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If you have been signed off work today, there is a one in three chance that it’s not because you are physically unwell but mentally ill. A study from Liverpool University published yesterday revealed that a third of all sick leave from work in the UK is attributed to mental illness. The debilitating effect of such illness, the labelling and subsequent shame that can be attached to the label, is only made worse by the loss of confidence in not being able to work, increasing the isolation of the person themselves and the fear of the people around them. It’s absolutely true as the poster said some years ago; you don’t have to be mentally ill to suffer from mental illness. It is an exhausting situation for everyone who cares about a person who is unwell and we put almost unbearable pressure on each other and ourselves in our efforts to be what we think is “normal”. For Christian communities, the story has been very chequered in the past and new resources were published at the beginning of this year to help religious communities be more adept at including people struggling with depression, bi-polar disorder, and other forms of mental fragmentation and suffering. Christian theology has sometimes been charged with intensifying not relieving the isolation of people who are mentally ill, allowing a reliance on prayer to turn into a tendency to spiritualise every illness, emphasising guilt when someone doesn’t get well. But the Scriptures much more often talk about the brokenness of human experience, and what the psalms call the “pit”. The pit is a place where we are in some kind of crevasse of anxiety or grief, cut off from everyday life going on “out there”. In Scripture, it’s a place we cry out from; we might be able to hear the other people with whom we live and work high above us, but we can’t get up to reach them. As in psalm 40, we are wading through mud, looking for some solid rock on which to stand. In the pit, we become bounded by the parameters of our reduced life, with our entrenched habits and attitudes and the way of living we’ve fallen into. One of the first tasks in addressing the pole-axing effects of mental illness is to find ways to talk about it. Learning language that gives a name to such invisible distress will start to convince us that even in the chaos this kind of isolation brings, it is possible to be heard, and understood and in being understood, to know we’re not alone. First broadcast on Wednesday 25th February 2015