II. IDENTIFYING THE STONES & LAYERS
This affects all of us. It’s about disconnection.
Yolanda Martinez | The Marshall Project
THIS AFFECTS ALL OF US
This module is not about trying to become experts in the mental health field, nor to diagnose anyone.
It’s about opening the conversation—about something both those in prison as well as those in the community, in churches, don’t like to talk about. Sadly, it’s not just the mental health itself that afflicts us or those we love. It’s also the shame and isolation of managing it alone, in silence.
So let’s jump in:
How has mental health affected you?
Do you have someone in your family who suffers with a disorder or other diagnosis? How did that affect your family, or you? What helped them find some support? What made it worse? What did you learn?
Do you yourself struggle with mental health? Maybe it’s crippling anxiety, or long seasons of depression. Maybe you suffered a very specific trauma in your life, and the echoes of that event remain in your thoughts, your body, your relationships even now.
We recently opened our conversation on trauma, a core ingredient in the lives of so many of our now-incarcerated community members. This module expands from that: all the kinds of mental health challenges your person might be surviving as a result. They range from more common mental health challenges to more grave diagnoses that need more urgent mental illness care.
Warning: Many One Parish One Prisoner teams have entered deeper waters with each other in this module: church members disclosing for the first time realities they’d never shared before: a mother’s suicide that their family couldn’t be honest about in earlier generations; a memory of one team members’ father holding a gun in his mouth in front of the family forty years ago; a mother cautiously sharing her daughter’s teenage months in a psych ward.
The tears come—which unlock others’ tears.
We are all unbinding each other, removing the protective “layers” that hide our wounds, as we get closer to God’s love here at the tombs.
CURING VS. HEALING
While we need professional help and the support of modern medicine to navigate many aspects of mental health, we are learning that we can’t just treat mental health as some complicated disease for medicine to “cure” or fix—to make it go away.
Our various mental health struggles can be windows into great connection with each other.
This is the slow foundation of healing beneath addiction, illness, mental health diagnoses: tender and safe relationships where we find connection and love. Where some of the most powerful medicine is a space where we can grieve the overwhelming losses and pains we’ve survived:
“There is a difference between curing and healing. I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.”
— Rachel Held Evans
Sound familiar? We stick around no matter the outcome. In an earlier module, Father Greg Boyle called that “faithfulness.” That’s what we do. We don’t fix (cure) everything. But we stick together. We are learning the healing that comes through faithfulness.
DISCONNECTION
Remember that Ted Talk video in the recent Addiction module? The same Johann Hari here reminds us of the same basic reality beneath the varieties of mental (un)health: it’s largely about DISCONNECTION:
How many of these can you relate to—even if you aren’t diagnosed with a mental health disorder?
How many of these might be true for your incarcerated friend—simply by being incarcerated? Now think how many of these experiences of being disconnected could have been part of their life before going to jail or prison: as a child, as a teenager, during and after any significant trauma?
WEBSTER’S STORY
Webster calls me (Chris) from prison all the time. Multiple times a week. He calls two of his One Parish One Prisoner team members every week as well. He was released the first week of the pandemic in 2020, and the sudden state lockdowns disconnected him from his new relationships, his new connections. Within days, he desperately found what kind of connection he could: his old girlfriend, who was in active meth addiction, whom he swore he’d never go back to. He relapsed on drugs, in part, because losing his sobriety wasn’t as bad as being alone.
As a baby, Webster “was born kicking heroin,” as he says. His mother was a victim of sex trafficking and numbed her daily nightmare with heroin in her bloodstream. Webster was fearfully and wonderfully made inside a womb of trauma, stress chemicals, and heavy opiates. His formative years outside the womb as a helpless baby? Very little connection with his suffering mother, who passed on the abuse she endured from other men by kicking, slapping and abandoning her little boy, Webster. He spent most days of his childhood entirely alone in an apartment.
Webster has some mental health struggles as an adult.
When he first started One Parish One Prisoner with a local team, and began writing letters, he—God bless him—shared his entire childhood story in misspelled, handwritten, heartbreaking looseleaf pages. He’d found people were capable of caring for him! And they did. He found safe relationships who wouldn’t hurt him. Several retirement-age women on the team offered a maternal care he attached to instantly.
One of them took Webster to the animal rescue center, where they walked unclaimed dogs, out of their cages for an hour.
One day on a walk together beside my favorite creek near his recovery home, I told Webster that yes, even I had a season on anti-anxiety meds. Twice in my life, actually.
“Really? You?”
I told him about that first season in my twenties when I was suicidal. He didn’t smile, exactly, upon hearing this, but his very tattooed face seemed to brighten, or open. He seemed to breath more fully.
“I never would have thought that you struggled with that too, bro.”
I told him we in the church, sadly, just hide our problems better. And that talking with him helps people like me open up and tell our own stories.
On the walk back through the forest, he called to schedule his mental health evaluation. He hadn’t wanted to, but removing the shame was the main issue.
Connection is healing.
The next day the state lockdowns began, and that first week everyone was scrambling, learning how to quarantine. We failed Webster over those next several weeks. He never got the care he needed.
So when Webster is now back in prison—on a drug violation, a probation violation—the disconnection from other is unbearable. Disconnected from his team, his daughter, his new habit of walking to that local creek I’d shown him near the recovery home. On his prison tier of cells, he fights the temptation to collect-call his old girlfriend by trying to call his new friends on his One Parish One Prisoner team instead. And me. When he can’t get through to us, when we are too busy, it hurts. Sometimes he feels so rejected he rejects us by removing us from his JPay account.
He used to have a good mental health counselor inside that prison unit. Now that he’s back, she’s taken a different job elsewhere. It’s not easy to be a caring professional and survive working inside a prison. So Webster now has even less mental health care.
This is part of our journey approaching the tombs: getting our hearts broken. Jesus wept at the tomb for his friend Lazarus. We are becoming the shape of God’s heart.
There are millions of people in prison just like Webster.
MENTAL HEALTH IN PRISONS
In recent decades our society has handled mental illness by shutting down mental care institutions across the country and letting the most un-well portions of our community find their way into prison institutions instead, via arrest—after self-medicating through illegal drugs or harming themselves or others.
These facilities make mental health worse. More lack of safety. More violence. More disconnection.
“The distinction I once imagined between [psychiatric] hospital and prison populations exists only faintly, when it exists at all.”
— Christine Montross, "Waiting For An Echo"
Click the book cover image above to read a short and powerful review in the New York Times of Christine Montross’s book.
Locking Up Our Sick: The devastating effects of incarceration on the mentally ill
Excerpt: “[Montross] accepted a position with a psychiatric hospital in Rhode Island. It did not take long, however, for her to realize that her tidy binary—dividing the guilty criminal from the innocent patient battling mental illness—was a crude one, belied by complex realities. Many psychiatric patients, she observed, had previously served time behind bars, with some being admitted to her hospital only hours after being released. When she noticed that a few of her regular patients had not come to the hospital for surprisingly long stretches, she began searching state records and often discovered that they were in jail or prison. ‘The distinction I once imagined between hospital and prison populations exists only faintly,” she reflected, “when it exists at all.’”
YOU’RE CREATING CONNECTION
Here’s the good news:
You as a team—without being mental health professionals—can offer the most healing antidote to disconnection. You are already doing it. You are creating connection. Do you see how precious and powerful this relational work is? See how your faithful monthly team meetings, you regular letters and calls are healing?
As a small “Department of Connections,” you are creating an environment of mental health—together.
Hopefully your growing connection with your incarcerated friend is creating some of that healing inside you as well, by now.
MEDICATION
Let’s talk medication now.
Ask your incarcerated friend if they are on any mental health meds right now, in prison. Write it down.
Many men and women, like Webster, will tell us they don’t want to be on these meds when they get out. They feel “drowsy.”
It’s true: prisons notoriously over-drug to sedate the men and women inside. It’s not good. But we assure our releasing friends there’s better mental health care out here.
Yolanda Martinez | The Marshall Project
Going cold-turkey off mental health meds throws a brain for a roller coaster—right when they need all the stability and support they can get.
So the member of your team who’s working on the HEALTH SYSTEMS role—make sure you help your friend make that mental health evaluation their first couple weeks out, to set up a healthy prescription continuity.
We don’t want the cultural shame and stigma around mental health care to sabotage our friend’s courageous and fragile journeys out of the underground.
OUR OWN EXPERIENCE
We unbind each other from these layers of shame and silence—like Lazarus’ death wraps—by sharing our own experiences with each other.
Start now. In your letters. In your calls with your incarcerated friend. Before getting into their meds or diagnoses, start with your story. Any part of it. How you struggle, how you stay sane, what’s helped you or your family with mental health challenges.
In this way, maybe you—like one of our One Parish One Prisoner team members Erin and her releasing friend Wally, who learned to laughingly confide in each other about their diagnoses and weekly struggles—can become “mental health buddies” as well.
ACTION STEPS
TELL YOUR INCARCERATED FRIEND ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH MENTAL HEALTH. Start the conversation. Write the letter this week. Or take the call.
HEALTH SYSTEMS ROLE: Ask about meds and discuss setting up all their health appointments and evaluations when they get out. That you’ll do it together.
CONGREGATIONAL CONNECTION: Can one person from your team share about a mental health struggle and ask your church for prayers? This vulnerability might just open up more space for people to be their whole selves in your community.
FOR TEAM DISCUSSION
Tell each other these stories: your experience with mental health in your own or your family’s life.
