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Mental Health is Everybody’s Job: An Interview with Dr. Adam Wilson: Podcast Episode 118

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In today’s podcast, Dr. Adam Wilson from Denver Seminary joins Catherine Boyle to share about the work he and others within the seminary have done around mental health support within Christian schools. Dr. Wilson believes that mental health is everybody’s job, whether you are a parent, teacher, ministry leader, or friend. Take a listen and read the transcript of this insightful conversation.

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Catherine Boyle: Well, hi everyone. This is Catherine Boyle from Key Ministry. Welcome to this edition of Key Ministry, the Podcast! Today I am joined by a guest—I love that—and today my guest is Dr. Adam Wilson from Denver Seminary. Adam has done a lot of really interesting work that overlaps with the mental health ministry that we have within Key Ministry. He's worked with a lot of different organizations and also on mental health support in Christian schools. So I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation, wherever you're coming into this. So Adam, thank you for your time and welcome to Key Ministry the Podcast.

Adam Wilson: Thank you for having me.

Boyle: So just tell us a little bit about yourself. I already spilled the beans that you're with Denver Seminary, but just share a little bit about what you do there, some of the books that you've written, those kinds of things.

Wilson: Sure. So historically, and still to date, I'm a child and adolescent counselor, so licensed professional counselor. And I started out in community mental health and worked in a Christian outpatient counseling group for a long time, and was embedded in a Christian school one day a week, working with students there. And then throughout community mental health, I also worked within schools quite a bit. And so over time—school-based mental health and youth mental health—they're kind of at the core of my passions—in what, I feel like God called me to try to have an impact in. So when I started teaching full-time, which was 2017, the initial step in was just teaching Human Development in a Neuroscience class. That's another one of my geek fests, Neuroscience. So teaching in that. But then we had a School Counseling program that at the time was just a certificate program, but then the state changed the licensure rules for school counselors where we needed to create a Master's program.

So I was asked to take over that. And so I developed a Master's program for the School Counseling students. And then alongside that, there was a question of this being a way that the Seminary could have a very direct impact within the community. Obviously, the Seminary had been working within churches for as long as it existed, and had missionaries all over the world, lots of world impact. But this was kind of a newer way that the Seminary was faced with an opportunity to impact the world. And so, they asked, “What else could we do around school counseling that might be helpful?” And so I developed the idea for the School Counseling Mental Health Initiative (SCMHI), which is a research initiative that I direct. And the idea was in my time working with schools, I recognize there's a gap between what the schools—whether that's Christian, private, public—what they were trying to do to support student wellbeing and mental health and their time, money, resources, and sometimes knowledge base to be able to do that out of what we know works.

And so I said, well, why don't we create a research initiative that comes in and tries to help bridge that gap for people, tries to help them build the evidence-based or provide evidence-based activities for them to be able to do to help support student mental health. So that's what the SCMHI was, and it is now—we're in our fifth year doing it, and it has just been remarkable. I think we'll talk a little bit more about that later. It's been an amazing journey so far in what we've been doing. So apart from doing the—we call it the SCMHI by the way, I'm going to just default into calling it the SCMHI as we talk.

Boyle: Great.

Wilson: Apart from the SCMHI, I continue to teach full-time. I have a little private practice on the side, and again, teaching child adolescent counseling, human development, the neuro class among others. As far as what I’ve written, I helped write a chapter in a book treating trauma in Christian counseling, wrote a book on the effects of trauma on the brain and the nervous system. So that was edited by the Gingriches, Fred and Heather Gingrich, wonderful friends and colleagues. And then I have most recently written a chapter in an intro to Christian school counseling book, which is to be published this fall. Then several journal articles along the way, things related to mental health in Christian schools, and lots of presentations on youth mental health and neuroscience along the way.

Boyle: It sounds like you've got the typical academic kind of thing going on there, with ‘publish or perish,’ but it's really great stuff, and it's so relevant and important in our time, and definitely in the Christian school kind of environment. These schools don't typically have the resources for that sort of thing that the public schools do, and even a lot of private schools.

So in keeping with all of this work that you've done around mental health support, a lot of what I've seen in conversation with you—and I’ve also seen on the Denver Seminary website—is a focus on mental wellness. And I personally love that, because I think that there's an awful lot of focus on mental illness, and really—if you can focus on what is working, sometimes that's a more effective strategy. So how do you or the seminary define mental wellness, either in the church setting, family, school, what have you?

Wilson: Absolutely. Well, I think I'll go with my definition that's the one that I spent the most time with, but my definition of mental wellness is based a little bit on a frustration, both directions. One was when we were initially doing a lot of focus groups and interviews with people around their experiences around mental health, what we found is many people—and I almost want to say the majority of people—defined mental health in a way to where what they actually meant was mental illness. They said, I struggle with mental health. And what they actually meant is I struggle with mental illness or my child struggles with mental illness. And that started to bother me a bit, because the definition of health is a spectrum. It's not something that you have illness and health as binary categories. We're all moving back and forth on our physical health on a daily basis.

At any given moment, we're more or less healthy. If I just ate six donuts, I'm less healthy! If I go for a run, I'm more healthy. But I don't think we traditionally have thought of mental health in that same way, that our mental health is varying at any given moment, at any given point. And some of us have maybe genetic predispositions or certain events in life that have moved us one direction or another, by default. But every day, every choice, every thought, every behavior that we do, and frankly, all the physical health choices that we make are all directly impacting our overall wellness. So my definition of mental wellness or mental health is the pursuit of health. It's those choices, no matter where we start—how do we move forward in a way that promotes and fosters healthy thinking, healthy behaviors, healthy choices, healthy social interactions, healthy spiritual practices? All the things that would move us towards health, or in some ways fight against the movement towards illness, which is an effect of the fall; there is entropy and there is damage done.

But our pursuit, and frankly the default God has designed us with—is towards health. If we cut our hand, the default naturally is for our skin to move towards healing. If we are ill, our body is fighting to move us back towards healing. So that's the default. And psychologically and neurologically, it's the same thing. Again, some have greater barriers against that than others do, but at the same time, the pursuit towards health and towards wellness is a calling from God. That's a part of what our job is. And again, part of my sense of why I want to work in the field of developing counselors is because that's the goal of counseling, is to facilitate that process towards healing and removing barriers where we can.

Boyle: So is that in a nutshell, kind of what SCMHI does? And so if that is what SCMHI does, then who is your audience who's using your resources? And I know you have success stories, so I'd love to hear a couple of those, just little short nuggets if you've got some.

Wilson: Yes, absolutely. So our audience initially was to partner with educators and educational systems. And so our target is students, student wellness. Student mental health was the initial goal. We want to promote practices and behaviors and systems that facilitate that process towards wellness. And that's not always recovery from illness or dwelling just on the illness—it's that—but it's also the fact of, what are we doing proactively to promote wellness? What are we doing to proactively promote the fruits of the Spirit among our kids? Patience and control, and these things that help promote wellness. So our audience in one sense was education and educators, but what we found early on when we started—when I started, COVID hit right after we started—and we were blocked from doing any active research initially because schools were kind of struggling to figure out, what are we going to do? How do we do this, what can we do?

And so I just started having conversations like this with educators, just listening and saying, what is it like for you? What are you noticing? What is it you feel like you're needing? What is it you feel like you are really good at already? What would be something that would help you to do more of that? Good. And in listening, what we found was the needs vary depending on context for sure. But at the same time, what folks need is partnership. They just need relationship. They need people alongside to help brainstorm, to provide some resources to facilitate a conversation, to help them think through a process that would help them to do what they're doing better, or just identify what's working. And so ultimately, our audience in what we're trying to, I call cross-pollinating. So we're trying to cross-pollinate, to link churches with schools, link parents with educators, link educators with educators, link pastors with resources.

We're trying to create a very large system of overlapping communication across all different areas, at the core of which, everyone is trying to support the youth. So our audience ultimately—trickle-down economics—we're trying and we're working with lots of different folks. So as far as successes go, there's one that always stands out in my mind; it’s the one I'm most proud of; I’m so proud of this group, they just ran with it.

I can't name names. We always keep our partners confidential, but one of the private school systems that we worked with when we initially worked with them had really little-to-no infrastructure around student wellness, in the sense of mental health support, as well as promoting this health. They had lots of spiritual resources and character development resources, and they had endless heart and love for their kids.

But it's just systemically, a lot of Christian schools and private schools don't have an institutional history of supporting mental health. That's something that's typically been external to that system. But now more and more schools are realizing, this can't be external anymore, only external. We have to do something internally to support our students, because they’re struggling here and not just out there. And so as they worked with us, we did focus groups with parents and educators and staff and administrators and kids, and we have this wide range of insights, and our team was able to summarize that and present it to the school and help them think it through, and they just ran with it. And over the next couple few years, they started developing policies; they got Mental Health First Aid training for everybody in the school, and they were creating policies and they had their teachers trained and they were focusing on teacher wellness, and they just went nuts with it and really took it.

We (SCMHI) were just standing back at that point—we're trying to work ourselves out of jobs, to help people be empowered to do what they need to do. And so it's just been so fun to watch that group really take charge, and make proactive progress on wellness and not just a reactive, how do we prevent suicide, which of course is essential, but if kids are suicidal, we need to help them there, but we need to figure out why are the kids suicidal, which is going to be more of a proactive work. And so that's the one that just makes me so happy when I think about what they've done with the research.

Boyle: Do you have any real specific metrics around, I mean, I don't even know exactly what I'm asking here, but maybe kids who are seeking treatment for depression or anxiety, like any of those metrics coming down in their environment as a result of implementing this (program)? I mean, I believe you, but I'm just curious.

Wilson: Yes, absolutely. Well, the research we did with them initially was qualitative, and so it wouldn't have been tracked as far as progress goes in quantitative kind of numbered ways. But anecdotally, I can answer that as far as progress, the utilization of the resources that the school has offered, things like having counselors available and having these trainings that people can go to and having programs that kids can take part in that promote social and emotional growth and things like that. The involvement in the engagement of the community has significantly increased where you see a whole lot more buy-in within the community. You have a whole lot more conversation within the community. I know often a lot of people move into, we need to do something mode when a child has committed suicide or there's an attempted suicide or there's some extreme exposure within the community to something.

And so it's difficult if you track just those exposures—you could say that's a metric—to say there's been a significant reduction in the numbers of those. You have to be really careful with that, though. I think we can become a little bit too comfortable with that, meaning, everything's okay, when the reality is the vast majority of kids aren't going to end up in that place. And if the vast majority of kids are struggling in a different way, with performance anxiety and stress, and they're overworking, and we have a term we call “engagement fatigue,” where they're just so constantly on that they're burning out. And if your educators are burning out, they just feel like they can't stop and there's no Sabbath. Those are the kinds of things that we want to make sure we're looking for.

So reality is, I think metrics-wise, what we've seen overall is when you put a lot more emphasis on mental wellness, we've started to see benefits as far as, say, suicide rates go. We're starting to see a dip in youth suicide rates over time, and you can look back and look at how many resources have been poured into trying to do preventative work. Sources of Strength would be a great one, and a lot of schools that they use that are looking at suicide prevention, but it's all about how do you tap into your daily strengths and that ultimately would reduce those risks.

Boyle: I sort of assume that anybody who's working in mental health support at an academic level, in a research level, is working on some of—what I think of—as sort of the bigger items that are talked about a lot. You've mentioned suicide several times. I sort of assume trauma too, but are there some specific tools that you guys have developed that are helping educators or families? If you would just describe what those kinds of tools might be, that go along with your success stories you just shared.

Wilson: Yes. I think interestingly enough, suicide is certainly the most frightening or one of the most frightening symptoms, I guess if you want to call it a symptom, but it is one of the most frightening ones out there. I would say probably though the most prevalent struggle that we're seeing and that we've seen and we've heard from churches and educators around is anxiety. I think the number one difficulty right now for youth, and I combine with that, something that—there's a couple ways you can think of this. There's something called distress tolerance that people will talk about, but we've also looked at—it's not always distress in the sense of distress would be around something that's overwhelmingly and probably unhealthy in our life. So trauma would be an example of extreme distress, but we've actually found that it's actually discomfort tolerance that kids are struggling with on the more normative basis.

And that idea of my negative emotions, for example—boredom, loneliness, feeling hurt, feeling nervous about something, feeling sad about something—not depression, not clinical anxiety, but just the normal ones that we all experience. Somebody didn't do well on a quiz or they have a quiz coming, and so they're feeling stressed about the quiz. Or they have a cross country meet or something, and there's this sense of pressure that they feel, which is normal, but the younger generations are really struggling to regulate their emotions in the face of that pressure. And they've come to a place of often feeling like, if I feel that (negative emotion) something's really wrong, because I shouldn't feel that way. And so, what we have tried to support—what schools and churches and other folks are doing—what we've tried to come alongside, and then some of what we've been cross-pollinating with are things like direct conversation around what is normal.

And so having groups of students get together, groups of youth get together and talk about their anxiety, and talk about tools that help reduce anxiety, but also to just regulate in the face of stress and anxiety, what do you do when you start to feel overwhelmed? Not just how do you not have a panic attack because most people aren't having panic attacks, some are, but most people are feeling anxious. So how we upregulate our nervous system? So having focus groups in schools, we've supported some folks doing anxiety groups where they have groups of kids come together, and there's a curriculum that trains them about anxiety, teaches them about the brain and the body and what's happening, and what they can do about it.

We've had other social and emotional training programs, curriculum teaching kids about those skills that will help build up things like deep breathing skills or how to have conflict conversations, or for them to understand when they're starting to feel overwhelmed, how they can ask for help, which is called functional communication, these kind of core bedrock skills that the current youngsters aren't developing in the same way that historically they would have, that we would expect them to.

And I think for me and for a lot of other people, initially it’s like, well, what's wrong? Well, you can think of it that way, but if it's the bell-shaped curve, and normal experience is that most of them aren't developing it (these skills), then nothing's wrong. That's normal that we have to look at. How can we train these skills in our kids now? And so those kinds of programs that are usually a curriculum that walks them through educationally, but also then practically gives them a chance to do stuff to be a little uncomfortable.

And one of them was singing Happy Birthday in front of a group of other kids to yourself, something uncomfortable, and regulate in the face of it.

Boyle: Most adults might feel a little nervous doing that!

Wilson: Another one that I'm really proud of is within the school systems, often school counselors have been thought of historically just guidance counselors, as people who make the schedules and rearrange classes and things like that. And while there's some truth to those roles, school counselors have moved much, much more into a mental health professional role over the years. And one of the things that we found was that because that old model didn't require any kind of clinical training or awareness, but now school counselors are daily sometimes the only person in the building who has any mental health training and has the role of helping kids in that, we found that they weren't receiving any supervision around how to do that.

We helped a partner develop school counselor supervision groups, which is a new thing. It was remarkably helpful and in a different form has continued on to this day. That'd be another one—helping people within a system know how do we support the people who are supporting mental health. And then our most recent thing we're working on right now, which this is—you're getting a preview, Catherine, into the future—we're in the process of working on something we currently are calling the digital toolbox. It'll probably be renamed at some point, but we kept hearing from people I wish I had a toolbox of resources and interventions and things that I could pull out and look at to try to know how to help kids. And so we're trying to create one, we're trying create an app and a website that will provide evidence-based research and training modules and things that will help support ministry people in ministry and in schools to do the work of supporting student health. So that's to be, it's coming.

Boyle: Okay. Do you have a rough timeline on that?

Wilson: Part of it depends on funding. So if anybody out there would love to fund the process, it's an expensive process to develop apps, and we are right on the verge. So we're looking for—we have our design and we have everything we want to do with it. We just are looking for the funding to hit go, and have software folks come alongside and create this beautiful thing. So yes, I'm hoping within the next year we'll be able to have our initial working model version of the app available for people.

Boyle: That's really exciting because my next question was going to be about churches, but it sounds like that tool is going to be an opportunity for churches to also tap into some of these resources.

Wilson: Absolutely yes. The concept of it is to allow people to go as deep and as wide as they need to for their particular location and role, because something—maybe a youth pastor might need a different level or a different type of resource from someone who is primarily a mental health professional in a school setting or in a counseling setting. So we're going to try to provide layers of, you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you need or want to, but also have some level of training to help people not just read about something, but also get a chance to practice and develop those skills to be able to do it in lots of different settings. Yes.

Boyle: Excellent. Well, so for what you guys have currently, are there certain denominations or different regions of the country where churches are already using your resources? I'm just curious about that.

Wilson: Yes, so far, our origin story being out of Denver so far, our ministry connections have been mostly in the Denver metro area, well, Denver metro and then the wider kind of the front range is what it's called in Colorado, the east side of the Rocky Mountains, so north and south of that. And that's mostly who've been working with us so far. We've been presenting nationally, and we've been in conversation with, in partnership with organizations that have national connection points to Christian schools and things like that. But churches have been mostly around here.

We've been able to go around and speak and present and do some trainings for a lot of churches in this area. And then again, the Seminary's podcast Engage 360. There've been a lot of podcasts on there that have had some national utilization through churches. We've heard from churches across the nation that have found, pastors that have found—and not just pastors—but folks in ministry that have found that really helpful. And then we also had the Gospel Initiative talk that we did here at a conference on youth mental health. We had a chance to speak at that, and that was also something that would've had a national audience as well.

Boyle: Awesome. Well, all right. So when we talked before we hit record today, I said that our audience is mostly ministry leaders and then it's going to be families of kids who have a challenge, whether it's a physical disability or a mental health kind of challenge or a so-called hidden disability. So if a person is listening in either one of those audiences today, what are some practices that you've seen that can be really helpful for supporting the mental wellness or the mental health needs of kids who are in that Christian environment, whether it's the church or the Christian school or at home, especially if that kid is really struggling and may have more of an urgent need presenting in that environment?

Wilson: So I have a few things. I would say one—and this starts more broadly—is there's a mindset within the, at least evangelical church world surrounding mental health—is historically there's been a sense that that is somebody else's job. And one thing I would just initially say that, at this point, I push pretty hard on people, that this is everybody's job. The wellness of a child is everybody's job. Now, there are specialty areas and specialty knowledge base that you do need to have a referral network and a network of humans that are really good at particular things supporting mental health and wellness. If not—unless you're not a psychiatrist—you need to find some good Christian psychiatrists in your area. If you aren't a licensed professional counselor, you need to get some good Christian licensed professional counselors in the referral base.

So the idea here is it's really a community response. This needs to be everybody's job, but that means that we need to build a community if we don't currently have a community surrounding this area. And I think that's probably the current state for a lot of churches; they have maybe a pastoral care representative or a pastor who has traditionally been the one to take these, and then maybe has a referral network of counselors that they send people out to. And that's great. That's really good. But what I would say is more and more, we need to have policies and trainings within staff, within church staff to know, how do we approach this? How do we handle if we have a kiddo who comes in who has a particular disability or hidden disability, or someone who comes in who has overt mental health issues that we can see, but we don't necessarily know what they need, how do we step 1, 2, 3, that how do we triage what the level of care and need is?

I think two responses, either happens. One, we tend to be like, I don't know what to do with that. Or two, we get over involved in something that is, maybe parts of it are beyond what our role should be. And so I think—partly this comes with that whole take a plank out of your own eye first, do some self-check on our systems or policies or procedures. Then frankly, the staff's personal view of wellness and mental health, have we even talked about that as a community? Well, what do we think is true about wellness? What do we think about mental health? There's been a fair amount of conflict in the past because people have connected very secular philosophy with psychology. And so there's been maybe for some people, a wall there saying that we shouldn't go there. I would challenge that. We need to have that conversation.

Again, I think the concept of biblically integrated mental health care is very well established and very, very comfortable with itself. Now, there's been plenty to separate us out from maybe past issues philosophically. So that would be one thing I would say, is start within the community, and just assess where are we at, what do we need? What does our system need to support people well? And then if we move down into the personal engagement side of things, one of the things I would strongly encourage is just recognize this is scary for everybody. When there's someone who's struggling, everybody's scared. Even professional counselors can feel pretty overwhelmed when someone is in the moment of crisis, that's not an abnormal response. What I would strongly encourage is, for people who have to directly engage with a human, but not forget that this is a human. They might have struggles that you're not familiar with, and don't know exactly how to handle, but you do know how to engage with people and be loving to every human, as you draw in other folks and other resources alongside you.

It's not that that person is your entire job, but your job is to be loving and engaged with them in that moment. So authentic engagement, I think is step one when it comes to—particularly around suicidality—this is one that there's a great deal of fear among a lot of folks who help out. How do we handle that? What do we do?

And the research is very, very abundantly clear. And then just my clinical practice and every counselor I've ever talked to, it is abundantly clear. You just ask them directly, are you having suicidal thoughts? And people have always talked about like, oh, we're afraid that's going to cause more suicidal thoughts. And actually the research is the complete opposite. The more we go straight at an issue, the person decompresses, because finally somebody went there, somebody actually gave me the chance. And it's not that they're always going to tell you, it's not that they're always going to open up, but when you ask directly, you actually reduce the chance of suicide.

It's not a guarantee. If someone is highly suicidal, they may do something, and if they do, it is not your fault. You could have done nothing other than what you did. If you could have done something else, you would have.

Boyle: Right, right.

Wilson: So the idea here is ask directly, talk about where somebody is at. Again, you have to build relationship. It has to be a trusting relationship, often before someone's going to open up. But if you have concerns about a student who seems like maybe they just made a veiled suicidal reference, to pull them aside, maybe having somebody else along with you and say like, Hey, are you thinking about killing yourself? Are you having thoughts about hurting yourself? And when you do that, you give them a chance to make a choice. They might say no and hide it, but you give them the chance, and that's really, really important.

Last thing I would say is, if you don't currently have trainings around Mental Health First Aid in your churches and in your ministries, I would say that there’s a hundred percent a place, a great place to start. And there's free ones out there, and there's really low cost ones. QPR is one (training) that's out there, and you can get these Mental Health First Aid trainings, and it's really just like taking a first aid training, physical first aid training. You're not becoming the expert. You're not becoming an ER doc. You're becoming somebody who knows what to do if somebody is currently unconscious on the ground in front of you, or in this case, if somebody is actively suicidal in front of you, you have the steps, 1, 2, 3, what I do, and here's how I lovingly hand them off to somebody to continue to work with them. And then maybe my relationship becomes more or less involved with that, but I'm still engaged with them personally, relationally.

Boyle: Right. Well, last question—and I don't want to forget to say this, so I'm going to say it right now. We're going to share any resources that you would like to share with the audience before we close out today, but I firmly believe God made us in His image. He made us in this design that He has for us. He made us for a specific purpose. So to me, it just makes perfect sense that our optimal mental health is going to be if we are in relationship with Him, if we are seeking to become more Christ-like. So for ministry leaders who are listening to this, if you could just share a couple of tips that would help them support both the spiritual and mental wellness and the teens that they're working with, I think that could really be a helpful thing for those who are listening.

Wilson: Absolutely. I think something I've seen increasingly, particularly pastors, but I don't want to limit it to just formal roles of pastors, but ministry-based folks who are in some form of leadership with kids, whether that's volunteer or not, is when there's an appropriate level of self-disclosure around your own struggles that you've had. And I say appropriate, because not all of our struggles should be shared with everybody. Those are private stories, those are personal stories. But if there are elements of your struggle, for example, I was bullied in the fifth grade, and that's a story that I've deemed as like, yeah, I feel like I've worked through that over my life. I've come to understand the effect of that in my life. And that's a story that can be really potent for a kid to hear who's going through something like that. But then to understand, okay, you've actually, you've felt some stuff. You've been through some things; you've been rejected. It could be if you've struggled with anxiety, sharing yeah, I've struggled with that at times and here's what I've tried to do and here's when I wasn't doing well, I tended to hide, or I tended to kind of shut down or whatever. That appropriate level of self-disclosure I think is crucial because it goes back to that authenticity that most kids who are struggling with something related to mental health feel like—youth in general—feel like their experience is unique, that no one else has ever felt this or in this way or to this degree. And that's a normal developmental thing. So for us to help them kind of break that wall and be like, yes, I totally, I actually felt this, this, and this and this, and they all of a sudden can see like, oh, and you're doing okay now.

So maybe there's some hope there. Maybe there's a path forward. So I think that idea of helping though it gets better. This won't last, but let me tell you why. It's not just because an adult telling you something that's true, but because I've actually lived that, I've actually been there. So I think the more that ministry folks can start to model this process of authenticity and this process of like, Hey, it's totally fine to struggle with mental health. It is a hundred percent all over the Bible. You can see it everywhere. Just read the Psalms and you'll get a high dose of people struggling with their mental health. I think another piece that I would say we kind of referenced what I already did before is around suicidality, which does seem to be the number one scary topic. And rightly so, a massive concern for people is just ask directly.

If you're wondering, ask! They might be like, why would you think that? Then tell them why you thought that. And then all of a sudden they'll realize like, oh no, that's not what I meant at all. It's like, oh, okay. Maybe that's not the way to phrase that then, because people around you might get concerned. And again, it helps the kids to understand how they're being perceived, if it's not really suicidality. But if it is, all of a sudden that kid knows, somebody sees them and someone cares about them, cares enough to ask them, that's really important. And then again, I think the idea of when it comes to reading the Bible from a wellness perspective—and not just reading the Bible, but our theology in general—recognizing that mental health is God's design, and the physiological aspects of mental health, that He grounded our spiritual, our emotional selves in a physical creation, is something really important for people to understand.

So I honestly have been a big “brain nerd;” if ministry folks haven't ever spent some time understanding the physiology behind mental health and not just the spiritual aspects, I think that's really key, because historically, modern Christians have shied away from the scientific aspects of mental health and leaned a lot heavier towards the spiritual aspects of mental health. And that makes some sense, but I think it's kind of missed the balance that God originally designed. So there's great books out there like Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson that a lot of people have really valued and enjoyed related to that. But there's a whole branch of things—neurotheology—now looking at these areas. But I think ultimately what I'd encourage people is start to research a little bit, start to dig in if you feel like you don't know anything. This is the era of information--and be careful where you get your sources, like Google can be a dangerous place—but start digging and trying to find some really important resources, really trustworthy resources on mental health, and start exploring what the reality is around some of the statistics about what are youth facing and how do you work on anxiety? And not that you're going to become a licensed professional counselor, but mental health is everybody's job, because we're in the job of developing humans and our mental health is a core part of God's design, of how we develop as humans.

Boyle: That's just such a fantastic way to say that. And so are there any resources that you want to specifically recommend? I mean, I'm going to put in a link to the podcast series that you have done through the Seminary. Is there anything else in particular that you'd really like to point folks to?

Wilson: Yes, I would really—for the sake of getting at the most pressing need—I would really strongly encourage people to look at Mental Health First Aid resources like QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer). That would be a place, I would say, for a lot of ministry organizations might be the place to start, if you don't currently have any kind of infrastructure or policy around supporting people, in particular in suicidal crisis. That I think is probably step one for a lot of folks, in our experience is an organization.

I think if people want to know more about what I just said, Curt Thompson, I think it's a great book for folks who are trying to understand mental health. I think Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazerro would be another great book for people to dig into, look at what healthy emotions look like in relationship to our spirituality. If they want to know more about things like trauma specifically, if they're finding, they have a lot of folks who are struggling with trauma. Again, the book is directed more towards clinicians, but it's a great resource. There's a couple: Treating Trauma in Christian Counseling, it's edited by the Gingrich's and put out by CAPS, the Christian Association of Psychological Studies. There's also another book by Heather Gingrich called Restoring the Shattered Self. And Heather Gingrich is a great resource for all things trauma (find here website here). So I'd encourage people to look at those resources. As far as broader wellness goes, though I don't have a specific resource. My encouragement would be if you look at Scazzero as a way to start thinking of how do we bridge the conversation and our thinking around the connection between our emotional health and our spiritual health. I think that's probably a crux of, at least on a theological philosophical level for a lot of ministry-based folks. It's a great place to start.

Boyle: Yes, our church did a series on his book. It was something along those lines a few years ago, and it was just excellent. And I think that it really helped start a lot of good conversations about how we think about how these things intersect, because they absolutely do. And it's a common human experience, and it's been a human experience ever since there have been humans. And as you mentioned, those kind of stories are littered throughout scripture.

Well, Adam, thank you so much. This has really been just excellent, and I've been taking a few little notes of things that I want to highlight for the transcript and for our social media, and I have too many! Anyway, it's a good problem to have. But we'll definitely share links to all those resources.

And if you're listening before the end of September, we've got our Mental Health and the Church conference in Cleveland, September 26th and 27th. We hope that you'll be able to join us there. But anyway, Adam, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate this and wish you every success with your new app. You just need to go recruit some friends of some of those seminary students who have those mad computing skills to get that built out!

For Key Ministry, I'm Catherine Boyle. Thanks so much for listening to Key Ministry, the Podcast.