Tia — thank you for a great post. I like your statement “Let’s bring Mental Illness from the back of the pews and bring it front and center.” This is true for other problems sometimes hidden in churches, including both formal and informal churches — for example, issues arising from near death experiences (NDEs) that are not understood by the clergy resulting in rejection, depression and other symptoms similar to PTSD within their congregations. All this trauma is absolutely unnecessary if only seminaries gave lectures on what really happens after death, scripturally and in practice, but ministers begin in churches without a clue. I know and even a professor from a seminary wrote to me about this and his own NDE which he dare not mention in lectures — numerous ministers have themselves had an NDE and just a few are no longer prepared to keep quiet about them. In order to help change this distressing situation I wrote the factual book “Living Beyond: Making Sense of Near Death Experiences”, but its influence has been minimal to date.