Ep. 72 | The Answer to Mental Illness, with Jacob Hess

Meghan is joined by Jacob Hess to discuss the unlimited power of God to heal - including healing our pervasive and persistent mental illnesses. Topics Include: 

- Long-term sustainable healing from mental illness and addictions
-Other resources besides medication
-Pathway to an ‘upward spiral’
-The 2 things that heal trauma
-Healing at Home and in Zion

Jacob Hess is lead author of The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints, a contributing writer at Deseret News, and a founder and former Editor at Public Square Magazine. He is a former board member of the National Coalition of Dialogue & Deliberation, and wrote You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought, But You’re Still Wrong with Phil Neisser, Dean at State University of New York. 

Jacob’s life work is dedicated to making space for thoughtful, good-hearted people to find understanding (and affection) while exploring together the deepest of disagreements. He has been featured on This American Life and honored by Public Conversations Project. Jacob has also helped create online resources for pornography addiction (Fortify) and depression anxiety (Lift) that have reached 200K in 155 countries. He has published 14 peer reviewed articles, with a focus on long-term outcomes – helping people find deeper, more sustainable healing from depression and anxiety through his non-profit, the Council for Sustainable Healing. 

Jacob and his sweetheart Monique live in Paradise, Utah, having some modest success raising four boys, and a baby girl – and proving to be reliably mediocre in raising chickens, ducks, goats and a vegetable garden that proves year after year that the earth is still cursed.   

To read more of Jacob Hess's writing and work, you can access it all here: https://jacobzhess.substack.com/

And to go deeper in some of the mental health conversations discussed today, check out the following:

• When the Adderall Runs Out
• Imagining a Mental Health System Centered on Learning & Growth
• Does Your Depression Keep Getting Worse? This Might Be Why
• Hope Sometimes Hurts. Hopelessness Hurts More

And this article about pornography: "Whose Body Will Save Us from The Pain Inside?"

“The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it.  It comes the very moment you wake up each morning.  All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.  And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.  And so on, all day.  Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first.  But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system:  because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.”  Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 198-199.

If you’re ready to move from understanding into lived experience, join me for Parting the Veil Women's Retreat this June near Paragonah. 

Hidden Wisdom initiates truth-seekers into the Mysteries, guiding listeners toward a lived experience of the Divine that awakens and transforms faith—without dismantling family or community. 

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