Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church's Mission

The 2014 Christianity Today Book Award Winner (Her.meneutics) Winner of a 2013 Leadership Journal Book Award ("Our Very Short List" in "The Leader's Outer Life" category) Mental illness is the sort of thing we don't like to talk about. It doesn't reduce nicely to simple solutions and happy outcomes. So instead, too often we reduce people who are mentally ill to caricatures and ghosts, and simply pretend they don't exist. They do exist, however―statistics suggest that one in four people suffer from some kind of mental illness. And then there's their friends and family members, who bear their own scars and anxious thoughts, and who see no safe place to talk about the impact of mental illness on their lives and their loved ones. Many of these people are sitting in churches week after week, suffering in stigmatized silence. In Troubled Minds Amy Simpson, whose family knows the trauma and bewilderment of mental illness, reminds us that people with mental illness are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters in Christ, and she shows us the path to loving them well and becoming a church that loves God with whole hearts and whole souls, with the strength we have and with minds that are whole as well as minds that are troubled.

• Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness
• Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness
• Mental Health and the Church: A Ministry Handbook for Including Children and Adults with ADHD, Anxiety, Mood Disorders, and Other Common Mental Health Conditions
• Strategic Pastoral Counseling: A Short-Term Structured Model
• Anxious: Choosing Faith in a World of Worry
• The Emotionally Healthy Church, Updated and Expanded Edition: A Strategy for Discipleship That Actually Changes Lives
• Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness
• Helping People through Grief
• Blessed Are the Crazy: Breaking the Silence about Mental Illness, Family and Church (The Young Clergy Women Project)
• Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service