Integration, Community, and Mental Health

"Everybody needs to know there is a place in society for them. That there's a place where they can belong. To be honest with you, most of us don't belong."

"I don't want you to take care of me for the rest of my life. What I want is for you to help me with what I don't know, so that I don't need your help as much anymore...Don't just therapize me, give me the tools."

Both of these quotes are from Julie Crafts in P. Ridgeway's "Coming Home: ex-patients view housing options and needs," published in 1988. I spent five hours today looking at numbers and spreadsheets, so I gave myself a little break in the middle for reflection on the integration of mental health consumers (aka individuals who have psychiatric disabilities).

What always astounds me when reading this kind of material is just how generalizable it is. Those quotes could be coming from a teenager, an addict, a refugee, an immigrant, a person living with chronic illness, etc. They speak to our need to connect with one another. The passages that I was reading today discussed our basic needs for love and understanding, community and a space to grow as a person, as well as to experience regular communication through both verbal and physical connections.

This next quote brought it all together for me: "Community is integrative. It includes people of different sexes, ages, religions, cultures, viewpoints, lifestyles, and stages of development by integrating them into a whole that is greater--better--than the sum of its parts. Integration is not a melting process; it does not result in a bland average. Rather it has been compared to the creation of a salad in which the identity of the individual ingredients is preserved yet simultaneously transcended. Community does not solve the problem of pluralism by eliminating diversity. Instead it seeks out diversity, welcomes other points of view, embraces opposites, desires to see the other side of every issue. It is 'holistic.' It integrates us human beings into a functioning mystical body." - 1987, M.S. Peck

This is true for the tenants I work with on a day to day basis, as well as for my personal home where I live in an intentional Jewish community. And I think it's also true for my ideal society as a whole. It's not an easy way to live, but it sure is interesting.