To be more personal, when I tell my own story and that of my family’s in my book Bipolar Faith, one point I’m trying to make is that people who have experienced enslavement, sharecropping, sexual violence, war, poverty, ongoing state violence, reproductive injustice, and migration that is described as voluntary but is largely spurred by a fear of lynching or land robbery are understandably not OK. We can give that a clinical diagnosis and we can recognize the trauma and astounding resilience that exists in African American experience. Thus, to cultivate Black mental wellness is a dimension of the goal for Black liberation writ large. And any implication that God wills, abides, uses, or ignores these experiences is a faith that we can and should throw in the trash.

I also believe that Black religious communities have been, can, and should be places of spiritual liberation for those who live with mental health challenges. As a matter of theology, there are beliefs and practices that are sustaining and helpful. I will list four that exist within many theistic traditions:

• Suffering sucks. Full stop.
• God knows us from the inside out.
• God is in everything and everyone.
• God does not abandon us. Ever.

These are theological starting points that can transform spiritual terrorism into spiritual liberation.There are things that Black religious communities do especially well that are supportive, even nurturing, to the experience of living with a mental health challenge. Let me describe a few that have been meaningful to me and others.

We know how to mourn. We know how to collectively acknowledge loss and tarry in it when we need to. We have the entire genre of spirituals that do exactly this, while expressing the longing for relief and freedom.

We know how to testify. We know how to tell a story of hardship before community and how we have survived it. What I’d like to see is a greater acceptance of telling that story before it has a happy ending, testifying before and even without “deliverance.” That I’m still in the middle of my story but I trust community to hold it and to hold me while I’m here.

We know about embodied community spirituality. Even the naming of “mental health” suggests that it’s somehow disconnected or different from “physical health,” which we know isn’t true. Mental health is part of our physical health. The separation and hierarchy of soul, spirit, mind vis-a-vis body and earth is a problem that Black religiosity, at its best, eschews. In our spiritual tool kit, we have embodied practices including ecstatic worship, dance, spirit possessions, earth grounding, and these are things we often do in community with elders, ritualists, and musicians who know how to both cultivate and release these forms of spirit embodiment. Trauma therapist Thema Bryant often talks about the ways that an embrace of the arts—music, singing, dance—done in community is an important, and for many communities necessary, form of healing.

Some Black religious traditions have prayers and rituals that are particularly meaningful for mental health. In Black New Thought traditions, affirmative prayers function as both a goal post and a core spiritual practice for transforming one’s thoughts and life in a positive direction—practices embraced in many therapeutic strategies. Meditation and contemplative practices are also core to some forms of Black religiosity, healing practices that neurologists have lately discovered through brain scans. In traditional Yoruba religion, rituals such as iboris—focused upon both the vulnerability and strength of one’s head, one’s mind, one’s guide—can explicitly serve as a health practice for maintaining mental wellness or healing mental distress.

These are the parts of our traditions that give me hope and keep me faithful.

There are explicit steps that Black religious communities should also take to serve as sanctuaries for mental health. Let me name three here:

Talk about mental health. Religious leaders should have therapists and talk about that in religious community. We should normalize the care of minds and bodies the way we emphasize the care of souls. We should talk about mental health challenges in the same way and with the same language and with the same call or care we talk about any other health challenge.

I have been in communities that connect with mental health advocacy organizations and faith-informed culturally competent clinicians on National Depression Screening Day and hold events in the religious community space.

Religious leaders should have relationships with trusted clinicians. People go to their religious leaders with challenges before most other professionals. In many ways, religious leaders are often the first responders to a variety of crises that people experience. Our leaders should have referrals undergirded by relationships that can mitigate a reasonable skepticism that Black folk often have of Western medical systems. When your religious leader can say, I know this person, they are good people, let me call them for you, let me go with you to their office, it is a completely different experience than doing an internet search for a therapist or holding a card someone gave you.

Black religious communities have a tradition of doing two things that are particularly relevant for the discourse on mental wellness. Black religious communities have long served as holistic places of healing and support. Political, social, economic, and social service needs have been met by Black religious communities. In that vein, they can serve as supports for those who are pursuing mental wellness. When someone is in a most difficult place with their mental health, there are tangible supports they need that religious communities can provide. These communities do not need to be any kind of expert in mental health, but to continue being experts in the care they can provide: food, childcare, check-in, a ministry of presence.

Lastly, Black religious communities have long functioned as a place of affirmation and respect amidst a wider society that denies that to Black embodiment. However, Black religious communities also have the capacity to vilify and ostracize those who deviate from any kind of moral, social, or spiritual norm. Some of our communities are well-versed in this. But at our best, we can offer affirmation and respect for persons living with mental health challenges. My experience of this has both saved my life and my faith and it is my hope for all religious communities. May we curate and cultivate a space wherein people can roll up and lose their whole minds, but still walk out with their dignity.

Monica A. Coleman is John and Patricia Cochran Scholar for Inclusive Excellence and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith(Fortress Press, 2016) and Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Fortress Press, 2008).