by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

 
Good morning!

Come into this circle of love and justice;

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together!

The subject that nobody talks about—it’s not sex or death or even money—it’s mental illness.  This is not a subject, quite frankly, that I want to talk about.  It is a topic that was requested, and one that should be spoken of—but it is difficult for me, because of my own family history.  You see, my family—on both my mother’s and my father’s sides—is chock-full of mental illness.  I know about this first-hand.  I know about the secrecy that surrounds it, and the pain that comes from that secrecy.

We were living in Cincinnati at the time—my mother and my father and my little brother and sister and I.  I was nine, and my brother was seven and my sister was three.  One summer day my uncle and my grandfather, on my father’s side, drove up from Louisiana in my grandfather’s Studebaker.  My mother wasn’t at home.  My father put a sheet in the middle of the floor and emptied our clothes into the sheet and tied it up and threw it in the trunk.  We were leaving, Daddy said.  I asked if I could take my new puppy, and he said no.  What about my bride doll?  And he said, “There’s no room.”  We left and drove fast, along the less traveled roads, to Louisiana—I didn’t see my mother again until my high school graduation.

What was happening in that household before we left?  Well, my mother was mentally ill.  She had already been hospitalized twice since I was born, and she was descending into another spell of illness.  In those days, there was little known in the way of treatment—my father didn’t know what to do, my mother was being difficult, and so he just left.  We went to live with my paternal grandparents in a small town in North Louisiana.  I didn’t hear from my mother for over a year, and I didn’t know why.  Nobody ever told us children that she had been shut up in a mental hospital again.  I thought what any child would think—she just didn’t love me.  When I was in my fifties, I asked my older cousin, who was around at the time, “Why didn’t you tell me where my mother was?”  She got tears in her eyes and she said, “I guess we were trying to protect you.”

My grandfather himself was mentally ill.  He had had to retire early from his position as postmaster of the town because of a nervous condition.  He had been an aggressive, angry man in his younger days, and when we lived there, he would seem to be all right, if stern, but then from time to time he would become depressed and threaten suicide. 

And then there was my father.  He had depressions, too, and he self-medicated with alcohol.  He married five times in all, and spent the last 7 or 8 years of his life in the state mental hospital with a diagnosis of alcohol dementia.  The last 4 years or so, he didn’t even know his own children when we came to visit.  When I got word that he had died, I cried, not so much that he was gone, because he had been gone a long time, really—but I cried because alcoholism and mental illness had taken him away from my mother, whom he loved—or so he said, all the years of his life.  And it had taken her from him, for though she was restored to health, she never looked at another man after my father left.  All that brokenness in those two lives.

With a history like this, you might imagine that I didn’t get off scot-free, and you would be right.  As a matter of fact, statistically, I should be a drug addict, or weigh 350 pounds, or be dead.  But I had the church, where I was loved, and the school, where I was admired.  When I was a senior in high school, I was elected “Most Intelligent” and “Best Christian,” two honors that any adolescent girl would covet. 

All my adult life, off and on, I have had to cope with depression and anxiety.  But I’ve been lucky.  We know so much more about mental illness now.  We have drugs to treat depression, and when I need them, I take them.  And I have had a number of wonderful therapists who have helped me through the years to work through the trauma of my childhood.  Are there still scars?  Yes.  But I also think I’ve been able to use my early experiences to deepen my compassion for others. 

I tell you my story because it’s important for us to acknowledge how pervasive mental illness is.  It is important to understand that it is an illness, like any other illness, and that it can be treated.  It is important to speak out about it, to tell our stories, and to challenge the culture of shame that still to some extent hangs round it.

Just how pervasive is it?  Very pervasive.  An estimated 1 in 5 individuals in any given year suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.  Five to seven percent have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder.  And about five to seven percent of children have a serious emotional disturbance.  Major depression is the leading cause of disability in this country—and yet the success rate for treating clinical depression is over 80 percent.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Oregon’s youth ages 10-24, and studies estimate that 90 percent of youth who commit suicide have at least one major psychiatric disorder.  Twenty-three percent of Oregon’s prison inmates suffer from mental illness, and 59 percent of Oregon’s juvenile offenders have a diagnosed mental health disorder.

Senator Gordon Smith has just published a book, Remembering Garrett, about his own son Garrett’s tragic suicide, and the depression that led to it.  He speaks of his own devastation and grief, which gave way to overwhelming bewilderment and shame and sadness.  He was blaming himself for his son’s death.  He finally was led to ask his son’s psychiatrist, “Was I complicit in killing my son?  Did he die because of my traveling, striving, achieving, because of my high expectations?”  The doctor told him, “Absolutely not!  Garrett killed himself not to hurt you or because of you, but because he was gravely ill, most likely manic depressive.  He had a chemical imbalance in his brain.”  Senator Smith was able to get a bi-partisan bill passed in Congress setting up a fund to address youth suicide.  He writes, “Pain and loss do not register as Democrat or Republican.  They come to all.”

Mental illness has always existed, so long as people have been on this earth.  In more superstitious eras, it was thought to be caused by demons, or by the devil.  In scattered villages and rural areas, mentally ill people were generally cared for by their families—the insane who could not be cared for were sent to almshouses and jails, institutions which didn’t have the ability to see to their needs.  In the United States, Dorothea Dix, a Unitarian, surveyed conditions for the mentally ill and discovered that they were often kept in the most deplorable conditions, chained in small spaces, lying in their own waste, without adequate clothing, and sometimes abused physically and sexually.  She was a tireless advocate for change.  The first asylums were built in the early part of the 19^th century.  Before too long, many of these hospitals became underfunded and overcrowded, and they became associated with hopelessness, abuse, and untimely death.  By the middle of this last century, the consensus was that the mentally ill could better be cared for in local communities, in group homes and half-way houses—and so all but the most seriously ill were deinstitutionalized—but the financial support from the government was not forthcoming, and so many of these people ended up on the streets or in jails, and that is largely the situation to this very day.

You may have heard the story on NPR a month or so ago about Carol Ann Reyes, 63 years of age, a mentally ill patient who was loaded into a cab by a staff person from Kaiser Permanente and dumped out on Skid Row in Los Angeles, wearing nothing more than a hospital gown and socks, according to police.  “She was very disoriented.  She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing,” said Regina Chambers, a worker at the Union Rescue Mission.  “All she knew is that she had been to a hospital.  She didn’t know which one.”  Officials say a number of hospitals, police agencies, and jails take the homeless who are seeking treatment or crowding jail cells and release them on the streets of Skid Row.

It appears that this society doesn’t really consider mentally ill persons fully human, deserving of respect and deserving of the care that any other person would normally expect to receive. 

A case in point is the 5,000 patients whose cremated remains are “neatly stacked in a stark, lonely room like cans of paint” at the Oregon State Hospital.  Since late in the 19^th century, the State Hospital has been a dumping ground for all kinds of people who just don’t fit in, who are unwanted.  Even its administrators admit that they’ve been housing patients who don’t belong there.  Patients whose psychoses have been stabilized by medication are being warehoused in the hospital for lack of smaller community-based mental health centers that would serve them much better.  For those whose ashes have been long unclaimed, a memorial is being planned at the new state hospital site.

A big problem facing those with mental illness in Oregon is the lack of parity in our insurance plans.  Jake Steckly, a slight 14-year-old Portland boy, bravely speaks to lawmakers in Salem about how his brother’s mental illness and his father’s substance abuse wiped out his family financially and made him want to run away.  He breaks down and cries while describing visiting his dad in a drug treatment program that his mom paid for with her credit card.  Oregon is one of the few states that still do not require mental health parity in insurance—35 other states have laws preventing insurers from putting more limits on treatment of mental illness than for physical ailments.  Denying mental health care doesn’t lead to savings, it leads to more illness, absenteeism, crime, homelessness, and poverty. 

Why should we, as a religious people, care?  Because if we take seriously our first Principle, “We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we have to say that our society has a long way to go in its respect and caring for our mentally ill.  Casting a light on the truth of the situation, saying that secrecy is no longer appropriate, because secrets hurt, is our way as Unitarian Universalists. 

I am so proud of this congregation so often, and I was never prouder than when our youth invited Carl, one of their group who has schizophrenia, to speak to the congregation on Youth Sunday a couple of years ago—and he gave a funny, warm, and enlightening message about what it means to be mentally ill.  And one of our Board members thanked this congregation for the support that was given to him in his recent bout with depression—this is the kind of openness that I cherish about this congregation and the kind of honesty and respect for persons that will support the systemic changes we need to make in our mental health system. 

We do have a mental health task force now in this church, if you wish to join with those folks in their work—you can sign up in the parish hall to do that today after the service.  You can donate to NAMI.  But most of all, you can tell your stories and hear the stories of others.  You can break the veil of silence that lies over so many lives, and bring a healing message to those ill of mind, just as we do for those who are ill of body.  This church is a place where all are welcome, where all have worth, where we care for all.  Yes, it is a church of all souls.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we pray that we might mature in wisdom and in spirit, and that our compassion might grow.  We pray that we might have the courage to tell our truth and to hear the truth that others may tell, that secrets will keep us no more from the health and the wholeness that we all seek.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know the truth, and speak the truth, for the truth will set you free.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.