Writer and photographer Marja Bergen wishes everyone who struggles with depression, as she does, could have such an “amazing” friend as the one she found at the Alliance church she now attends.

During a recent suicidal episode, this friend dropped by for a visit without being asked.

As Bergen recalls, “She said, ‘Marja, no matter what you say, no matter what you do, I’m always going to love you.’ And through that, I found God talking.

“I don’t know if I’d fully understood the fullness of God’s love before to that extent.”

For Bruce Anderson, a stay-at-home dad in Saskatoon, who himself suffers from bipolar disorder and social anxiety disorder, his special friend and mentor has been his pastor.

“Sometimes we would just go out for coffee and talk. Oftentimes it was just socializing. Because of my social anxiety disorder, I was very socially inept,” he says.

Everyone needs to feel loved—but perhaps none more than the growing numbers of Canadians who may seem fine on the outside, but on the inside are often overwhelmed by dark thoughts and negative emotions triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain that can’t be controlled without medication and counselling.

John Toews, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the University of Calgary, says there is still a social stigma attached to people with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, bulimia and other diseases of the mind.

“Churches are often not understanding,” he says. “They don’t realize that with proper treatment, the person has an immense amount to offer, maybe more because of further life experience. And so we find ways sometimes of devouring them.”

For 10 years now, former Canada Post worker Rob Henderson of Airdrie, Alberta has been on disability. He believes things might be different had the Baptist and Pentecostal churches he attended in his teens and early 20s not dismissed his severe depression and suicidal tendencies as proof of moral failure.

“I was told that you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, you need to repent and start praising the Lord,” Henderson remembers. “I was more or less deserted. I was in the hospital without any visitation or anything like that.”

Anderson adds that people at the Bible college he attended in the early 1990s actually shunned and made fun of a student whom they knew to be mentally ill.

“At one point, he was told that if he didn’t shape up, he was going to end up committing suicide and he was going to go straight to hell,” he says.

Henderson now belongs to a “very compassionate” Anglican church and Anderson’s Bible college has since changed its ways—and yet many churches still teach that most mental illness is satanic in origin and therefore treatable only by a correct ministering of the Word of God.

One leading proponent of this approach is John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in suburban Los Angeles and a prolific author.

In his book Drawing Near, he argues: “Professional psychologists are no substitute for spiritually-gifted people who know the Word, possess godly wisdom, are full of goodness and available to help others apply divine truth to their lives (Rom. 15:14).”

John Auxier, a marriage and family therapist who teaches counselling at ACTS Seminary in Langley, B.C., says MacArthur’s understanding of mental illness betrays a “truncated” view of sin.

“The fall has impaired our bodies, so that they do not work the way they should. And so it’s legitimate to take medication in order to help correct some of the impact of the fall,” he says.

Along similar lines, Henderson once went to a deliverance service in hopes of being freed from the “evil spirit” that tormented him. But all that did was aggravate his illness.

“One of the prevailing things with depression is guilt—‘I should be better. I should do more,’” he says. “And so you go to a deliverance service and a week or two later, you’re feeling worse—‘God must really hate me. I’m a real failure.’”

Auxier says evangelicals generally have found if difficult to frame a response to mental health issues that fits “our belief that faith in God can solve problems.”

But that could be changing.

For example, The People’s Church in North York, Ontario launched a new department of family ministries and counselling three years ago under Pastor Warwick Cooper that seeks to help anyone facing a crisis or life challenge, including the mentally ill.

“There’s a Baptist church near The People’s Church. They also have a separate pastor for counselling and pastoral care,” says departmental intern Thomas Mattai. “So I would say evangelical churches are learning to understand this and are doing something about it.”

Mattai adds that pastors who counsel need to be able to identify the “first expression” of mental illness in a person.

“It starts with self-doubt. Then it progresses to rejection, loneliness, alienation. And finally it reaches a point [of] ‘I am unlovable, I am defective, I am a failure,’” he says.

“If the clergy or the pastors are open, then we are able to prevent them from graduating to the second or the third level.”

And whether they counsel or not, Auxier urges pastors to preach at least annually on mental health, explaining what the Scriptures say about it, and suggesting ways they can help the mentally ill—and especially their families and caregivers.

“If somebody’s got a serious problem, you often can’t do too much to change the problem,” he says.

“But the people who are having to manage the problem need a lot of support, prayer—maybe even some relief, because they often become very isolated and exhausted.”

The fact is that no sector of Canadian society is immune to mental illness. And the problem is getting worse.

Two years ago, Statistics Canada reported that about four per cent of Canadians, or 1.1 million people, said they had experienced symptoms and feelings associated with major depression in the past 12 months. This makes it about as prevalent as other chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.

Overall, it estimated that 2.6 million Canadians suffered from a major depression or other mental health disorders and substance dependence problems.

“It is difficult to imagine a day going by,” the Canadian Mental Health Association told a Senate committee last October, “without all of us, knowingly or unknowingly, being in a room, on a bus, at a restaurant or elsewhere with someone who has experienced a mental illness or addiction.”

And if the mentally ill are indeed their neighbours, Bergen believes that ought to challenge Christians to ask themselves whether or not they are responding to them in love, as Christ commanded.

“I think the Church is in the position to be more helpful [toward the mentally ill] than any other part of society,” she says. “But when they don’t understand and become judgmental, they can be really more damaging than any other part of society.”