“For I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you, says the Lord, thoughts and plans for welfare and peace and not for evil, to give you hope in your final outcome.”

This scripture from Jeremiah, 29:11, is a familiar verse that often is used to emphasize God’s overwhelming desire for each of his children to enjoy their lives and look forward to the good future He has planned for them.

For a country attempting to collectively catch its breath, even subtle signs of hope are a welcome relief. In the wake of COVID and the multitude of social and economic shifts our country has experienced over the course of the last several years, these words help restore confidence and allow people to forge a new vision of life and the future.

As the nation begins to jointly exhale and entertain the idea that life will go on, we can only hope that our country will soon continue to seek a more balanced and normal way of life. I pray that as we heal, we will find ourselves a stronger, more united, and healthy society with the energy to freely laugh, love, work, and worship without fear. That is… if they will let us.

The Power of Fear

If these last few years have taught us anything, it is that we have all been given the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson about the power of fear. Fear can drive us, immobilize us, and cause us to engage in behaviors that surprise even ourselves. Unchecked, fear becomes a tormentor that supersedes our ability to think logically and reduces us to tenuous and compliant people willing to do almost anything to rid ourselves of the fear. In a state of fear, high anxiety, and emotional distress, we are easily managed, exploited, and convinced of things that we might never have considered, had it not been for the extreme state of fear to which we were exposed.

The Anatomy of Fear   

In its simplest form, fear is an emotion.  And like all emotions, fear is birthed in your mind as a thought that is linked to a cognitive belief or perception. Fear is generally a strong emotional response that tends to propel us toward some kind of action. Thus, fear begins as a belief or perception that gives birth to a thought, which in turn triggers an emotion (fear), which results in an action. To manage the emotion, you must manage the thought, and to manage the thought, you must manage the belief. 

What You Believe Determines Your Emotional Response.

It is important to remember that what you believe is largely determined by what you hear, what you see, what you read, what you experience, and where you direct your focus.  As the old saying goes…garbage in, garbage out.  If your life is flooded with a constant barrage of negative, toxic, destructive, and disparaging content, your mind will subsequently align itself with those images, ideas, perceptions, and beliefs. If your life is filled with positive, life-affirming, hopeful, uplifting, and empowering content, your beliefs and perceptions will likewise reflect these types of mindsets.

How a Constant Diet of Gloom and Doom Impacts a Nation

In light of the somewhat consistent flow of negative, noxious, and distressing content being shoveled into every aspect of our lives, it should not be surprising that a collective sense of gloom and doom has settled over the country. Nor is it difficult to assert that the massive insurgence of fear we have been witnessing is a direct result of our minds being overloaded with images and postulations about suffering, loss, death, and dying. Undoubtedly, these non-stop predictions of global disease, economic demise, and death will result in shifts in perceptions, beliefs, and mindsets, and subsequently an increase in trauma responses. In such a circumstance, it would be reasonable to expect people to experience a wide variety of trauma responses based on the degree to which these fears manifest as lived experience. 

When faced with an unprecedented event, rises in emotional distress, mental pain, relational issues, spiritual questions, and any number of perplexing and confusing feelings and emotions should be expected. This also means that a proportional rise in the number of people in need of supportive, validating, compassionate, and life-affirming care should also be expected.  What we need is time to recover and heal.  What we don’t need is a second wave of fear.

A Global Push for Mental Ill-Health

Unfortunately, a second wave of fear seems to be exactly where we are headed.  Following the extraordinary experiences of the last several years of coronavirus mandates, financial challenges, and social unrest, we have been subsequently inundated by a strong “mental health” initiative to expand, if not exploit, the mental illness narrative and agenda.

The recent uptick of mental illness awareness campaigns has become a front-line effort to convince people that a surge of mental health disorders is to be expected, in light of the level of ill-health, civil unrest, and financial instability to which we have been exposed. All of which require increased access to psychiatric diagnosis, treatment, and psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants, benzodiazepines, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety medications (neurotoxins).

The Second Wave of Fear: You May Not Have Died From the Virus, but You Now Have a Broken Brain

It has been truly disheartening to witness the birth of a new narrative about a second pandemic of mental ill-health, touted by mental health “professionals,” designed to label emotionally distraught survivors of the coronavirus mandates and other social distresses mentally ill. 

The same organizations that insist we follow the science seem to conveniently set aside the fact that scientific evidence for the functional or biological causes of most emotional and mental conditions has never been found. As such, campaigns attempt to diagnose large numbers of American citizens with anxiety and depressive disorders, and subsequently, place them on a variety of psychotropic drugs for which any effort at informed consent or truthful conversations about the limited efficacy and harmful side effects is limited at best.

This push will result in a new generation of psychiatric patients who will be sold the broken brain and chemical imbalance theories and told they will need to be on medication for the rest of their lives if they hope to live a somewhat normal life.

This movement will also promote the narrative of post-traumatic stress, which will similarly result in the already suffering being subjected to a protracted and possibly life-long battle with anxiety, fear, drug-induced proliferation of their traumatic response mechanisms, disability, and possible self-induced death. While there is certainly a need to address the emotional and mental impact the coronavirus and the subsequent financial hardships and social disruption had on our nation, the APA, the Pharmaceutical Industry, the CDC, and the WHO seem to be doubling down on a narrative that will create more panic, illness, and disease rather than promote healing, recovery, and health.

Suicidality and Akathisia: A Predictable and Avoidable Outcome

In the wake of this second wave of fear and the psychotropic medication campaigns, it is likely we will also see a jump in suicides which will be publicly attributed to the virus and a lack of social awarness and sinsitivity, which will more accurately reflect the result of people being subjected to strong psychotropic drugs (antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety meds) which significantly increase akathisia and suicidality. The psychiatric community is the master marketer, simultaneously convincing and educating people to be mentally ill and then luring them into the mental health system, where they can become hopelessly trapped in a never-ending cycle of treatment, drugs, dependence, and a lack of self-agency, hope, and healing.  

Important Things to Remember

It is normal to experience emotional and mental distress when exposed to excessive stress, negative toxic narratives, and real and perceived threats to personal well-being and safety.  However, these experiences are not permanent, and the resulting trauma responses (i.e., anxiety, depression, panic, grief, loss) can and will heal.  There is hope. You will recover. 

Important Points to Ponder…

• The mental illness model or narrative is an attempt to medicalize and pathologize every aspect of human emotion and experience.
• Experiencing a trauma response does not make you mentally ill; it makes you a human being.
• A trauma response is a normal reaction to an abnormal set of circumstances.
• Pain is not pathology
• Emotional distress and mental pain are not diseases or disorders to be diagnosed or treated.
• Emotional distress and mental pain are trauma responses to be healed
• The chemical imbalance theory is not supported by scientific evidence.
• Psychotropic drugs are neurotoxins that can and do cause long-term dependency issues and harm.
• Empirical evidence of the biomedical model of mental illness does not exist. Current assertions are based on supposition and pseudo-scientific methodologies.

A Better Way: Alternative Methods for Healing Emotional and Mental Trauma Responses  

Because trauma responses are directly linked to our beliefs and perceptions, trauma can result from imagined, impending, or actual experiences. If you believe it to be real, it is real for you, and you will live and react as if it is real. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” Proverbs 23:7

People recovering from trauma responses require relational safety, security, and stability. They will need a safe place to make sense of what they have experienced and what has happened to them. To fully heal, people experiencing trauma responses need to be heard, understood, and validated. 

If emotionally wounded people are allowed to articulate their experiences in a safe and supportive environment, find validation and make sense of their experiences, they are better equipped to integrate the event into their total life experience, build a positive mindset, increase resiliency, find recovery, and ultimately heal. 

God’s Response to Fear, Trauma Responses, and Healing 

In this time of upheaval and in the wake of the unprecedented waves of fear to which we have been exposed, it is important to make an intentional decision to drop anchor in the only harbor of unchanging, safe, and dependable guidance, which is most notably God’s Word.  Although this may be the first time we as individuals have been faced with core-shaking, value-testing events, we need to remember that the fear of annihilation is not a new or even unusual historical event. Countless civilizations have faced the prospect of disease and death head-on and emerged victoriously. 

For the people of God, this is an especially common circumstance and one to which God has directly spoken and provided comfort.  As recorded in Psalm 91…

“Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.  This I declare about the Lord: He alone is my refuge, my place of safety; he is my God, and I trust him. For he will rescue you from every trap and protect you from deadly disease. He will cover you with his feathers. He will shelter you with his wings.  

His faithful promises are your armor and protection. Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night, nor the arrow that flies in the day.  Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness, nor the disaster that strikes at midday. Though a thousand fall at your side, though ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.”

Because we serve a loving and compassionate God who anticipates and provides for all of our needs, we can be assured that God will make a way to take that which the enemy meant for harm and transform it into a good and redemptive work.  When we utilize all of the provisions he has given us, we can refuse to listen to the enemy’s tactics of fear and instead stand strong in the battle.  

The Bottom Line:   

Relational and emotional pain and mental distress are not diseases or disorders to be treated or conditions from which to recover, but rather traumatic responses to the real-life experiences, conditions, and situations to which you have been exposed.  Rather than being physical maladies or biomedical brokenness, these traumatic responses are normal and often adaptive reactions to be shared, validated, and relationally healed within one’s self, in relationship with others, through the loving-kindness of God and God’s Son, Jesus.

Helping people find Biblically principled, safe, supportive, and health-oriented methods for resolving the emotional outcomes and trauma responses linked to external social and cultural shifts is essential. As we come alongside those who have suffered great loss, let us be collective voices of hope and healing that offer a pathway up and out of the waves of fear and despair. 

Fear is not an attribute of God’s nature, nor is it a state to which we must become dependently bound. Fear is an emotion, and properly managed, fear can become a motivational experience that drives us to take positive steps to make changes, support others, and fight for righteousness and truth. 

Remember…in Him all is well and the future is bright. 

In His grace and service,

Teresa

For readers wanting to understand these reactions more clearly, further guidance can be found in the resource library.

Additionally, readers may find the following article helpful. Who Decides What’s Normal?

This article was originally published under Chrysalis Connections and was reviewed and updated in 2026 as part of the Natural Relational Health Institute rebranding and content expansion.