"Mental Illness"
Mindy Greiling
Sunday, August 7th 2005

St. Joan of Arc Aug. 7, 2005 I believe the best thing we can all do to advance the cause of a better mental health system is to talk out loud about mental illness. Compliments to you for participating in that at St. Joan’s.

When our now-27-year-old son, Jim, contracted schizophrenia six years ago, our family started speaking out loud about our experiences, so the topic comes up quite often. Including while I’m door knocking. I find that these families do not know how common mental illness is in their very own neighborhood. Once I found two families struggling with schizophrenia, living one block from each other and who could have supported each other so much, but they were unaware of the proximity.

Mental illness, like any other misery, loves company. The bonds of kinship one develops with friends who struggle with it are not unlike those forged in the trenches of war. Mental illnesses can be very upsetting and scary diseases, and the fact that those unaffected may not fully understand adds to the horror.

That is where stellar efforts like you are undertaking here at St. Joan of Arc come in handy. Each of us can make a concerted effort to talk out loud about mental illness in order to make it as common as it is.

One in five Americans will experience a serious mental illness in their lifetime. Think about your row here in church. ... lost in text version ... dependency are often the reasons these citizens have difficulty accessing housing programs.

I believe faith communities are sleeping giants just beginning to play a significant role in the healing process for those with a mental illness and they can be a bridge to advocacy through organizations like Faithnet and Faithways, which are part of NAMI.

NAMI is a wonderful organization that provides education on mental illness and advocacy. NAMI is a young organization that is still learning, too. I am proud to serve on its national board. At this year’s convention, the membership voted to change what NAMI stands for. Up until now, it has stood for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. This June it was changed to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI teaches others to “put the person first” by saying “a person who has mental illness – not The Mentally Ill as if all people with mental illness are is one big illness. NAMI has actually been around fewer years than Pope John Paul’s Papacy. People have not been speaking out loud about mental illness for very long.

NAMI provides free classes for people with mental illness, classes for their children, and for their families. My husband, Roger, and I took NAMI Family-to-Family classes and that’s where we first met Mary and Claude Paridis, who invited me here today. We shared our stories and it helped. It helped a lot.

We certainly were grateful to have others in the Family to Family classes in the same swamping boat with whom to share our intense grief and what we had been through. We also learned in the NAMI class what our CHILDREN were going through and how to help them, as well as how to better cope ourselves.

It is hard to imagine what families went through before NAMI and other mental illness advocacy groups existed. I do not believe it is an accident that research on mental illnesses increased and modern medications started coming out that help most people to recover after folks began talking out loud about mental illness.

This year, in the Minnesota Legislature, we organized a Mental Health Caucus for interested legislators. We weren’t sure how many would come so we ordered pizza. We were elated and surprised when over a third of the legislators joined. We ran out of pizza! They were personally interested or had heard from constituents.

Part of the hold up in the special session just completed was funding for health care and the mental health system came out pretty well. Minnesotans don’t generally realize that 28% of the people working fulltime and paying for MNCare are people with mental illnesses who are obviously doing very well.

It doesn’t have to be all legislation. We can all resolve to talk more about mental illness and break into the silence – the power of one. We can share stories as we are able. We can offer and ask for prayers for mental illness like we would for any other illness.

40% of people with emotional distress turn first to their clergy for help and counseling. In the United States, clergy outnumber psychiatrists by nearly ten to one and are more equitably distributed geographically than health professionals. Churches can also do what you are doing - educating people about mental illness and getting the dialogue going. What a terrific website you have started and what wonderful leaders you have.

Of course, the Catholic Church has been a leader on social justice and mental illness issues for some time. Last week, I had an opportunity to tour Guild Incorporated, a great organization that provides services for people with mental illness. I learned that the Guild was started in the early 1970’s by the Guild of Catholic Women, a volunteer organization that stepped forward to house individuals leaving Hastings State Hospital.

Archbishop Harry Flynn is a member of the NAMI-MN Advisory Board. You can be very proud.

I want to end by saying that our son, Jim, is doing incredibly well at the moment. He is a student at Metro State where he is pulling A’s while majoring in accounting. He also works half time for Tasks Unlimited, a wonderful employment and housing program for people with serious mental illnesses, and lives in one of their lodges.

Thank you for your leadership at St. Joan’s. You are a quality model for other churches.