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Spiritually, Mental Illness and Recovery

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My father is a retired protestant minister and I grew up attending church. When I was a child, Easter was my second favorite holiday. I preferred Christmas because I got presents. At Easter, we hid eggs but didn’t exchange gifts. Of course, when I got older I came to understand just how important Easter is to protestant faiths.

I am writing about religion because of a question that I was asked recently at Viterbo University, a beautiful school in La Crosse, Wisconsin. About 550 people attended my speech at Viterbo, which traces its origins to a small school founded by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. 

“How important is spiritually to mental health recovery?” a woman in the audience asked me.

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What Is Critical To Recovery?

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What’s the most important ingredient to recovery if you have a mental illness?

I’m beginning my week by flying into LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where I will speak tonight at Viterbo University.  As always, I will talk about my book, my son, and what happened to our family. I will explain how those terrible events led me to the Miami Dade County Detention Center where I followed persons with mental disorders through the criminal justice system.  I will talk about how our jails and prisons have become our new asylums, why this is wrong and how we need to turn our current system back into a community health issue rather than having it continue to be a criminal justice problem. 

But on this trip, I’ve also been asked to speak in the afternoon to a number of local leaders as part of an informal afternoon “conversation.” The goal of this talk, which is sponsored by the Mental Health Coalition, is to discuss what is happening in La Crosse and what it might do better. 

My role is to describe successful programs that I’ve seen visiting 46 states and three countries — Iceland, Brazil and Portugal — and touring more than a hundred different programs.

I am always happy to talk about programs that are making a difference and I don’t mind citing specific examples.

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