Mental Illness Awareness Week 2022
Right at the end of my seminary degree, the final credit hours I needed to graduate, was an intensive summer internship as a hospital chaplain. I had been drawn to it, intrigued by it, for the entire 3 years of seminary…I had also, on the other hand, been extremely scared of it. Scared of the prospect of finding myself not up to the task, or that I would lack composure in the moment, I had successfully put it off and avoided it for as long as I possibly could. I had listened, for three years, to fellow seminary students share their own chaplaincy horror stories over meals in the cafeteria. Stories of when patients had screamed at them and cursed them and sent them running from the hospital room with their tail between their legs. Stories of when they had witnessed bodily injuries in the emergency room so gruesome that it had been seared in their brain and kept them up for weeks. Stories of students hiding in the bathroom between patient rounds and crying silently in the stalls as they encountered the depths of human suffering, and came face to face with the true fragility of the human condition.
The first few days of chaplaincy began with orientation, and I found myself becoming more and more nervous. I was too embarrassed and ashamed to admit to any of my fellow interns the depths of my anxiety, and it seemed as if the more and more I tried to keep it to myself, the more and more my anxiety grew inside of me. Soon, the orientation week was over and I was handed a jacket and a name tag to wear, given a list of rooms to visit, and then left alone in the hospital hallway. The hospital was so large that I couldn’t find the rooms I was supposed to visit, and soon found myself completely lost and overwhelmed. I remember hoping no one could see my legs shaking in my black slacks. Finally, I had to admit I needed help. I went to the nurses station at the end of the hall and made eye contact with one of the nurses on duty.
‘Hi, I’m a new chaplain, and I’m really lost. I’m actually really nervous too.’ She smiled.
‘I remember my first day too. You’ll get the hang of it. Let me take you to where you’re trying to go.’
Just like that, I remember feeling the ground solidify beneath my feet again. My legs quit shaking, I got my voice back, I took a deep breath, and exhaled all the anxiety I had been carrying for three years. I could do this. The act of finally sharing out loud with another person the anxiety I had been holding onto for years, and being met with compassion, gave me the strength I needed to persevere.
Established in 1990 by Congress, the first full week in each October is Mental Illness Awareness Week. All of us in this country, in one way or another, are affected by mental illness, and if you’re reading this, you no doubt know intimately and personally, the devastating effects thereof. The figures and statistics (1 in 5 adults and 1 in 6 children age 6-17 experience mental illness each year in the US {https://www.nami.org/mhstats}) are so large that it’s almost impossible to take in, to comprehend the scope of the issue.
And yet, just like the feeling of release that came from naming my own anxiety in the hospital hallway so long ago, we remember Mental Illness Awareness Week in an effort to name the problem facing us, and in naming, allow it to be released by us, and held and supported by the wider community.
In other moments of national grieving - mass shooting events, deaths of celebrities - the community gathers at a central location and light candles to acknowledge the sacredness of human life. Mental illness certainly affects our communities in equally deep and tragic ways, and this is the time we have set aside to acknowledge that reality, to name it, and to make space to collectively bear and release that pain, and to give thanks for those healers who have guided us on our own journey towards wholeness. Yet we have no one centralized location to grieve from, since mental illness affects so many of us, in so many different places.
If you’re reading this, I encourage you at some point this week, to light a candle in your own home or office for those who you know, and those who you have never met, who have been affected by mental illness. I encourage you to light a candle for yourself, and make space to acknowledge your own struggles with mental health as well, if that is the case, as it is for many of us. And as we light our candles for each other, alone or with those we love, we exhale, find the ground solidify beneath our feet, and find the strength we need to persevere.
