FROM MY FILES FRIDAY
8-22-14 (The Hilton Foundation, http://hiltonfoundation.org, announced last month that Fountain House/Clubhouse International was chosen to receive the 2014 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. At $1.5 million, the Prize is the world’s largest and most prestigious humanitarian award. It is presented to a non-profit judged to be doing extraordinary work to alleviate human suffering. This is the first time the Hilton Prize has been awarded to a mental health organization. In 2010, I wrote about the importance of clubhouses. Congratulations to Fountain House and to the many Clubhouses that it has helped launch.)
Clubhouses Change Lives
I am always touched when I hear recovery stories, especially those told by young people. Jourdan Miller, a beautiful girl in her early twenties, described how important the HOPE Clubhouse in Ft. Myers was to her recovery. As with so many of our young people, Jourdan had excelled as a teenager and had gone to college with big plans – only to become sick. She was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and not long after that she became so ill that she had to drop out. At one point, she was suicidal. When she called the local police during a manic episode, rather than getting help, she ended up getting arrested and jailed — “to be taught a lesson.” That experience – at the hands of unsympathetic and poorly trained sheriff’s deputies — resulted in her developing PTSD.
Jourdan spoke eloquently at a recent luncheon about how she was in such anguish that she simply wanted to give up — until her parents got her to visit the HOPE CLUBHOUSE.
“The HOPE CLUBHOUSE,” she said. “Saved my life.”
