Mental Health – DARIN MICHAEL SHAW

One of the most dangerous misconceptions about mental health within certain religious communities is the idea that depression, anxiety, or trauma are strictly isolated, individual problems. We tend to view mental illness as a private spiritual battle taking place solely within one person’s mind or heart. We treat it like a broken bone—fix the individual, and the problem is solved.

But thirty years of living at the intersection of clinical science and theology has shown me that mental health challenges never operate in a vacuum. They are highly relational. When one member of a family system is suffering from the heavy weight of depression, anxiety, or a trauma response, the entire family system shifts to accommodate that pain.

Think of a family like a hanging mobile over a child’s crib. If you pull on just one string, every single piece of the mobile begins to twist, shake, and lose its balance. That is exactly what happens within a household.

When depression enters a home, it can manifest as a heavy, thick cloud of silence. Communication slows to a crawl, and family members may withdraw into their own separate corners, experiencing a collective loneliness that is hard to articulate. When severe anxiety is present, the home environment can become highly hyper-vigilant. The nervous systems of everyone in the house become synchronized to a state of high alert, waiting for the next panic attack, the next sudden mood shift, or the next crisis. And when trauma is part of the story, past wounds can cast long, unpredictable shadows over everyday interactions, causing family members to react to one another out of defense rather than love.

Sadly, when families look to their faith communities for help with these complex dynamics, they are too often met with judgment, misunderstanding, or rigid, unhelpful advice from religious leaders who simply don’t understand the clinical realities. They are told to have more family devotions or to correct behavioral issues, which only deepens the sense of shame and isolation.

Jesus never operated that way. When He healed people, He almost always restored them back to their families and communities. He understood that our brokenness affects our relationships, and His healing is always systemic, compassionate, and deeply relational.

If your family system is currently feeling twisted or broken by the realities of mental illness, please know that there is zero judgment from the heart of God. You are not a failing Christian family; you are a family navigating a complex medical and emotional reality in a fallen world.

No one is meant to walk this valley alone. In our daily book, Sanctuary Devotional, David Hoskins and I talk openly about the fact that mental health treatment, clinical recovery, and deep spiritual transformation are not only completely compatible, they are often inseparable. Healing doesn’t just mean fixing the person who has the diagnosis; it means bringing an honest, raw conversation into the entire home, creating a predictable rhythm of grace that allows everyone’s nervous system a safe place to settle.

The Father’s hands are wide enough to hold your entire family. If your home feels fractured today, stop trying to force an artificial wholeness. Welcome Jesus into the middle of the mess, right into the muck and weeds of your family’s daily reality, and let Him begin to speak peace to the whole system.

Darin Michael Shaw, MDiv, MA, is a collaborative writer, researcher, and veteran of over twenty years in pastoral ministry who has navigated his own seasons of brokenness to find a deeper identity as a beloved son of God. Along with David Hoskins, he is the co-author of the newly released morning and evening devotional, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing. [Click here to order your copy of the Sanctuary Devotional on Amazon]

For over twenty-one years in pastoral ministry and decades spent navigating the intersection of faith and mental health, I have sat on every side of the recovery table. I have been the one crying out from the bottom of a dark valley, and I have been the one standing on the rim, desperately looking down, trying to figure out how to pull someone I love out of the shadows.

If you are currently loving someone who is in deep emotional or psychological pain, I want to say something to you right now that you might not hear within the walls of a typical church building: It is incredibly heavy, and it is okay to feel exhausted.

When someone we love is diagnosed with depression, battling debilitating anxiety, or sorting through the fragmented shards of trauma, our immediate Christian instinct is often to go into “fix-it” mode. We pray harder, we quote scripture, or maybe we accidentally slip into those well-meaning but incredibly painful pat answers. We say things like, “Just surrender it to the Lord,” or “Joy comes in the morning,” as if a chemical imbalance or a deep psychological wound can be swept away by a neat spiritual catchphrase.

But when those quick fixes don’t work—when the morning comes and your spouse still cannot get out of bed, or your child is still paralyzed by a panic attack—a quiet, insidious shift happens in the heart of the one who loves them. You begin to carry an invisible emotional toll.

You start walking on eggshells in your own home, constantly measuring the emotional temperature of the room. You watch the person you love slip further away into an ocean of sadness or fear, and the gap between what you believe (“God is good”) and what you are seeing (“my family is breaking”) begins to feel like a vast, terrifying sea. In the quiet, lonely hours of the night, you might even find yourself fighting your own unexpressed anger—anger at the illness, anger at the situation, and sometimes, a deeply guilt-inducing anger at God for not stepping in faster.

Religious culture often tells us that if we just have enough faith, we shouldn’t feel broken by the storms of life. But when I look at the gospels, I see a completely different Jesus. I see a Savior who looked at people in pain and was moved with profound, gut-wrenching compassion. When Jesus encountered the marginalized, the broken, and those crushed by the heavy burdens laid on them by the rigid religious leaders of His day, He didn’t offer a lecture or a reprimand. He offered Himself. He sat with them in the muck and the weeds.

Loving someone in pain means you are participating in a holy, sacrificial kind of love. But it also means your own heart is sustaining real, measurable bruising. It is not a lack of faith that makes you feel tired; it is the reality of human love in a fallen, fractured world.

In our book, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing due out this fall, David Hoskins and I wanted to build a literal sanctuary for both the person who is struggling and the one who is walking beside them. You do not have to pretend to be whole while your internal world is fracturing under the weight of someone else’s suffering. The Father’s hands are not resting on the shoulders of the prodigal because the prodigal has it all together; those hands are there to offer comfort in the midst of the brokenness.

If you are the one holding the line for someone else right now, take a deep breath. You don’t have to fix them today. Jesus is not judging your exhaustion. He is inviting you to pull up a chair, sit beneath His gaze, and remember that you are a beloved child of God, completely independent of how well you perform as a caregiver.

Darin Michael Shaw, MDiv, MA, is a collaborative writer, researcher, and veteran of over twenty years in pastoral ministry who has navigated his own seasons of brokenness to find a deeper identity as a beloved son of God. Along with David Hoskins, he is the co-author of the soon to be released morning and evening devotional, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing.

Tag: Mental Health

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