Generations of believing women learned to treat anxiety and trauma as spiritual failures. Christian clinicians are challenging the shame that keeps them from care.
By EEW Magazine Online Health & Wellness Editors
For many Black Christian women, anxiety and trauma stay hidden behind the belief that asking for help means weak faith.
In 2019, a severe medical crisis left Dianna Hobbs with a traumatic brain injury. Her recovery brought post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, along with anxiety and other challenges. From childhood, she had absorbed the belief that mental health struggles could reflect spiritual weakness. “I grew up Pentecostal, where we leaped for joy and rebuked the devil if we were sad,” said Hobbs, the founder of EEW Magazine Online.
“We didn’t talk about mental health in my family,” she explained. “Walking the road to getting professional help was difficult and humbling. It took me a while to even receive the treatment I desperately needed.”
She is far from alone. For many Black Christian women raised in churches where prayer was the expected answer to nearly every problem, admitting anxiety, depression or trauma can feel like confessing a spiritual failure.
Dianna Hobbs, founder of EEW Magazine Online, sought professional help for PTSD and anxiety after a 2019 traumatic brain injury. Photo: EEW Magazine Online
Clinical psychologist David Zuccolotto, a former pastor who has treated trauma survivors for more than 35 years, is challenging that thinking from inside the faith. In a Christian Post essay published Tuesday, he writes to Christians who read their fear as proof of weak faith: “Fear isn’t a verdict on your faith.”
Zuccolotto addresses Christians of every background. Among Black women of faith, researchers have documented the same shame. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Religion and Health described how, when Black women of Christian faith seek professional help for psychological symptoms, their religious communities sometimes respond with rejection.
That rejection, the authors wrote, can bring emotional, physical and spiritual trauma that increases the frequency, duration and intensity of women’s symptoms.
Hobbs understands the toll of putting off the help she needed. “I resisted treatment as long as I could until I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “Looking back, I should have gotten help sooner. I hope by telling my story, some other woman will see that there is no shame in saying I’m not okay.”
That experience helped shape the American Alliance for Black Mental Wellness, or AABMW, which she co-founded with her husband, Kenya Hobbs, in 2026. The initiative works to confront stigma and widen access to compassionate, culturally responsive mental health support in Black communities.
Federal survey data for 2025, compiled by Black Health, show the size of the gap AABMW is working to close: 40.5% of Black adults with a mental illness received treatment in the past year, compared with 50.9% of all U.S. adults with mental illness. The figures cover Black men and women together, with religious stigma remaining one barrier among several. Others include cost, too few providers, mistrust rooted in harmful health care experiences and a shortage of culturally responsive clinicians.
Many believing women learned to carry anxiety and trauma quietly, fearing their churches would see treatment as a lack of faith.
The Rev. Dr. Thema Bryant has heard the messages that keep people from care. Some faith leaders discourage treatment by saying, “If you prayed about it, you should be fine,” she told Duke Divinity School’s Faith & Leadership in 2022. Others say, “You don’t need to go to outsiders; we have enough with our faith.” Bryant speaks to the issue as a clinical psychologist, an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association.
She has also pointed to what helps: leaders who speak openly about mental health, even their own use of therapy, and pastors who keep referral lists of mental health services in their communities.
Grammy-winning Gospel artist Tasha Cobbs Leonard did just that in October 2022. She opened up about her journey with depression on “Tamron Hall,” EEW reported.
“For so many years, I had to put on this mask of perfection. I was a pastor’s daughter,” she said.
Professional treatment and the support of her family helped her through that dark season. Today, she speaks openly about what it did for her: “I believe in therapy.”
Hobbs writes about her own dark season in her new devotional, Finding Gratitude in the Dark: 28 Days to See God’s Goodness More Clearly, released Nov. 2 on Kindle through AABMW Publishing. The book grew out of a gratitude series she wrote in 2019 while recovering from her brain injury and facing significant emotional and neurological challenges.
It explores the painful, sometimes complicated work of holding on to faith through trauma, grief and prolonged uncertainty. It also makes room for professional treatment, with gratitude as a spiritual practice that walks alongside recovery.
For women who spent years believing they had to pray their way through every psychological struggle by themselves, asking for help takes courage.
Churches can make that step easier. Pastors can speak openly about mental health, recognize when someone needs specialized treatment and build relationships with qualified providers. Congregations can also offer support without pressuring anyone to disclose a diagnosis or defend the strength of her faith.
Some already do. In East Dallas, St. Luke Community United Methodist Church has run a mental health ministry for about a decade and is now training members as trauma educators, EEW reported last month.
A woman can love God, know His Word, faithfully serve her church and still need treatment for a mental health condition.
She should be able to say so without shame.
If you or someone you love is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. To find a licensed therapist, the Therapy for Black Girls directory lists clinicians across the country.
Dianna Hobbs is the founder and editor-in-chief of EEW Magazine Online. AABMW, which she co-founded, published Finding Gratitude in the Dark.
