Faith and Mental Health: Learning That Faith and Struggle Can Coexist
This past week, I spoke to college students at UNT and TWU about navigating mental health and faith together. At the center of the talk was a tension many of us can carry: the assumption that a strong faith should eliminate emotional struggle, and the confusion that follows when it doesn't.
Where This Started for Me
College is often described as “the best four years of your life,” bringing a formative and transitional season of new independence, new relationships, and real identity development alongside new pressures, uncertainty, and distance from the support systems that have held us up. I experienced that tension directly during my own college years.
During one particular season of college, I found myself struggling to carry everything that was on my plate. That season brought real anxiety in a way I couldn’t shake or walk myself through on my own. What made it so disorienting was the timing: my faith life had never felt more alive and consistent, and yet I was facing significant challenges with mental health for the first time.
Beginning counseling helped me understand something I now spend my career helping others understand too: psychological struggle is not evidence of weak faith. Working with a therapist during that season also planted the first seed of my own interest in clinical work, which eventually became the path that led me where I am today.
That experience still shapes why I feel especially called to work with college students, and why I love speaking to this population on the intersection of faith and mental health.
Holding Both: What the Talk Covered
During the talk, we focused on three core areas:
Understanding why deep faith and real emotional or psychological struggle are not mutually exclusive, even when it feels like they should be.
Recognizing the trap of spiritual bypassing — using faith language to move past pain rather than bringing it honestly into relationship with God.
Learning a few tangible tools for noticing and responding to their own mental and emotional state before it quietly accumulates.
The most impactful part was hearing the students’ questions for how to navigate and make sense of the intersection of faith and mental health. We explored practical questions, like how to bring pain honestly before God instead of bypassing these experiences with platitudes and how to tell the difference between identity-based self-talk ("I'm just an anxious person") and experience-based self-talk ("I'm noticing a lot of anxiety right now"). Students left with language for their own struggle, permission to bring their whole selves to God without shame, and a few concrete places to start when things feel like too much.
Why This Work Matters to Me
I care deeply about this intersection because navigating faith and mental health together can feel confusing and difficult to make sense of, and a lot of people feel like they're figuring it out alone. It's easy to wonder why prayer isn't making the anxiety go away, or to feel unsure about seeking professional help when you also believe deeply in God's healing. Those questions are common, and they don't mean anything is wrong with someone's faith.
I don't think professional support and spiritual life are in competition. I think they need each other. Someone can trust God fully and still benefit from therapy. Someone can be deeply committed to their faith and still need medication, counseling, or both. Naming that clearly, out loud, in front of a room, tends to bring a lot of relief.
This is a big part of why I love speaking on this topic to different audiences and communities. Every time I get to talk about faith and mental health coexisting, I watch people relax a little, like they've been given permission to stop untangling something on their own that was never meant to be carried alone. That moment of relief is exactly why I keep doing this work.
Let's Work Together
I offer talks and training on the intersection of faith and mental health for a range of audiences, including college students, youth ministries, young adult groups, engaged and married couples, and ministry teams. If you're interested in bringing a similar presentation to your organization or community, I'd love to talk it through with you!