Hartland Summer Convocation 2022: Healing the Broken Brain

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Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Angeline D. Brauer

Great Expectations: Mental Health and the Gospel

So as we begin, again, since I'm not quite sure where we're gonna go with our time together, we really need to pray.

Dear Father in heaven, Lord, we have come together here because you have called us to worship on your Sabbath day.

Lord, you gave us this day as a day of rest and gladness, yet Lord, so many in this world lack that joy, that hope, that gladness.

And so Father, as we are here together, we want to experience healing as well, so that when we leave this place in the next day or 2, we will be able to share that healing with others.

Be with us in our Sabbath school hour, give us your Holy Spirit.

We know he is here because you have promised where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them.

Let us be here for your namesake, for your glory.

Let's start by talking about some of the basics of mental health.

How many of you have seen the growing numbers of mental health issues in the world today?

OK, a number of you have been following the numbers, the trends, just seeing how things are getting worse and worse.

I might have to jump around with my slides here, so Let's see.

We're gonna, yes, we're gonna jump right now.

Let's, we're gonna start as a sort of a warm-up to our conversation, our discussion.

Let's look at some of the facts and figures about mental health.

So this is a pop quiz to start our Sabbath school time together.

Our first question, poor mental health increases the risk of A heart disease, B stroke, C cancer, or D all of the above?

So poor mental health does increase the risk of these other chronic health conditions.

In fact, what we see is that oftentimes, chronic physical health conditions and mental health conditions co-occur.

And so when we're really thinking about caring for a person's bodily health, we also need to think about caring for their mind and vice versa.

And so we do need to think about caring for people as holistic approach, which the Seventh-day Adventist Church has always promoted.

So we need to remember that in our ministries.

Mental illnesses are A, very common, fairly common, or not very common?

Okay, wow, we're very sure about our answers And you're absolutely correct.

And we'll see what the numbers are in a moment.

Suicide is what rank as a leading cause of death among people ages 15 to 34 in the US?

A, okay, everybody's very familiar that suicide is indeed the second leading cause of death among our teens and young adults.

So this is in the prime of life, isn't it?

This is when individuals are really getting to figure out where their life trajectory might be going and they're learning how to use the God-given skills and abilities and yet they are the group facing the largest number of suicides.

Largest number of suicides in the United States.

We do know that the elderly is the other group, the, you know, on the other end of the age spectrum.

They're the other group that faces a large amount of suicide, but it's not quite as high as our younger people.

So something to keep in mind as we're thinking about our young people.

And by the way, I love getting our young people involved in ministry.

And we saw just this morning some prime examples of young people going forward with the gospel work.

We need to let our young people know that they are loved and needed in our church.

Just FYI, we did have a webinar on suicide prevention.

So you can go to our website and watch that webinar, too, if you're interested.

Half of all mental illness occurs before a person turns what age?

Well what we see by the figures is that by the time a person turns 14 years of age, Half, not half of all 14 year olds, but half of those who experience a mental illness, it's before they turn 14.

What this means is we need to start our work with children, our prevention strategies.

We can't wait, we can't afford to wait until we've gone so far down the line.

1 of the challenges that we see is that many young people who have a mental illness do not seek the care.

They don't receive the care that they need and what that means is that the trajectory that they are on gets worse.

And so we need to be more intentional in early intervention, early identification, early seeking care and support for our children, our children.

What percent of mental illness begins before age 24?

Now we just looked at age 14, what about age 24?

What percentage of mental illnesses happen before age 24?

D, okay, 62%, 75%, 83%, C, A, okay, another 1 that we're not quite sure of.

Well, it's what we're seeing is about 75% of mental illnesses occur before age 24.

And when we understand our brain development and we recognize that so much of our developing brain occurs during that teenage and young adulthood age prior to age 30, especially our frontal lobe development, we see that there is a high risk during that time.

There is a high risk during that time and so again we need to be more conscientious.

Think about how many of these conditions we might be able to prevent if we were working on this issue earlier, if we were thinking about our children and our young people at those early developmental stages of how can I help you to grow and develop strong and beautiful and healthy as God intended?

So, it's a high calling for us as a church, isn't it?

But it's an important calling that we should respond to.

Once a person develops a mental illness, they will never recover.

I'm so Glad to hear you all say that almost unanimously.

Again, early detection, early intervention, early treatment, seeking to help people earlier in their course gives them the best hope for recovery.

And recovery can be a complicated process for different people.

It can go through many different stages and many different sources and and ways of recovery.

I do believe and we promote and teach that our holistic approach, our 8 laws of health, are a vital role.

And we might talk about that later this afternoon.

But we also know that because of what mental illness is, sometimes a therapeutic approach is also needed.

So we need to be willing to to understand and support people in finding the help that they need for their particular condition and where they are.

We all experience health in different ways and experience healing sometimes through different pathways as well.

So I want to back up a little bit now because we see that mental health is such a major issue.

But we also know that this was not God's intention.

We were not meant to experience this illness.

Great Expectations: Mental Health and the Gospel

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