I used to think mental unwellness was weakness.
I believed it with the certainty of someone who had never heard their own mind crack in the dark.
Back then, suffering made sense to me only when it could be seen. A limping body,hollow cheeks,empty plates or grief with visible bones. Pain, I thought, should announce itself plainly. It should look like hunger, sound like weeping, feel like labour in the chest. If it could not be touched, then surely it could be conquered by will.
At school, there was a girl named Yasmina.She was the kind of person people noticed before they understood. Sharp in speech and difficult in manner. Her words could cut like untempered steel, and she wore pride the way some wear perfume; thick enough to arrive before she did. She was not easy to like. I had already judged her, labelled her, and filed her neatly among the kinds of people I believed, deserved distance.
Then one afternoon, Yasmina was crying.It was the sort of crying that unsettles a room. Not loud,not theatrical, just the quiet collapse of someone trying not to be seen breaking. A few students gathered around her, murmuring in low voices. Concern passed through them like a hush before rain. I stood at a distance and felt only irritation.
Yasmina often struggled to breathe. Every time her chest tightened and the air turned against her, people rushed in with alarm and sympathy. Yet she would still step into the cold dressed carelessly, sleeves short, legs bare, as though consequence were a thing for other people. In my eyes, she was reckless and dramatic. A girl too careless with her own suffering to deserve anyone else’s concern.
Then I heard the whispers ,Mental illness.The phrase moved through the room softly, almost reverently, as though naming something fragile.That was the explanation people gave for her temper,cruelty and unpredictability.
I almost laughed. Mental illness? How could the mind itself become ill enough to govern a person against their will? Was the mind not the very seat of reason? Had God not already spoken plainly on such things?
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” ~ 2 Timothy 1:7
That settled it for me.I wore Scripture then like polished armour- bright, hard, and often drawn too quickly. I believed discipline could cure what softness had enabled. I believed prayer could silence every storm if only one prayed with enough force. I mistook conviction for understanding and called it wisdom.So I turned away.
Later, our school magazine resurfaced after years of silence, carrying the scent of fresh ink and new paper. Between student essays and school notices, there was a page on mental health. Even before I read it, I dismissed it. A sketch of a crowded mind. Too many words. Too much feeling. Across the page, a heading declared May as Mental Health Awareness Month.There was a speech that followed. Words about emotional wellness, depression, anxiety and Compassion.I let them pass through me like wind through an open window.
In my view, mental illness was still weakness made fashionable. A gentler name for fragility,I thought people did not need counseling; they needed courage. Not gentleness, but grit. Not reflection, but resolve.And I had verses for all of it.
“Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed…” — Joshua 1:9
“Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be afraid…” — Deuteronomy 31:6
“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength…” — Isaiah 40:31
I held those words like iron in my hands.I did not yet know Scripture can be quoted with clean lips and an unbroken cruelty.Later, I heard more of Yasmina’s story. The quiet fragments people share in lowered voices. Childhood wounds, old grief and a life touched by pain.Still, I dismissed it.She was wealthy, comfortable and privileged in all the ways I had been taught to envy. What could a girl like that possibly know of suffering?
I came from the kind of life that taught endurance early. We understood want in practical terms. The ache of going without, the taste of survival and the long discipline of continuing. In my mind, pain belonged more honestly to people who had earned it.
So I thought.
Then life became the kind of teacher that does not raise its voice.It simply removes your certainty and waits.What drew me, one afternoon, from the safety of familiar rooms into the quiet office of a counselor is a story best told by God and time. But this much is true: suffering is no respecter of persons.
It does not pause at wealth. It does not retreat from discipline. It does not bow to intelligence. It does not spare the faithful.Pain enters where it pleases, and when it comes, it is rarely loud at first.Sometimes it is only dimming. A quiet fraying at the edges of thought. A heaviness that settles into the body like winter. A smile that still answers. A voice that still performs. A life that still appears intact, while something unnamed begins loosening quietly beneath it.
That was how the lesson came.Not with spectacle, with silence.The Christ I had quoted so easily began, in mercy, to finish what I had never allowed Him to say.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives…” — Luke 4:18
Captives.That was the word that lingered.Because some prisons do not clang shut. Some are furnished softly. Some are lit warmly. Some are so skillfully built they feel, at first, like shelter. Many souls live inside them for years, calling survival, peace.
I had spent too long believing that faith and suffering could not share a body. That prayer, if done properly, should make the inner life obedient. That trust in God should render the mind untouched by affliction.But the body can tire. The heart can bruise. And the mind, too, can grow weary.
This is not unbelief.This is mortality. Still, Christ remains Lord over both the seen wound and the hidden one.
There is no shame in naming sickness where sickness is. No failure in seeking help where healing is needed. No betrayal of faith in admitting that some wounds require both prayer and tending.
The same God who gives peace also gives wisdom. The same God who heals also sends help. The same Christ who saves souls did not mock the wounded for needing care.
“They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.” — Luke 5:31
That verse reads differently when one has needed both mercy and medicine.And so my eyes changed.
I began to see what pride had once concealed from me, that not every sharp tongue is cruelty. Not every coldness is arrogance. Not every difficult soul is untouched by sorrow.Sometimes pain hardens where it has long gone untreated. Sometimes grief learns to dress itself as anger. Sometimes wounds become so practiced in disguise they are mistaken for personality.At times what looks like pride is only pain that has forgotten how to ask gently.
This does not make harm holy but it does make compassion necessary.So I learnt, slowly, what grace had been trying to teach me all along:
That suffering is not a weakness. That faith is not the absence of affliction. That endurance is not the same as healing. That God is not dishonored by the wounds we bring Him. And that mercy is often holier than judgement.
Mental health matters because the mind can suffer quietly. Because pain can hide behind polished answers and functioning hands. Because some of the most wounded people still arrive smiling. Because not every battle announces itself in visible scars. And because Christ, who made the mind, is neither startled by its suffering nor absent from it.
I once believed mental illness was weakness.Now I know better.It is suffering.And suffering, especially the kind no one can see, must be met the way Christ met the wounded:
Not first with suspicion.But with compassion.
And that, perhaps, is where healing begins.
~Rinasco