I was a teenager the first time I visited someone in a psychiatric hospital. As any teenager would, I assumed this would be a one-off occurrence. But, as fate would have it, I unwittingly became a skilled navigator of the complicated and tortuous mental health system in the U.S.
That first visit was difficult. I didn’t want to be there, nor did the patient I was visiting. But they didn’t have a choice, even though I believed otherwise.
I was never explicitly taught this, but somehow I absorbed the belief that we always have control over our choices and the things that go on in our brains. It was a sign of emotional and spiritual weakness if we lost that control. We just needed to try harder and pray more.
It took years and many more visits to mental health visiting rooms to shed these beliefs. During my years working in university residence halls and then later in ministry, I sat with numerous people under my care struggling with mental illness. None of them were weak, and many had robust spiritual lives.
They also weren’t as close to me relationally, which is sometimes the secret to clarity.
When I was a child, family occasionally came and stayed with us for a while. I didn’t know why. My parents would tell me they were sick and just out of the hospital, which was odd because they looked fine to me.
What I also found interesting were the hushed tones they used when sharing the news of our guest’s illness. It wasn’t with the same loud, nonchalant matter-of-factness they would have used to tell me my neighbor fell off his bike and broke his arm.
Something about this illness required discretion and solemnity. A dark cloud hovered over any mention of it.
That same cloud exists in the visiting room of almost every psychiatric facility I have been to. It isn’t the same as being in an emergency room after someone was in a car crash or the hospital room after a life-saving surgery. It is darker, quieter, and the mood has more weight.
Much of this is due to the sedation of patients, but not all of it. Some of it is rooted in the shame and stigma surrounding mental illness that many of us inherited.
Around 5% of U.S. adults are admitted each year into emergency rooms for mental health crises. Most will be sent home, but some will be transferred to a facility for more extended care. Many will languish in emergency rooms for hours, sometimes days, as they wait for a bed in a psychiatric hospital to open up.
I have spent late nights that extended into late afternoons in emergency rooms, calling every facility within a 500-mile radius, begging them to simply place my loved one on a waiting list.
The mental health systems in our country have been broken for a long time. They are only getting worse under the crushing weight of post-pandemic depression and anxiety.
Somehow, I have personally been spared from experiencing severe mental illness. But given my genetic inheritance, the odds are not insignificant that my friends will one day need to visit me in a psychiatric hospital someday.
If that happens, I hope they will talk to me like I have broken my arm or am recovering from cancer. This will require some dark humor (something most of my friends don’t lack) and a comfort level with the challenges associated with mental health.
That comfort level will only come if we keep talking about it.
It will only come if we speak about it in humanizing, compassionate terms. This also includes calling out friends and public figures when they use stigmatizing language around mental illness.
Recently, the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, while speaking out against the border crisis, claimed that South American countries were emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental wards” and sending them to the U.S. Not only is this baseless, as virtually all of his statements are, it is dangerous. It is designed to use mental illness as a tool to stoke fear.
I understand people’s exhaustion from addressing every harmful lie this man tells. This is his strategy, to wear people of good faith down.
But I also have first-hand experience with the exhaustion faced by people who struggle with mental illness and those who love them. I have sat with and among them during visiting hours.
They come from every walk of life. They are Republican, Democrat, Independent, and MAGA voters. Some have never been to church, and some have never missed.
They all want to be loved, understood and healed– not demonized.
During a time when I was at my wit’s end and not knowing what to do next, I found incredible information and support from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). NAMI provides support groups for those experiencing mental illness and separate groups for their families.
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis and are alone, please call or text the suicide/crisis lifeline at 988.
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More by Craig Nash
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
