I was 15 when my dad passed away. And not long after, my mom took me to a clinical psychologist. I ended up on Zoloft for a season. I don’t remember it working. What I remember is that my faith is what carried me through that season. The medication and the clinical appointments were an attempt to help a grieving teenager, and I’m grateful for that, but faith was what held me.
Sharing this isn’t a case against medication, for the record. Writing about this from the outside would feel wrong to me, because I’ve sat in the tension of it personally. And I know how complicated it gets when faith, grief, mental health, and the pressure to “be okay” all show up at once
A new KFF Health News investigation published this week brought all of that back up for me. Between 2019 and 2024, the share of American adults taking anxiety medications climbed from 11.7% to 14.3%, according to CDC survey data. That’s roughly 8 million more people, bringing the total to about 38 million Americans. And before the numbers could breathe, the culture war moved in.
What’s Happening Right Now
RFK Jr. has been on his soapbox about SSRIs lately (that’s the class that includes Lexapro, Prozac, and Zoloft). During his January confirmation hearing, he compared quitting them to quitting heroin. His agency is now studying a supposed link between SSRIs and school shootings. The American Psychiatric Association pushed back hard, and a psychiatrist who actually treats patients told KFF Health News the claims were “just not grounded in any sort of evidence or fact.” So, we’ve got politicians weighing in on your medicine cabinet while doctors are over here saying that’s not what the research shows.
The research tells a different story. A Cochrane Library study found that over half of people with generalized anxiety disorder who took an SSRI saw their anxiety symptoms cut by at least 50%. The KFF investigation is also careful to distinguish between SSRIs, which are not habit-forming, and benzodiazepines like Xanax, which do carry real dependency risks with long-term use. Two very different medication classes are getting flattened into the same political conversation, and that conflation is doing real harm to people trying to make informed decisions about their own health.
And a lot of those people are entrepreneurs. A Founder Reports survey of 227 entrepreneurs across 46 countries found that over 50% of entrepreneurs report struggling with anxiety specifically. Women entrepreneurs carry additional layers, and research shows women report anxiety at higher rates than men, with female entrepreneurs also facing disproportionate financial pressure and impostor syndrome on top of that. So this conversation lands right in the middle of the lives of the women reading this.
The Question We’ve Been Too Afraid to Ask Out Loud
In Christian circles, the anxiety conversation has a layer that doesn’t show up in KFF Health News. The unspoken question sounds like this: Should I just pray harder?
Or some version of it. Should I have more faith? Is something spiritually wrong with me? Shouldn’t a woman who trusts God be able to get through this without medication?
I want to stay with these questions instead of rushing past them, because they deserve a real answer, and the real answer is more nuanced than either “just pray” or “just medicate.”
A lot of us grew up with a theology, sometimes spoken and sometimes just absorbed, that treats anxiety as a faith problem. Philippians 4:6 gets quoted. “Be anxious for nothing.” And prayer does have power. Community has power. Therapy has power. Rest, movement, and time in Scripture have power. I believe all of that.
And I also know that when I was 15 and grieving my dad, what my soul needed was God. My faith was the thing that held me. The Zoloft didn’t do what grief needed, because grief needed something medication was never designed to give. What I needed was to be comforted by a God who was acquainted with sorrow.
Grief is different from clinical anxiety, though. Clinical anxiety, the kind where the nervous system fires alarms when no threat is present, where sleep disappears, where avoidance patterns quietly erode your work and your relationships, can have biological roots that faith practices alone were never designed to treat. The body is part of how God made us. Treating it is not a lack of trust.
Scripture doesn’t set medicine and faith against each other. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts, was a physician (Colossians 4:14). Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach in 1 Timothy 5:23. The Bible has never treated physical care as spiritual failure. That theology came from somewhere else, and we can put it down.
What Christian Women Entrepreneurs Are Carrying
Let me be direct about what the entrepreneurial grind looks like from the inside, because the highlight reel misses most of the weight.
Financial uncertainty is a feature, rather than a bug, of building something from scratch. A slow month can make you question every decision you’ve made, even when you’ve done everything right. Decision fatigue is a real, documented phenomenon, and when you’re the CEO, the content creator, the customer service rep, and the accountant, your nervous system runs hot all day. Isolation is real, too. Building alone, or with a small team, can be profoundly lonely, especially when the people who love you don’t fully understand what you’re going through.
Add the specific weight of being a Christian woman entrepreneur, where the cultural expectation can be that you should look peaceful about all of it. Covered in grace and not visibly struggling. Grateful and trusting and… fine.
Clinical anxiety doesn’t care about that expectation. And the woman who is white-knuckling her way through a season because she’s afraid of what it means about her faith to even consider seeing a doctor, that woman deserves better than the silence she’s sitting in.
On Politics Getting into Our Medicine Cabinets
There are legitimate conversations worth having about prescribing practices. Are people getting adequate therapy alongside medication? Are telehealth platforms moving faster than proper monitoring allows? Are we over-relying on medication as the only intervention? Those are fair questions for the medical community.
Turning those questions into a political movement that stigmatizes 38 million people who are quietly managing a real health condition is a different thing entirely. For the Christian women in our community who have finally found some relief and some functionality, the political noise adds another layer of shame to something they’re already going through things with enough complexity.
Lexapro, Prayer, or Both?
I’m a journalist, not your doctor, and what you decide about medication belongs between you, your physician, and God.
My theological take, for what it’s worth: the binary is false, and it always has been. Prayer and medication are not competing treatments. Spiritual practice and psychiatric care are not on opposite sides of a spectrum where choosing one means abandoning the other.
The woman in Proverbs 31 was industrious and resourceful. She used every tool available to her. She didn’t wait for provision to fall from the sky while ignoring the means in front of her. She worked, and God moved through her work.
Seek God in your anxiety. Absolutely, pray, find a good therapist (ideally one who understands both clinical care and faith, because they exist and they’re worth finding), build community with women who understand the specific pressure you’re under, and take your rest seriously. When your doctor recommends medication as part of that picture, receive it as one more resource God placed within your reach.
My faith carried me through losing my dad at 15. And I also know my story isn’t everyone’s story. A woman whose anxiety has a biological root deserves access to biological treatment. Those two things can both be true at the same time.
Healing is rarely one thing. You are a whole woman, mind, body, and spirit, and God is invested in all three.
A Word About the Stigma We’re Still Carrying
For a lot of women in Christian spaces, the stigma around mental health runs deep. The unspoken message in some of our churches has been that struggling is weakness and weakness is sin-adjacent. Women have sat in silence because they were afraid of judgment, or because they mentioned a therapist and got a concerned look instead of a referral.
The politicization of anxiety medication is going to make that stigma worse before it gets better. Christian women with platforms, which includes you if you have an audience, a community, a voice anywhere, have an opportunity to push back on the shame. Becoming a mental health advocate isn’t required if that’s not your calling, but being the kind of woman who doesn’t make it weird when someone in your community mentions their prescription or their therapist, that matters. Normalizing the conversation matters. Saying out loud that faith and mental health care can coexist matters.
Scripture, medicine, and 38 million lived experiences all confirm the same thing: faith and mental health care can absolutely coexist.
If you’re experiencing anxiety and looking for support, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (adaa.org) is a solid place to start for finding providers and resources. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
