Category Archives: September 2011

The National Day Of Prayer For Mental Illness Awareness Recovery And Understanding

The National Day of Prayer for Mental Illness Awareness Recovery and Understanding is Tuesday, October 4. This day of prayer was initiated by Angela Vickers of NAMI Florida and Gunnar Christiansen of NAMI California in 2004. It has had widespread support by individual congregations and National Faith Community Mental Illness Networks.

In seeking God’s guidance, we can recommit ourselves to replacing misinformation, blame, fear and prejudice with truth and love in order to offer hope to all who are touched by mental illness.

You can download helpful resources at liturgies to use for the National Day of Prayer on the Home page of the Mental Health Ministries website. This resource is available in English and Spanish. Many faith communities have sponsored an interfaith candle lighting service using a liturgy written by Carole J. Wills that is included in this resource.

There is also a fact sheet, What You Need to Know About Mental Illness, including facts that involve our faith communities.

Reaching Out to Faith Communities

*from NAMI FAITHNET: National Day of Prayer for Mental Illness

NAMI FAITHNET TRAINING MODULES.

Reaching Out to Congregations is a four-part training tool provided by NAMI FaithNet, an educational outreach to faith communities of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The goal of Reaching out to Congregations is to better equip NAMI members and leaders to build bridges with local faith groups. The content was written in response to common questions like: Why should we reach out to faith communities? How do we handle differing views of mental illness or stigmatizing remarks? How do I get started?

The long-range goal of NAMI FaithNet outreach is to promote supportive faith communities where awareness, welcome, inclusion, support, and spiritual care for individuals and families facing mental illness is provided.

Four Parts of Reaching out to Congregations:

  • Laying the Foundation provides basic information about NAMI FaithNet, its interfaith dialogue approach and religious diversity. This section also explains the value of outreach to congregations and the community impact of untreated mental illness.
  • Opening the Door explores the impact of mental illness on individuals and what basic spiritual care encompasses. Suggestions are offered for starting informal conversations with people of faith and building advocacy, awareness, and support within a congregation.
  • NAMI FaithNet: Sharing Your Story provides training for those who want to more effectively tell their story about mental illness and the role of NAMI and the faith community in their journey.
  • Looking Ahead & Following Up offers tips on the team approach and how to respond to stigmatizing remarks, differing beliefs, and other challenges unique to faith community outreach.

Reaching Out to Faith Communities is offered via PowerPoint and intended for self-study while viewing with the NOTES function. While the four sections are designed to be used consecutively and as a whole, they each can be studied independently. In addition, the material is also presented via a two-part webinar series. Support documents referenced in the curriculum are also included. It is available on the NAMI FaithNet site (www.nami.org/namifaithnet).

Interview with Barbara Crafton

An interview with the Rev. Barbara C. Crafton on her 2009 book Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet. (Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN 97-0-470-37195-4)

EMIN: What prompted you to write Jesus Wept? Did an event or something specific prompt you?
Barbara: I have been a lifelong sufferer [of depression.] In thirty years of doing retreats, there has always been someone with depression who was seeking help. I have knowledge from a religious aspect and personal information about the illness.
Sharing both aspects has worked well, and I thought others would think so too. I was in a place with the Geranium Farm to ask readers to share their experiences of coping with depression. A large number of eloquent stories came in. I was delighted with the response.
EMIN: Please say something about facing the hard reality that having a mental illness is a long-term situation?
Barbara: It is difficult for us to come to understand that it [a mental illness] is chronic. We can control and manage it. Having a mental illness is part of life, an unfortunate part of life. We want a cure. Ordinarily, you don’t get a cure, but you do get help. We are blessed today to have something with which to manage it.
EMIN: What do you have to say to people who have depression, but want to get off their medication?
Barbara: I would say that the time is long past when any Christian needs to hesitate to seek professional help. It is no sin to have this disorder. It is not helpful to not do what you can do. It is your disease talking when you think you can’t do anything about it. It’s been a long time since thinking like that made any sense at all.
People think having a mental illness is shameful – nonsense! It is a source of major suffering. I’m on a bit of a crusade. I want people to serve God with everything they have. If they are bleeding inside, they can’t do that.
EMIN: Why do you think we feel shame when we have a mental illness?
Barbara: The Bible has a lot of ancient belief that illness is a result of sin. Fundamentalist see it as one’s own fault or we have no right to do something about it. We have chosen what we decide to believe from scripture. It is time to be discerning and careful about what we want scripture to do. It is not a recipe book. The ancient teaching about suffering being from sin has been thoroughly discredited, but it is easy for us to fall back into that.
EMIN: What are some tools our faith offers us when we face mental illness?
Barbara: We do have healing resources in scripture. We have reliance on God, We have hope in hopeless situations. We have our communities, a powerful sense of community for wholeness.
In prayer we have a resource and honesty; truth in prayer is powerful.
We have the teaching of resurrection from the jaws of death.
We have tools sufficient without leaning on those which are not.
EMIN: Do you have any suggestions for family members and friends of persons facing mental illness? What helps? What hurts?
Barbara: Recognize that the sufferer has a God too, and it’s not you. We can’t take responsibility for someone else’s journey, for their walk with God.
We have no duty to help them stay sick, but we can’t do it for them.
Part of depression is thinking that we don’t have any lines in our own play. Our power is limited, but we do have lines. We have to find courage to find and speak them. That will go a long way toward our own healing. We can get out of God’s way.
Call 911 if someone threatens suicide. If he does resist, it is not your fault. His death is his own. Depression is a Disease that kills.
EMIN: Since writing Jesus Wept, have you had any strange or negative reactions from people who weren’t aware of your illness?
Barbara: People have been surprised, maybe naïve, a little shocked. This plays into my hands. If they are shocked, I’ve got their attention. I can point out that they have never known me not on antidepressants. Then they can know that the drugs don’t make me a zombie. If a religious leader can be candid, it is very helpful. This is a Call within a call that I didn’t know I had.

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is an Episcopal priest, spiritual director, and author. She is the founder and head of the Geranium Farm, www.geraniumfarm.org, an online institute for the promotion of spiritual growth, which publishes The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm, read by thousands of people worldwide.

News from Pathways to Promise

Pathways to Promise and the American Association of Pastoral Counselors have begun to implement a national training and educational initiative called National Training Initiative (NTI). This emerged from the National Mental Health Summit held in Belleville, IL, sponsored by Pathways to Promise in 2009. Pilot Projects in St. Louis, MO, and several communities in Washington State, supported by foundations and by state departments of mental and behavioral health, have just recently completed their first year of implementation.

An NTI site covers a city, county, or region. Guiding each local Training Site is a planning group made up of representatives from key and diverse stakeholders: faith groups, consumers and families, community mental health providers and advocates, pastoral counselors, parish nurses, and other community allies. The NTI planning group helps organize neighborhood clusters of congregations and other community partners, who participate in core NTI trainings on mental health and substance use, as well as other trainings identified in the annual curriculum of continuing education. The result is reduced stigma, increased knowledge, and the development of skills in promoting recovery.

The training resources developed for the St. Louis project are now available online at pathways2promise.org. They are available for individuals within a congregation or as train-the-trainer resources.

An NTI Advisory Task Force will seek national partners among faith groups, agencies, national organizations, state and county behavioral health programs, and foundations.

If you are interested in participating or wish to know more about this initiative, please contact:

Rev. Robert Dell, Chair

Douglas M. Ronsheim, LMFT, D.Min.

Pathways to Promise

American Association of Pastoral Counselors

815-786-6341

703-385-6967

bob.dell@comcast.net

doug@aapc.org

Blue Christmas at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The December holidays are not all joy and light. For many, it is a hard time. Some loved one will be absent from the Christmas table. Our lives don’t live up to the idealistic Christmas scenes of hearth and home. We don’t look like figures in a Norman Rockwell painting. Some suffer from seasonal affective disorders. When it seems like the whole world is happily stringing decorations, we can feel sad and out of step with the festive emotions.

A Blue Christmas service can be a holy container to honor those emotions and losses. We hold our service in the evening, near the winter solstice, when the days are shortest and the nights are long. We use the lections for St. Thomas (Dec. 21). St. Thomas was the apostle who missed the resurrection appearances of Jesus on Easter. While the other disciples were rejoicing, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas’ mind was filled with the all-to-real images of his friend’s death on the cross. “Until I see…” something as real as that, “I will not believe,” Thomas said.

We start in a darkened, quiet church. We use the Order of Worship for the Evening, BCP p. 109, as a Liturgy of the Word, lighting candles at the altar and in the windows. The sermon tries to allow people to honor the difficult work of grief and disappointment in the midst of a festive season. During the Eucharist, we invite people to light vigil candles for remembered loved ones or other appropriate intentions. We have a place for laying on of hands with prayer.

The mood is contemplative — quiet, accepting, healing. We’ve found this gentle, dark space, held within the December bustle, is a treasured holy space for tender things. For some, it is a space to place deep loss so we can open more fully to the coming joy of Christmas.

Contributed by The Rev. Lowell Grisham, Rector, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas. lowell@stpaulsfay.org