “The Christian Struggle with Mental Illness,” says that, “In many ways, the church, the supposed haven for sufferers, is not a safe place for those who struggle with mental illness.” That’s because, more often than not, there are comments (like the ones I received from my last mental illness piece) that if a Christian has a mental illness, he or she just doesn’t have enough faith.

A Christian Response

The truth is far more complex. Many people have died from unhealed illnesses — while their family prays with faith that healing would come and are devastated when their loved one dies anyway. So to buy into the theory that it’s a lack of faith on their part is presumptuous at best and troubling at worst. Paul, of all biblical characters, had more faith than most, yet he was not healed. God allowed the thorn in his flesh and did not heal him, in spite of Paul’s earnest prayers. The judgment and critical heart expressed in that belief hurts to the core those who struggle with mental illness.

Dr. Paul Summergrad, president of the American Psychiatric Association and psychiatrist-in-chief at Tufts medical center, also said in the 2014 Guardian article that things are changing for the psychiatric community in terms of opening up about the disease. “We are in general moving to be being more open to talk about these conditions. And the more they become visible, and the more there is sunlight on them, the less there will be stigma and people will recognize that these are thinks lots of people suffer with and that lots of people can get better.”

The Proper Christian Response

In the meantime, as Christians with mental illness open up to others about their struggle, we should meet them with love and compassion: “Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble” (1 Peter 3:8). We should also realize that mental illness is prevalent — 25 percent of Americans struggle with it. You are not alone.