What do You Expect In a Psychiatric Hospital

May is Mental Health Month; the American Psychological Association is hosting a Blog Day that I thought I’d tag on to as I’ve been a Chaplain in Behavioral Health Services for a long time and promoting an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to good mental health is an important part of what I do:


The first time I thought I might become a Chaplain in a psychiatric hospital it was 1978, I was 21 years old; a college senior. In all honesty, this was an absurd idea, but there I was at the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, a part of the South Carolina State Hospital, in Columbia South Carolina, bag in hand, ready to be the first woman in an undergraduate unit of Clinical Pastoral Education offered by the hospital. I lived on the grounds with female interns in other disciplines, in an old, old building upon which one could still discern the shadows of letters, long removed, over the entrance: State Insane Asylum.


I remember my Supervisor asking us on our first day what we expected a psychiatric hospital to be like and what we expected from our training quarter. I remember telling him that the experience was so foreign to me that I had no expectations. (My mind has always drawn a total blank when I am overly anxious.) In the past thirty-two years (much of it spent in this same ministry) I have had more opportunity for training in pastoral care and ministry and psychology and theology and biblical study. I have had great experiences in continued Clinical Pastoral Education, continued to grow in therapy and spiritual direction and clinical supervision. In all of these, by some grace, I have increased my capacity to hold my own anxiety, and I believe, at long last, I can form some semblance of an answer to my first Supervisor’s question:


In 1978, my father had just died after a ten-year-long battle with degenerative heart disease and my mother was only just ramping-up into the acute and chronic phases of enough  Axis I and II diagnoses to teach a class in diagnostics. I was only just beginning to explore the graces and gifts which would sustain and save me—a faint inkling of God and some blind, stupidity of faith to grudgingly follow; and gifts enough of intellect and abstraction to seek to fashion within some lopsided vessel of containment, which, when cracked, I would haul weakly to more tender and experienced hands for care. I was expecting to find in a place of absurd ideas, amid other suffering souls a ministry of care, that same strength in the absurdity of faith that called Abraham to the sacrifice of Isaac, when to lose him would have been to lose faith and strength and all. And, I expected to drink there from that same well of courage and endurance which sustained Jacob through a night long wrestling match with his divine attacker—broken, healed, blessed and prevailed before he could continue on is way.


I expect, in the psychiatric hospital where I work and in the care in which I engage today, to find people just like me who are hurting. I expect to pray for grace and mercy as I listen to their stories of suffering and of loss, to their tales of violent attacks and merciless engagements. I expect to hold with them, in some misshapen vessel of containment we manage to fashion between ourselves, the absurdity of frail faith, when doing so, for them, risks losing more than I ever pray to comprehend. And, I expect that there, despite the lisp and cracks, is the well of courage and endurance from which we draw some drops of sustenance of courage and endurance, broken, healing, and blessed as they are, so they can continue on their way.