Video Transcript: Integration

Welcome back to the short on mental health integration, the mini course. I am  Brandon in the last section we talked about the man and the woman and how  they had inherent value, and then how that value is fractured. When sin entered  the world, and how things were broken, how mental illness may have entered  the world, through the breaking. Everything as sin entered. In this section, we're  going to talk about this question of why integration. What does that mean? What does that have to do with anything? Let's start there. Why integration?  Integration is putting two things together. In this case, it is the integration  between faith and mental health. It's how our faith and mental health encounter  each other, and how they merge together, and how they change and inform  each other. And this case, a lot of times, we talked about the hermeneutical  spiral. That is where our experience informs how we read the Bible informs our  experience, informs how to read the Bible. So in this case, we can see that this  integration can be really important. Now, there's a really important reason for  that, which is because you need to do integrative work, if you experienced  disintegration, when we started the nonprofit to work with faith and mental  health, and one of the things that we saw is disintegration among how people  saw themselves and how people saw God, it looked something like this. Three  things we heard over and over again. First, I will never be who I was. We  constantly saw people who had been in positions of power or authority, who are  no longer in those positions of power and authority, who had felt really, really  capable. And suddenly were not very capable, who had been doing amazing  things. And now we're not capable of doing those amazing things. And their  action to that was to say I will never be who I was, I was a somebody, I'm no  longer a somebody. It's almost like we're looking at Genesis 1, and 2, and then  Genesis 3, I was somebody and now I'm not somebody, something entered the  world that broke me. This was after they had experienced mental illness. The  people that we were talking to had mental illness. They ranged from, homeless,  drug addicts to CEOs of multi million dollar companies, from agnostics to  pastors. They were all over the spectrum. But universally, they said, I don't get to be who I was, again. The second thing that they said over and over is I'm not  good enough anymore. They had felt like they weren't good enough. Maybe they were before they can perform for God. They can do all these things for God.  They could lead Bible studies, they could lead churches, they could do the  things that they felt connected them. But now they felt like they weren't enough.  They weren't valuable enough. They weren't worthy enough, because they  couldn't perform anymore. Their capacities had been linked to their value. And  now that their capacity was diminished, their value was diminished. Over and  over, in every case, we saw, I still remember sitting with the pastor who said to  me, he said, Who am I anymore? I'm not worthy. I'm not good anymore. I can't  do this stuff anymore. The third thing that we saw was that how could God let  me go through this, he cannot still love me. And in some cases, this even had a 

worst side to it. God can't love me and let me go through this. Sometimes even  God must actively hate me to let me go through this. This idea that if God loves  his kids, he's not going to put them through hell like this. Why on earth would  this happen to me? And over and over and over, we saw these same questions.  So we had to ask what is missing? Because this wasn't just about dealing with  mental health issues. This was about dealing with faith in the midst of mental  health, and how their faith had been destroyed and blown apart by their own  mental illness. What does a mental health struggle actually cost? It could cost  everything, there were no longer answers to really simple questions that some  of us have answers to. And some of those may have just known the answers to  as far as like just understood them. But we can still answer and that still not be  in conflict with our own experience. Questions like, who am I? Am I somebody  that matters? Does God actually like me? Am I worthy of love and belonging?  Can I do things? Who is God? Is God in favor of me? Does God like me? Does  God want to be with me? Does God love me? And, what am I capable of? Is the  life where I was capable .and I defined myself with my capacity all gone or is  there still hope?. When we ran into people over and over and over, were asking  these questions, we had to ask, what is going on with all of this? And how can  we make a difference? This is the why behind mental health integration,  because suddenly these questions of faith didn't have answers anymore.  Because mental health had absolutely blown them apart. So we had to go back  to the drawing board and ask, okay, well, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean for God to like you? What does it mean to be valuable? Are these  things that change? Or are these things that are just gone forever? Is it right that somebody says, I'm not worthy anymore? The answer is, no it's not. But we  have to do some serious work in understanding how people think about their  own value and worth and how they think about God in order to understand how  we can move forward through this. In the case of most of these questions, we  had the opportunities to walk with these people for an extended period of time.  And many of them through coaching and discipleship work, came out the other  side and said, I am good and valuable and worthy. My life matters. I can make a  difference. But in the midst of their journeys when we met them they weren't  even close to these answers for questions. I will see you in the next section.