How mental health and religion ‘collides’ in our community

"Growing up in a Caribbean household, I don't think we had a conversation around the table about mental health"

PICTURED: Rev. Dave Mahon is a Baptist Minister and mental health advocate

THE HISTORY of black communities and how they found solace in churches throughout Britain is as long as it is complex.

The 1940s saw the influx of Caribbean families to the UK that marked the arrival of the Windrush generation, called on by the British government after the devastation of the Second World War.

Their arrival led to the formation of hundreds of Caribbean Pentecostal and Holiness Churches throughout London, and later the founding of African churches.

These black churches became a safe haven for a generation of immigrants and their families that came to the mother country for a better life, amidst the inequalities they found in racism and poverty as black Britons.

Today, these disadvantages still exist and the recent pandemic may have exacerbated the issue. Peeling back the layers of a society divided by intersections of race and class, it was found that in a survey of 14,000 adults that black and ethnic minority people are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. They are more prone to suffer from mental health conditions than any other demographic.

This raises questions as to where they can turn to for support in a world with pre-dominantly white-led, secular mental health services.

Dave Mahon, a Baptist minister and mission worker, believes that the church should always be more than a place of worship for black people that are suffering from mental health.

At 24-years-old while living alone in Birmingham, he found himself feeling as if everything he did “fell through his fingers like sand;” he looks back on that time and can now call what he was experiencing as depression.

It was in the early 90s, an era that hadn’t yet polarised the conversation around mental health, that he felt as if his worlds as a black man and like many others raised in the church, started to collide.

A tabooed subject

“Growing up in a Caribbean household, I don’t think we had a conversation around the table about mental health. To even mention that to somebody that you had mental health issues, we’d probably say they are mad or even religious words like ‘demon possessed,’ he recalled.

“It was always shunned upon to talk about it, and so there was a tendency within me not to even want to talk about this thing. It was shameful to have these kinds of feelings; looking like I’m on top of the world but inside feeling really down and lonely.” Dave, whose family are from Barbados, acknowledges that Britain itself has had a difficult past with mental health.

It was at the turn of the 1960s that previously labelled “lunatic asylums” such as the infamous Broadmoor and Ashworth Hospitals – riddled with allegations of abuse and misconduct – did the language and treatment of those with mental health problems begin to change.

LEADING CHANGE: Dave preaching at a church in Iquitos, Peru

However, the dad-of-three realises that the “uncomfortable” conversation in black communities – and in certainly religious communities – hasn’t evolved with wider society.

“Culturally, we find it quite uncomfortable to talk about these subjects, even though we have issues within our families and within our churches and even within leadership as ministers,” he said.

“To talk about it, to open up and have an honest conversation, I think culturally we need to learn how to do that. We need to learn language and not necessarily from different cultures or different books, but we need to develop our own language.”

On the religious spectrum, the conversation is just as difficult with sentiments that “Jesus will heal everything” and so will prayer, because there are those examples to turn to in the Bible.

There is also another side, which believes that people are “fearfully and wonderfully” made by God just as we are which can prevent progress in battling mental health issues.

The role of the church

Growing up as a first-generation British-Caribbean – where the church community was a staple of many childhoods – Dave saw his peers dealing with the same struggles. One of his friends took his own life, but yet nobody knew about it and there was no “conversation.”

After becoming a minister in 2012, the 50-year-old had his first pastoring at an African and Caribbean church where he encountered the same sentiment. “My teaching in theology is from a Western perspective, so I had to learn a different cultural way of ministering or communicating to people from the black community concerning things like depression, grief and loss,” Dave admits.

“There was a tendency to say that the person is in heaven now, so let’s move on with our lives, there is nothing to talk about here and I could see that was causing some church members problems.

“It was more of an informal conversation that was needed as we were working and doing things together, rather than let’s meet at nine o’clock and let’s talk for an hour session.”

A stigma in black communities

Nathaniel Oke, a psychotherapist and Director at the Talking Therapy Clinic, believes that confronting the stigma around religion and culture in black communities is the first step to opening up discussion around mental health.

“Cultural influence is pivotal in addressing the stigma. It needs to be stated that the stigma around mental ill health is not a monopoly of the black community,” he said.

“There is however a distrust of authority that plays a huge part. This trust is well founded based on historically large disparity in the treatment and sectioning of black people compared to their white counterparts.

“Another major influence on this stigma is religion. The interpretation of religion is that faith in God through service and prayers should be enough to conquer any ills and thus seeking alternative routes is tantamount to doubting God. This misinterpretation can have the impact of stopping people from seeking viable and effective treatment.”

Mr Oke stresses that having spiritual or religious beliefs alongside seeking mental health services are not mutually exclusive as “they can both co-exist and aid each other.”

He added: “Therapy does not replace religion or faith. Therapy is the action of helping oneself as supported by major religions – God helps those that take action to actualise.

“Mental ill health is not a curse or a plague afflicting the non-believers or the sinners. Science is not an alternative to faith, it is in-fact the supporter.

“For prayer to work, it is encouraged that one has faith and belief in the power of prayer. If you will it, it shall be. It has been shown in various studies that a positive mindset aids physical and mental recovery. These two are the embodiment of faith and science co-existing.”

Mr Oke goes on to acknowledge that mental health services such as talking therapy and psychology originated in the West, along with their values and behaviours, the emergence of intercultural workings is also a “huge positive” for black religious communities seeking mental health support.

Now living in Iquitos, Peru as a mission worker – Dave is worlds away from his upbringing in leafy Aldershot, Hampshire and certainly from his family life in Brockley, London.

But he has already seen how the conversation around mental health rages on amidst a global pandemic since his four years in South America.

And how he still deals with the challenges of his own mental health that first arrived over 20 years ago.

“Just as a minister who has to lead a congregation and dealing with multiple sicknesses and bereavements, during a whole lockdown and various breakdowns with certain denominations, and ways of seeing things,” he said, “for a minister like myself to get sick, there would be a sense that I wasn’t a proper minister. So, there’s always a pressure to look professional when you are broken yourself.”

Honest conversations

For Dave, over two decades on from his first experience of suffering with mental health alone and that eventually saw him called to God, he now reaches out to a black community of other ministers to support him through a unique, yet duly unspoken reality of being black, while grappling with spirituality.

“I would say to use technology to reach out and talk to people during this time, some churches are doing a wonderful job at this. The human race can be a benefit from each other,” he explained.

“We talk about the disparities between black and white people, but when it comes to mental health we can learn from each other’s stories. However, we can’t take everything that they do and prescribe it to black people, and we can’t wait for white people to find the solutions for our mental health problems.

“Statistically, we are the ones in the mental health institutions and prisons, we have to write our own material and this will help white people better understand us also, rather than resulting to medication in the first instance.

“But we can learn from each other, from the scriptures to start the conversation and to keep it going.”

To find out more about how to access spiritually-led mental health services, vist the Talking Therapy Clinic.

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