Mark Licitra
Discussions of Mental Health and Christianity
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Archive for December, 2008
New myth forthcoming.
The duties of graduate school have taken priority. I have a final tomorrow night and a paper due tomorrow. So, after that, I can give some attention to this little blog. Until then its all social work studies, all day and night.
Myth #10: “I don’t know anyone with a mental illness.”
A few months ago, I accidentally learned of a great-grandmother of mine that struggled with mental illness. Needless to say, I was intrigued- not so much because I work in mental health, but because I had lived 28 years and never heard a word about it. In fact, when I inquired about it, I recieved a rather suprising response:
“We don’t talk about that, Mark.”
“Why not?” I asked, honestly wondering.
“We just don’t. Can we talk about something else?”
There is a fundamental question that needs to be asked, if we are to be serious about caring for others. One man in a crowd listening to Jesus put it this way (a paraphrase): “Who is my neighbor anyway?” For our purposes, I’ll frame it like this: “who are the mentally ill anyway?”
The simple answer is that they are our brothers and sisters, our mail-deliverers, our store clerks, our librarians, our homeless, our pastors, our rich, our poor, our middle-class- you get the idea. The statistiscs are truly astounding: About 26% of the US populace suffers from a diagnosable mental illness in a given year, a number just short of 58 million people. Approximately 6% suffer from a serious mental illness, or about 1 out of every 17 people. Among those that meet criteria for a mental disorder, almost half meet criteria for 2 or more.
So given the apparent ubiquity of mental health issues in the world, and more specifically, in our smaller worlds, why does this idea that we don’t know anyone with a mental illness persist? For the same reason that my grandmother would be horrified if she read the beginning of this post: because mental illness is a dirty little secret, or at least we’ve made it one.
I really believe that in most cases this is not intentional (unfortunately in some it is). Maybe its just easier to ignore what we don’t understand. Maybe its too overwhelming to think about. Maybe its so complicated that we think that other people, professional people, are more qualified to think about it, to talk about it, to deal with it. I hope that we are this innocent, or rather naive. Because if its understanding that we lack, there is probably hope for us. Thats why I wanted to start this blog- thats why I want us to talk about this. So lets start talking…
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