How to Help Someone with Undiagnosed Mental Illness

00;00;01;06 - 00;00;20;03
Dave Quak 
Welcome back to Sunburnt Souls. My name is Pastor Dave Quak and I'm your host. As we speak about life and faith and our mental well-being. And on this show today, I'm going to do something a little different. I've only done at one time before, but that is that I'm going to fly solo, even though I've got a couple of recordings up my sleeve that I could upload.

00;00;20;05 - 00;00;43;15
Dave Quak 
I wanted to fly solo this week and address a question. I get a lot when it comes to our mental well-being, so after most podcasts, I get a few texts come through, you know, encouragement or people asking for clarifying questions. And in addition to that, I've been doing a fair bit of speaking at other churches and different organizations and homeless shelters and men's shed and stuff.

00;00;43;18 - 00;01;14;08
Dave Quak 
And one question keeps coming up. Okay. The question is this how do I help my friend explore their mental illness if they don't think they're mentally ill? The concept is really it's about the people who have relationships with other people in a in their life could be suspect that that person struggling with their mental well-being. Maybe they're showing signs of depression, maybe they're anxious, maybe they're missing work.

00;01;14;10 - 00;01;46;05
Dave Quak 
Maybe you notice that they're down. Maybe you notice that they're up. You know, you just might notice something in their rhythms. Maybe you're married to the person. So you really got a close view on what's happening in their life. But you're thinking there is something not right with this person's mental wellness well-being. How do I help them? And look, let's let's be honest, it's often a really hard conversation to bring up because when someone is walking with mental ill health, they don't always recognize that they're walking with mental ill health.

00;01;46;07 - 00;02;14;17
Dave Quak 
And sometimes it's extremely offensive when someone else brings it up and suggests that they're mentally ill because they could be feeling like they better than ever before. Like in the early stages of bipolar, when you're manic, you feel fantastic, or you might feel like you've got incredible insight in the case of having maybe some schizophrenia or some, you know, borderline personality disorder or something like you might actually, at the start of the process, be like, man, I feel like I'm coming alive.

00;02;14;17 - 00;02;54;04
Dave Quak 
And then for someone to suggest that maybe your mentally ill might not go down so well. One of my favorite movies is A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe. It's probably about 20 years old now, but basically he's a professor who gets schizophrenia and it's like, I feel like it's a really good depiction of what it's like when you're sort of entering into mental illness and you think that your world is opening up to all these new possibilities and amazing opportunities, but everyone sees that you're deteriorating into a place where you're losing with reality and that things aren't actually going well with your mental well-being.

00;02;54;04 - 00;03;19;07
Dave Quak 
So if you've not seen A Beautiful Mind, it is a good watch. But today, I just want to give you like seven hints, seven pieces of advice, seven helpful. You know, point is that you might be able to do in your life if you've got someone in your life who is walking with mental illness and does not recognize it, and you need to help that come to their awareness.

00;03;19;07 - 00;03;44;26
Dave Quak 
So number one, build trust and listen. The worst thing you can do is go and hit somebody that doesn't trust you with a suggestion that they might be mentally ill. You're not going to listen to somebody who doesn't have your back. I know for myself, in the early days of my diagnosis, I really needed to chat about it with people that I trust and people that I'll listen to.

00;03;44;29 - 00;04;05;29
Dave Quak 
And it's not just people I would trust and listen to. Specifically on the topic of mental illness, it's people that I would usually speak deeply to about all things in life. You know, if I speak to someone about my marriage or finances or my parenting or whatever, that's the sort of person that needs to bring up whether or not I need to pay attention to my mental well-being.

00;04;06;01 - 00;04;30;23
Dave Quak 
So before you bring it up with somebody, ask yourself, are you a person who has sewn into this person's life to build trust and develop a relationship to a place where they will listen to you? Because if they don't listen to you on things of marriage or parenting or spirituality or all the important things in life, why would they listen to you about assessing their mental well-being?

00;04;30;25 - 00;04;54;04
Dave Quak 
Conversely, if you have build trust with the person and they do listen to you, you can leverage that trust into a deep conversation about faith and mental wellbeing, or about mental wellbeing on its own. Sometimes we almost need to treat Ell conversational quota as almost like a poker game, where the more chips you have, the more you can risk.

00;04;54;07 - 00;05;13;23
Dave Quak 
So if you've been with someone through conversations over the years and you've built a lot of trust, it's like you've accumulated a lot of chips. So when you take a risky step and have a hard discussion or even bring up a brave conversation, you know, it's a less of a risk because you've got more chips in the bank.

00;05;13;25 - 00;05;43;27
Dave Quak 
You've been there through the hard times already. You've been there to build trust and listen. So you've almost earned the right to be able to speak into the person's life. Okay. Number one, simple, but really powerful. Number two, be gentle and not confrontational, okay? Be gentle and not confrontational. Ask questions. Don't just go in there as if it's like an intervention saying, we are here to sit you down so you recognize your mental illness and the negative effect it's having on everybody else.

00;05;43;29 - 00;06;07;24
Dave Quak 
I don't think that would work with anyone in Australia. Here we've just come off the back of, You okay day? It was on Thursday this week, a few days ago. And are you okay? Day is basically initiative run by. I think it's a black dog institute where you just literally walk up to somebody who you have relationship with and ask them if they're okay.

00;06;07;26 - 00;06;32;20
Dave Quak 
It's a non-confrontational way to bring up things of depth. I think it's good because in Australia, we're so surface level and cynical that we need training in how to have conversations of depth. And, you okay? Does that really well. But I think what it does is promote a gentle and non-confrontational way to bring up heavy topics. You know, you might say, hey, I've noticed you've been really stressed or tired lately.

00;06;32;25 - 00;06;57;11
Dave Quak 
Is there anything going on in your life or I noticed you missed training last week. What's sad about or I've noticed you've been kind of like a little bit lethargic lately. What's going on there? You know, it's about being gentle and not confrontational. I don't know about you, but I don't take confrontation very well. You know, I either kind of get my back up and want to, like, rip into the person or I just, like, apologize and disappear.

00;06;57;11 - 00;07;22;10
Dave Quak 
It's that fight or flight kind of thing. Like I don't respond to confrontation. There's a few people, like a few percent of people who don't mind it. God bless those people. But for me, if I want to help somebody come to a place of recognizing the need for change, gentleness is the only way it's ever worked. You know, there's a Bible verse that says faithful are the wounds of a friend, you know?

00;07;22;10 - 00;07;40;28
Dave Quak 
So even if you have to be a little bit confrontational, make sure your wounds are from a place of being a friend. You know, it's not just enough to go and declare you are this and you are that, and you are this. I just don't think that would work. So if you stay gentle during this process, I think you've just got a way higher chance of doing this.

00;07;40;28 - 00;08;06;01
Dave Quak 
Well, number three, offer support and just not solutions. Do not jump in and try to fix a friend who's struggling in their mental wellbeing. People know when they are being treated like a project to fix, rather than a person to love. You don't need to go up and offer solutions. You don't need to walk up and say, this is what you need to do to fix it.

00;08;06;04 - 00;08;28;19
Dave Quak 
Here are three steps to blah blah blah. What you want to do is offer support and not solutions and support that is going to continue not just for the next two weeks or the next four weeks, but for as long as it takes. So you one of the things with supporting someone with mental ill health is that it's not you can't treat it the same as you would someone who broke their leg.

00;08;28;19 - 00;08;48;05
Dave Quak 
So say someone breaks a leg, you drop a couple of meal vouchers around their home. You pray for them, you wish them well, and in like six weeks they're back on their feet. Kind of easy come, easy go. But if we treat someone with mental illness like that, what we're forgetting is that most mental illness lasts, you know, months and years and decades.

00;08;48;08 - 00;09;08;04
Dave Quak 
And so it's not just about one meal once or a couple of meal vouchers. It's about pitching up week in and week out for months and years and decades at a time. So if you go on a journey with someone, you know that you've got to journey with them for the long haul. Okay, offer support, but be in it for the long haul.

00;09;08;07 - 00;09;34;05
Dave Quak 
In the book of job, we see a man who'd lost everything like his family, his property, his wealth, his health, everything. Right. He's sitting in darkness, in despair, and his friends come and give him brilliant support. They sit with him, right? For the first week, they just sit there in the dust with him. They put, you know, dirt on their face or whatever they did to mourn culturally, appropriately.

00;09;34;05 - 00;09;56;22
Dave Quak 
And they did that for a week, and they sat with him. And then they open their mouths. Right? And they started trying to offer solutions and trying to, like, tell Jobe everything he'd done wrong for his life to be in tatters. And the advice that they gave him was horrible advice, and it misrepresented God. And in the end, God ends up telling them that they're idiots and to pull their heads in.

00;09;56;24 - 00;10;21;02
Dave Quak 
And instead of like, leading Jobe Jobe towards God, they actually led him away. One of the problems when we start trying to offer solutions, especially if we're not qualified, is we could inadvertently be offering someone a poor solution. And in our efforts to help, we could go the other way and hinder. You don't want to mislead people. You don't want to tell people the wrong way to go about their lives.

00;10;21;04 - 00;10;52;02
Dave Quak 
All right, number four, highlight the benefits of professional support, or at least have your head around the support networks available as a friend unless you're trained in, you know, mental health nursing or if you've got like a psychology degree or something, you're actually just not qualified to, you know, counsel somebody who's got mental illness, you can support them and you can be a blessing to them, and you can walk with them side by side.

00;10;52;05 - 00;11;32;07
Dave Quak 
But they also need someone to sit across a desk from them. They need to start the process of talking to a GP, or talking to a psychologist, or talking to a psychiatrist. The best place to start is the GP, the general practitioner doctor, because that person can start the referral process now, I think that if you've already had number one, two and three in place, like this person has trust and listened to you and your gentle and non confrontational and you offering support, not solutions, then they'll listen to you if you suggest, hey, maybe it's time to go see your GP and chat about this.

00;11;32;09 - 00;11;52;08
Dave Quak 
If you've had personal experience, positive personal experience with your GP when it comes to mental wellbeing, tell them about that. Tell them that it went well for you. Tell them that they're a great resource. Tell them that they were helpful and understanding and confidential so they can't repeat your business and they can steer you in the right direction.

00;11;52;10 - 00;12;13;21
Dave Quak 
I want to shout out my GP, his name's Paul. I'll leave his last name out for confidentiality, but Paul is he has worked with me in my mental health journey for about a decade, and I got all the respect and love for this man because he does his best to see my when my mental wellbeing flourish. I'm a pastor.

00;12;13;28 - 00;12;40;14
Dave Quak 
He's not a Christian. That doesn't even matter, because what he does is he understands me. He respects my worldview and he does everything I can, he can to make me better. If you can highlight the benefits of professional support to your friends, do so. Find out what support is available on the sunburnt souls website. We have a Get Help page at Sunburnt Souls A.com refer people to that.

00;12;40;14 - 00;13;14;09
Dave Quak 
It shows people where to get help. You know you should be all over that. If you're going to be encouraging a friend to take some steps to move positively in their mental health space. All right, once you've done that, number five, give them space to process. Let it sit for a little bit. I don't think it's helpful to give somebody the challenge to start exploring their mental wellbeing, and then bombard them every five minutes with text messages saying, have you done it yet?

00;13;14;12 - 00;13;34;14
Dave Quak 
You know, you got to let this stuff sink in to people if they're going to start pursuing help for mental ill health. It is a massive step and they've got to come to terms with it in their minds that it is a good, good enough reason to pursue think well, you're got to be intrinsically motivated to pursue mental well-being because it's tough.

00;13;34;19 - 00;13;55;27
Dave Quak 
And if you don't have an internal motivation saying, you've got this, you've got to go through this process, you're not going to make it. Now, that doesn't negate the need for support and love and community, but man, you've got to be motivated. So give them space to get to a place where they can be intrinsically motivated to go down this path.

00;13;56;00 - 00;14;26;25
Dave Quak 
And while doing that, number six, pray for them. Pray for guidance. You know, if you're not a prayer, that's fine. But if you're someone who prays and believes that God can move, this is the time for you to be praying into their lives and praying that God does a work in their hearts, and praying that they get led to the best GP's, and praying that they find the greatest medication or the best prayer meetings, or the greatest life group.

00;14;26;28 - 00;14;51;27
Dave Quak 
You know, there's a lot that can happen when we pray and battle in the spiritual realm. When it comes to our mental health. Okay, I believe that God is alive. I believe that he is moving and he is, you know, in the business of setting people free, his A-game is restoration. And it's been his favorite thing to do since Jesus was here to atone for the world and bring restoration.

00;14;51;27 - 00;15;15;27
Dave Quak 
He loves bringing restoration. So pray for guidance. Pray for the person you're ministering to. Pray that they might be stirred up to keep pushing through when times are tough. Pray that they'll be brave to have hard conversations. Pray that they'll be vulnerable to talk to their family about it. A question I often get asked is what my position is when it comes to supernatural intervention.

00;15;15;27 - 00;15;42;25
Dave Quak 
In the case of mental wellbeing, it comes up all the time and I'm glad it comes up all the time because it's a super important conversation. If you've heard any of our podcasts, you've probably heard me say this before, but my position is this is that on one end of the pole of Christianity and mental wellbeing is the view that everything of mental ill health or mental illness or mental, you know, deficiency is spiritual.

00;15;42;25 - 00;16;14;08
Dave Quak 
All right. On one end is this idea that everything is spiritual and that everything needs to be fought in the spiritual realm and by prayer and by deliverance and fasting and trusting in the Lord, that we will be set free, right? And then right on the other side of those that, Christian people who also love science and biology and believe that mental illness is a result of fallen biology, or it's a physical condition and should be treated with medication.

00;16;14;10 - 00;16;43;13
Dave Quak 
Right. And I think both views are awesome. And I love people who hold fast to both of those views. And those people love Jesus while they hold fast to both of those views. And so where it works for me is that I live in the messy middle where I do take medication, I take lithium, I take different things to treat my bipolar, but I also rest on the other side of things where I pray and I try to trust in God and I do my best to live for him.

00;16;43;15 - 00;17;12;17
Dave Quak 
And so I yeah, it's spiritual and it's biological and it's physical and it's mental. It's everything put together. We're holistic beings, and I think we ought to treat mental illness with every tool in the toolbox spiritual, physical, emotional, you know, biological. Now, I've had people say, well, insane that do you not believe that God could heal somebody from a mental health condition?

00;17;12;19 - 00;17;43;18
Dave Quak 
Well, here's the thing. In my life, I've only seen one person completely healed from mental illness in a supernatural way, in one prayer where it was literally there one day and gone the other. And that's actually my wife, Jess. Okay, so I've got faith for that type of healing when, you know, she'd been on anti-depressants as a teenager into her adult years and, you know, she'd really struggled with it, had suicidal thoughts.

00;17;43;20 - 00;18;06;05
Dave Quak 
You know, she talks about it in one of our other podcasts, but she got to a place where it was just Jess, myself and her mentor in our unit in America. We were a couple of years into marriage, and Jess had been praying and asking God for healing for years and years and years, and also taking medication and also seeing the psychologist.

00;18;06;05 - 00;18;37;23
Dave Quak 
So she was in a place where I am now sort of thing. But we prayed over Jess, and the Holy Spirit came into that home and rattled the place. She got overwhelmed with a sense of God's Spirit. She actually had to lay down because God's Spirit was resting so heavily upon her. And then after the prayer, she got up and she was completely healed, like off the medication, completely healed and restored, and hasn't had a depressed thought since.

00;18;37;25 - 00;18;55;14
Dave Quak 
Okay, so the prayer side of things is important to me, and I absolutely believe that God can restore people in an instant, but that hasn't been the case with me, and it doesn't seem to be the case with a lot of people that I'm working with. And so I want to I want to go for healing with everything.

00;18;55;22 - 00;19;18;06
Dave Quak 
I want to go for healing with the biological and the spiritual and the physical and the emotional and everything, and chuck everything and mental wellbeing, including the kitchen sink, if necessary. Because to get free from it is such a blessing. Okay, now I've been praying for people for, you know, 20 years since since Jess got healed. And it hasn't happened to that degree since.

00;19;18;08 - 00;19;43;05
Dave Quak 
But it doesn't mean I'm going to stop praying for it. So can I just encourage you? If you've got someone in your world who is trekking with mental ill health, hedge every bet. Pray, like and encourage them to see the GP. Encourage them to get good counsel, encourage them into good community and into a faith community in a flourishing church with good theology and all of that.

00;19;43;08 - 00;20;07;00
Dave Quak 
Throw everything at it and just ask that Jesus would infiltrate the whole thing. Because I believe Jesus is everywhere, from the spiritual to the biological and everything in between. And when he heals us, whether it be through an immediate means like we saw with Jess or through medication, it's all his healing because he is the God who gave the medication out of his goodness.

00;20;07;00 - 00;20;39;20
Dave Quak 
Anyway. So pray, pray, pray, pray, pray because you serve a God who listens and moves. And then number seven, set boundaries if necessary. If you've taken somebody under your wing with the intention of assisting them in getting help in their mental wellbeing, you've still got to set boundaries. One thing that I've discovered, since starting Sunburnt Souls, is that there's a lot of people that need help.

00;20;39;23 - 00;21;02;02
Dave Quak 
There's a lot of people that need community. There's a lot of people that need somebody to rely on, somebody to journey with. One thing I didn't anticipate when I started this podcast is how many people would contact me directly and ask if I could help them or mentor them or catch up with them. And it's awesome. And I do when I can, but it's not sustainable because I'm only one person.

00;21;02;02 - 00;21;30;01
Dave Quak 
And the requests, are outnumbering my hourly kind of like availability to help people. And so like, we've got to be able to set boundaries with people who, seeking help for their mental wellbeing because it can be relationally intensive and time intensive. Now, setting boundaries doesn't mean you stop caring for people, but what it does mean is that you need to protect your own emotional, emotional space as well.

00;21;30;03 - 00;22;00;03
Dave Quak 
You can offer love and support while looking after yourself to. You need to remember that you're not this person's savior and you're not this person's therapist. Unless you're a qualified therapist and you're not this person's GP, you're their support person, and if you walk side by side with someone, then you're in the right posture. As soon as you see the signs across from them advising or above telling them what to do, you've missed it.

00;22;00;05 - 00;22;21;24
Dave Quak 
We're supposed to walk side by side with one another. I'm going to be honest, I can't guarantee that this conversation is going to go well. All right. If you have got a heart to do this, it could be a very difficult conversation and it might not go as anticipated, or it might go better than anticipated, but I think it's actually just worth having a crack.

00;22;21;24 - 00;22;45;21
Dave Quak 
If you're walking with someone who's suspect is walking with mental illness, I can tell you from experience that walking with mental illness socks. It is hard, right? But the best thing that I ever did was allow people to help me on the journey. I don't like it when people talk about their spouses and go on and on and gush about them.

00;22;45;24 - 00;23;14;17
Dave Quak 
But one thing Jasmine wife has done really well in this process is gently coax me towards community and help. She's helped me recognize that I need help and I do. And because she's helped me and she show me with love and implemented the seven steps that we've spoken about today, I've been able to, you know, kind of humble myself and come to a place where I had to admit, man, I bloody need help because my life is out of order without help.

00;23;14;20 - 00;23;34;15
Dave Quak 
And because of that, we're down the track a bunch of years now and life is a lot better. It's not perfect. There are some days that are still horrible. There are some days where I wish that the world would end in a big fire, or a bowl of whatever's going to happen, but I'm also a lot better than I used to be.

00;23;34;18 - 00;24;04;21
Dave Quak 
If you've got this far in the podcast, it means you love somebody who is struggling with their mental ill health. I want to pray for you as we start to wind up, and I also want to pray for them to. So, Lord, I just pray for anyone who has someone in their life that struggling Lord, I pray that they can have the grace and the love and the patience and the boldness and the bravery to bring up these seven steps to kind of like just start the process from brokenness to restoration.

00;24;04;23 - 00;24;25;04
Dave Quak 
Look, all we pray for favor over conversations that when it's brought up that it's not met with offense. And I pray for the recipients, Lord God, those that are walking with mental ill health. It is a hard place to be, Lord God. So I pray that they're open for discussion that could lead to help and restoration. And so, Lord God, we trust you.

00;24;25;10 - 00;24;51;05
Dave Quak 
We ask for your help and declare that we need your intervention. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you so much for listening to some burnt souls. You can subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or Apple or any of the major podcast providers. Or you can listen directly at some Burnt Souls. Arcom. Thanks so much once again for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next week.