“This holiday season; please invite someone with mental illness from the streets into your home. Bring them from the last pew in your congregation into the conversation. Reach out to your neighbor who has a mentally ill child and show them your empathy. Yes, I am serious.” Virgil Stucker
Christmas is Patti’s favorite holiday and she spends hours decorating our house, both inside and out. This year, I was delighted when our homeowner association chose her decorations as the best in the neighborhood. (My photo is embarrassingly bad.) I am grateful for her boundless holiday spirit and that we are fortunate enough to have such a lovely home. Both of us want to extend our best wishes to you during this holiday season. We hope you will enjoy great mental health this coming year and remember others who have a mental illness, especially those who are in our jails, prisons, in hospitals and homeless on our streets.
Virgil Stucker, who contributes to my blog occasionally, recently wrote a Christmas letter to his friend, Dr. Allen J. Frances, at the Huffington Post about the season and “society’s castaways.” I want to share it with you. Virgil writes:
“I have lived most of the last 40 years in nonprofit healing communities with people who are diagnosed with mental illness. My family and I often walk with, dine with, socialize with, work with, and play with people who too often are treated as society’s castaways.
Over these years, my wife Lis and I have had several thousand such people join us at our daily table. We, along with my parents, our four children, their spouses and partners, and our seven grandchildren are fortunate to have formed lifelong friendships and had life-altering experiences living in healing communities.
We know first-hand that people with mental illness are much more human than otherwise; trusting and loving human beings, if only given the chance and offered the social context.
