210 - Do Christians Suffer from Mental Illness? with Guest Kathleen Denly

We don’t like to talk about it. We’re afraid to admit to it. But the fact is that being a firm believer doesn’t keep mental illness from striking. How do we, as believers and writers, deal with the reality of mental illness? Guest Kathleen Denly joins us to share how God met her in her own struggle and continues to guide her to soundness of body and mind.
About Kathleen Denly
Kathleen Denly writes historical romance to entertain, encourage, and inspire readers toward a better understanding of our amazing God and how He sees us. Award winning author of the Chaparral Hearts series, she also shares history tidbits, thoughts on writing, books reviews and more at KathleenDenly.com. (kathleendenly.com/)
Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon ( / writefromthedeep ) , we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!
Karen: Hi guys, and welcome to the deep. We are delighted you are here because we have an outstanding guest to share her experiences, knowledge, and wisdom with you.
Erin: We do. Her name is Kathleen Denley, and I get to introduce her. Karen and I both got to know Kathleen through her writing. We both edited her work and it’s been great.
Welcome, Kathleen Denly
Kathleen is the award-winning author of the Chaparral Hearts series. She writes historical romance to entertain, encourage, and inspire readers toward a better understanding of our amazing God and how He sees us. Kathleen enjoys finding the lesser known pockets of history and bringing them to life through the joys and struggles of her characters.
California, a favorite setting to her stories, is also her home, and she lives there with her loving husband, four young children, two dogs, and yes everybody, 10 cats. As the member of the adoption and foster community, children in need are a cause dear to her heart, and she finds they make frequent appearances in her stories.
So Kathleen, welcome. We’re glad to have you here.
Kathleen: Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.
Take Courage in God’s Strength
Erin: Let’s just jump right in. Kathleen, we love to ask people, what does the deep mean to you?
Kathleen: I’ve been listening to your podcast for so long. I thought about this for quite a while, and I feel like it changes depending on the season of life I’m in. Writing from the deep is about taking courage in God’s strength and wisdom, being able to go into those raw, dark, honest places that make you nervous. But again, leaning on God’s courage and strength to share the lessons he’s taught you from those dark and hard places with others.
Erin: I love that because we do, we have to go to the places where we’re nervous. That’s where it gets real.
A Scary Truth
Today we wanted to talk about something more real than Christians sometimes want to admit, but we need to admit it. We need to talk about it, and it’s mental illness. We asked Kathleen to share her story with us. But first, Kathleen, why do you think that Christians sometimes struggle to admit the reality of mental illness?
Kathleen: Well, first, I think it’s scary. We don’t want to think about the fact that this could happen to us. We wanna think, “Well, no. I’m a good Christian. I do all the right things, therefore I am impervious to this.” But that’s not actually what Scripture plays out.
Karen: Right.
Kathleen: Several people in the Bible struggled with mental illness. If you look for the signs, you can see them easily. And there are even people who showed signs, and expressed the words, of suicidal thoughts, where they were despairing of life and they thought God had abandoned them. They had real struggles just like we do today.
Mental Illness Taboo in the church?
Kathleen: But our culture has made it somewhat taboo. There is a history in the church of misunderstanding back in the 1700s, 1800s, and even farther back, of what mental illness actually was. They thought it was strictly a spiritual thing, or it was a sign of moral depravity or immaturity. And so a lot of taboo and stigma developed. It’s not as scary if we can say, “Oh, well, not me. I don’t struggle with that.” I don’t think people intentionally think, “Oh, I’m better than them, because they have that.” I think it’s more of a fear-based reaction.
Erin: And some Christians seem to think, “Hey, we have God so nothing can be wrong with our minds. We’ll just pray it away.” You know, as if you could pray away a broken leg.
Karen: It’s like they’re trying to cover God’s backside. “Oh, he would never let you go into that. That can’t affect you because you have Jesus.”
It’s A Brain Problem
Erin: But there are very real struggles with the way our brains function. A friend of mine knows that I battle chronic fatigue and she just sent me an article about a recent study where they took MRIs and there’s a real dysfunction that they can see in the brain. It’s not like, “Oh, you’re lazy. Oh, you’re tired for no reason.” It’s a brain pr...