Not So Simple: The Many Sides of Mental Health

Our family lives in a four-bedroom, one-bathroom home. We love it, but there are six of us and one bathroom. We have found numerous creative ways to address this problem including:

We are on a first name basis with the car dealer down the street.

The family mantra when leaving any other location has become: “Did you use the bathroom?”

A special set of rules for showering and bathing which includes closing the curtain and leaving the door unlocked.

These solutions have served us well for our three years, but when it gets down to it, what we really need is another bathroom. And we need it yesterday. However, our home was also built in the 1800s and has as many quirks and needs as our own family. We have found, to our great consternation, there is no quick fix to this problem. To some degree, we just are going to have to live with it and also laugh about it, while searching for further solutions, while acknowledging that this is a problem of privilege, not of provision.

For most things in life we’d prefer a quick fix though, wouldn’t we? Or if not a quick fix, a quicker one at the very least. This is true in the realm of mental health as well.

We want it to be simple. We want our brains to work the way they are intended to work and our relationships to support the way they are intended to support and medicines to solve things and therapy to be quick and painless. Rarely does any of this happen just right, all the time.

Instead, most things in mental health, like most things in life, come with their &s.

What do I mean by that?

Most things in the world of mental health we hold in paradox or in duality. Mental health is messy yet beautiful in many, many ways. Think of neuro-networks, which do all kinds of good things like communicate with our bodies about how to breathe or which foot to set down first. They can master wildly complicated concepts like algebraic expressions and atomic physics and abstract thoughts like empathy and kindness. Yet, they weld themselves together in extremely unhelpful ways when presented with trauma, and weird things happen with misfiring and reuptake, and they can leave us addiction prone and with degenerative diseases that take years of research to produce band-aids let alone cures to show for it.

Simple, mental health is not.

Still, mental health remains a part of all of us, and God cares about our mental health, just as He cares about every other part of our bodies and lives, so it’s worthy of wrestling with as well.

In my book study, The Mighty & The Mysterious, I talk about standing in the slushy places of life, the complicated, the sometimes messy, those things we can’t easily explain. I found that we are made for these spaces — made to walk through the slush of life, pondering, wondering, wrestling — while also knowing that He Himself is not messy like all this stuff we walk through. I like to call these places the &s:

God is powerful & personal.

God is truth & God is love.

God is justice & God is mercy.

Life is simple in some ways & complicated in others.

Heartache is loss & growth.

Self-care is about me & it’s also about you.

The deeper I leaned into this space of the &s, I found many in the world of mental health and psychology:

We have agency or choice & life is a series of things that happen to us as well.

Relationships are vital & so is self-differentiation.

We uphold the honor of one another & our honor is dependent on no one.

Life, relationships, and purpose are about acceptance & also constant work.

We live in a world of microaggressions & good intentions.

Our mental health needs our apathy & our passion.

We are who we are at age 40 & age 4.

None of these above &s of mental health are simple, but they are important. We want fast answers to anxiety and depression and all that assails us and those we love. God instead gives us learning and discovery over time. I invite you to walk through these lovely complications with me this spring in an article series on the &s of mental health. We’ll walk through the list above and discover more of ourselves and more of where God is in the middle of it.

Most days, we need someone to remind us:

We are complicated, so our mental health will be also.

There may be no easy solutions, no quick fixes. Life, and our mental health as a result, is pretty much like a six-person family in a one-bathroom house – chaos can break out at any moment, but so can joy and play and wellness. What if we embraced both sides of that coin rather than pushed against them?

Let’s wrestle with the complicated and walk through the &s for better mental health.

Up Next -The Many Sides to Mental Health: Agency & Happenstance

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