Mental Health-Mental Illness

During the Three Weeks. Amen.

About fifteen years ago we started a group that was designated a no Shonda (that’s a wrong transcription but it stuck) a No Shame group that focussed on mental health-mental illness. Naming is significant, using the mental health-mental illness continuum means we do not experience the concept as different states of being. It’s all mental health but we are often dealing with serious problems, and designations that have been/are referred to as mental illness. We are not so different, we are human beings dealing with this dealing with that, living with challenges.

I have written stories that came out of our group, the group has permeable borders with my other groups (Shalvah on addictions and every now and then the prison project). Amen. I am pulling all these stories together for my next book.

Here is a piece written for this period: the Three Weeks. The Three Weeks in summer are between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, the Jewish season of grief. There is an intensity to it, once one lives Jewish time so to speak. And in our group — even not when living Jewish time. When we are done, we are done and we enter the orbit of the Days of Awe, drawing us toward the elevated notions of high holidays.

Mental Health Mental Illness During the Three Weeks

The meetings intensified, some were low some were high, all were intense. We figured there were three parts to the equation when describing our meetings, the obvious two: who we are, and what we bring to the challenges we face. Some in our group feel like they’ve been unprepared for their lives so to speak, they hadn’t learned the skills to see them through the difficulties they would encounter.

There is also the nature of the challenges themselves. No one likes to compare pain as if we are kids showing each other our scars, but in our little group alone someone is dealing with being abandoned by a sweetheart, another is living through the latest course of treatment for pancreatic cancer. The lesson isn’t lost on anyone in the meeting, no one had to say it (though someone did), we all get through whatever challenge we are facing the best way we know how. And when we don’t know how, we may come to the group and learn a new way. This is one way to describe our process.

There is a third element that I think has surprised everyone in the group once we started talking about it. I call it ritual time. Shanah. The time we are in, everyone in the group, if they weren’t before, are now living Jewish ritual time. We almost expect the meetings to intensify – it’s the Three Weeks – and everyone is experiencing the atmosphere of the time as it relates to each individual’s encounter with grief. Even those who are not Jews are living like Jews in this sense. It surprises them but doesn’t surprise me.

How we know things, this came up. We think we know grief, not until we’ve experienced it. And some of us in the group are different only in the sense that their senses are more elevated.

Someone said it this way: We are like everyone else, only more so.

Jsg

For Shande Means Shame There Is None

On Mental Health-Mental Illness

St. Louis