Hi, it's good to see everyone. I'm Deacon Ed Schoener, president of the Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministers, and we're here for our monthly webinar on a mental health ministry topic that I know will be of great interest to many of you. I get lots of questions about how other folks have started their mental health ministry at a diocesan level.
This is directly in response to a lot of those requests for that kind of information. So, we have with us today Dick Collier from the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and he'll talk about how he's implemented a mental health ministry along with many other folks in the archdiocese. They've been at it now for a couple of years—three or four years now—and it's up and running.
It's a good ministry. So, I'll give you a little background on Dick. Dick is the Mental Health Ministry Project Manager for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and he comes to this position with many years of experience in business leadership in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds.
As I said, he's been working for the archdiocese and in the mental health ministry for the last three years and recently organized a mental health ministry conference in the Bay Area called "Hope and Healing," which attracted over 100 people to the conference. I know I've gotten to know Dick a bit over the last couple of years. He has a lot of compassion for those who struggle with unemployment, homelessness, disability, addictions, and being fatherless.
Over the past year, he and his wife, Patty, have owned and operated a sober living home in the Oakland area for those dealing with substance abuse. He's made it a point to write about the ministry a bit—he recently authored an article on breaking down the stigma to overcome mental health challenges for the diocesan newspaper in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. He's a graduate of Saint Francis de Sales School for Pastoral Ministry.
He has four children and soon to be seven grandchildren—it's good being a grandpa, right Dick? So, I'll turn it over to you, Dick, for your presentation. I would ask people, when you have questions, to put them into the Q&A or the chat for questions, and at the end, we'll go through those questions and try to get them answered.
As Dick speaks, there will also be links in the chat for some of the materials he's referencing as he goes through the talk. Hopefully, the Zoom powers that be will cooperate with us on all of this, and I'll turn it over to you, Dick. Thanks for doing this, Dick.
All right, thank you, Deacon Ed and Kate, for putting this on today. I really appreciate the opportunity. I would like to just give you a little bit of background here, kind of a diocesan perspective on how to start mental health ministries in parishes.
That's what we call starting a mental health ministry on a diocesan level. So, that's what this material will cover, and it will all be available to everyone with a number of handouts that Kate will be posting after the webinar. Okay, so if we go to our next slide—are you able to see it?
You can go to the next slide. Yeah, you're not able to see my forwarding of the slides? No?
I'm trying to stop the share and reshare; I'll see if that helps. Of course, it got cranky with us. See, that's okay.
All right, okay, there we go. So, this is all about trying to break down the stigma, and we're using this picture in a lot of our literature going forward. We found this a few months ago, and it really signifies where we are caught.
We're kind of calling this the mental health cycle, and we really need to break away. So, as these doves or birds are flying away, that’s the goal. That’s the goal of what we have here in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and I’m sure all of you have similar goals in your respective areas.
Next slide. Looks like I can control it, Kate. Okay, all right, give you a little bit of background on San Francisco.
We're a large urban and suburban diocese, widely diverse ethnically, culturally, and economically. We cover three counties—many people don't know that—but we do cover San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties, which is north of San Francisco. We have the Oakland Diocese next to us, Santa Rosa to the north, and San Jose to the south, so we're surrounded by three other dioceses in the broader Bay Area of San Francisco.
Early on, we started this a little over three years ago, and it became clear that there was a general lack of support for families and individuals suffering from mental illness. The Archdiocese itself really had no organizational structure to provide resources. Yes, there were other ministries—grief ministries, prison ministries, etc.
—but there was nothing really focused on and around mental health. So, then the question came: Why did we start it? Well, the first thing that drove us there was responding to the Hope and Healing, the California bishops’ pastoral.
Letter, uh, from May of 2018. I'm sure a number of you read through that; it's a nice read. It's about 11 pages long.
It's got six key points that are made in there, and it really did start, uh, us in the Diocese of San Francisco, thinking about what could we do right along these lines to bring help and assistance to the parish level. Well, we're very fortunate that the Diocese of San Diego, who was several years ahead of us, I would think it's kind of a poster shot of how this is done and done well. A gentleman, Ken Peters, and another colleague from NAMI spent a number of years talking about getting mental health ministries in parishes, and lo and behold, they finally got together and decided that the time was right.
So we were fortunate in that we've been able to leverage the model that they had out of San Diego. It was geared towards the diocese very top-down; I was given all the material from, uh, from Kent, so we had a good starting place—in fact, an awful lot of material that we were ready to go through and tailor to what we needed in San Francisco. And the last piece is that we were given a grant.
There were five dioceses in the country that were given grants, and San Francisco was one of them. We were really excited about getting that, which kind of pushed us forward to doing something along these lines. So, when you think about major steps, we have kind of five major steps here that I'll walk you through, and the first one was creating a position in the Archdiocese to have someone come in and be responsible to organize and implement the ministries of participating parishes.
So, that's kind of where I came in just over three years ago. But once we kind of started getting organized around what we wanted to do, we had the material from San Diego, and we felt that the most important part was getting the clergy involved—the clergy's awareness and support for a ministry. So, we ended up planning a clergy luncheon; we had about over 40 pastors and other priests attend.
We brought in the folks from San Diego to talk about the ministry. We had Father Saroki from Our Lady of Mount Carmel who gave a nice talk on what it meant to be, um, having a ministry team to support the pastor, which really felt was a strong message. We had Kent Peters come in and talk about how they built the ministry.
So, this awareness luncheon that we had with the clergy, we kind of finished it off with, "Okay, who's interested? Who's interested in having us follow up further with you at the parish level? " So, we had a, um, it's kind of like called a statement of interest—just a little one-pager.
We'll send this out, the material, afterwards, and if the pastor was interested, he would check the box or his name in and tell us when they wanted to meet, uh, and then I'd go in and have a conversation with the pastor. We also had a deacon luncheon prior to that, so we had probably 30 or 40 deacons that attended. So the key thing was to get the clergy on board—they play a critical role in getting this ministry started at the parish.
Once we had the pastor and we found out that they were interested and I talked to them and sat down with themselves and potentially another leader of the parish or someone that they would potentially want on the team, we had to schedule some type of recruitment. He needed to have a team; I mean, the team didn't exist. There were probably people in his parish that were interested.
There were people that the pastor would know that would be interested. So, we held a recruitment lunch—our entire recruitment workshop—we had this in person. This was before COVID.
We had this in-person at the parishes; whoever wanted to attend, attended. I'll talk a little bit further about what that workshop looked like, but that was kind of our first starting point of creating a team for the pastor. Another key step in rolling this out is coming up with standards and guidelines.
So, as we built out these ministry teams, they had a lot of questions, and those questions turned into, uh, material turned into, uh, information that we wanted to standardize on. So, one of the key documents that we created was just a one-page document; we had a lot of one-pagers and two-pagers—a one-pager that talked about what the role of the volunteer was like on these ministry teams. So, it’s kind of do's and don'ts of the volunteer, and that was really critical because the teams are not paid positions—they're volunteers within the parish, just lay ministry leaders.
So, we built a lot of that into our process too. And of course, the last piece is, you know, the team needed to be trained. So we came up with a training plan, and I'll discuss a little bit more detail here shortly, but uh, really careful grassroots training.
We leveraged what we had from San Diego, built off some of that, and laid out a training plan. So, those are kind of the key steps; I probably wouldn't change those too much if I went to another diocese to do this. But I can't get you grounded in how we started and the major steps of how we implemented this.
Let's talk a little bit further about the recruitment workshop. So, we kind of had four things that we wanted. .
. To cover in the recruitment workshop, one wants to share background on mental health and share what we knew about what San Diego had done. We had some videos at that point that we had taken from the clergy luncheon.
We want to share the vision of what we saw: a network, if we get this community built in the archdiocese, where we have parishes from multiple counties and multiple locations. They could really, in the long term, leverage the other work off each other; we could share a lot of common practices and material from the archdiocese down to these ministry teams. That's kind of what we've tried to do.
So, we can share the vision and then also talk about how the ministry will operate and work at the parish level. Again, these are guidelines, and we're drawing lines in the sand where we don't want to cross; we have to stay within the ministry boundaries. The last question we ask is about the questionnaire that we gave them.
Think of it kind of like an application for joining the ministry team to help them discern whether or not they want to participate. So, it's a little two-pager we're going to share afterward. The first page is just information about themselves, how long they've been in their parish, and different types of ministries they've been involved in.
But the last two questions really hit the key points. One is: Why do they want to do this? We're asking them to explain why.
Then the second question is: What in their background has really prepared them to become part of a ministry team? These are key questions. In a perfect world—right, it's not all perfect, but in a perfect world—they fill that out, submit it to the parish, and the pastor looks at it, reads through it, and decides who's on his team.
He may say, “Tom, Sally, Johnny, they’re the right ones to be on the team; maybe not Fred. Perhaps Fred should be in more of a background role; maybe he’s on the prayer team supporting the ministry. ” So, the pastor ultimately is going to pick his team.
When we ask the pastor to find one, if not two, people from his parish who can lead these teams, it’s very important that they have good, strong leadership. It does not mean they have to be professionals in mental health at all. In fact, we want to have a mix on those teams of professionals and non-professionals.
We’ll talk about that a little bit further, but that's kind of the way the workshop went. It was about 90 minutes, with a lot of Q&A and discussion as we worked through the different parishes, the material, and our understanding of how we want to standardize some things and build guidelines—grow and grow and grow. As I think back to the parishes, those that got the last bit of the recruitment workshops probably got a better deal; they had more information.
We had come further along, and we knew a little better what we wanted to do. There are kind of three key roles on these ministry teams, and I'm sure a lot of you have seen these already, but I think it was like a three-legged stool—a very strong stool when they're all working really well. The first one is around spiritual companionship.
This is what separates us from secular society; we can bring the accompaniment, the spiritual companionship, and the pastoral side of mental health into the equation. So, you want to have a couple of people on your team at the parish level who are pastoral. They should be good listeners who can sit and listen without necessarily having to answer questions.
The one thing we found in this ministry is that we don't have to have all the answers; we don't have to fix things. It's very important that whoever is in the spiritual companionship role on that ministry team does it and does it really well. The second piece is practical support, so it's very important that the parish knows where the resources are geographically to their location, whether that's folks in their parish who are involved in therapy or other relevant fields, maybe within their parish or the county or city they’re in.
They need to know where the resources are so when someone comes to them, they can share, “Hey, we found some resources here; you might be interested in checking those out. ” Then the third piece is educational opportunities. Every parish has a need to learn more about mental health; it's really, really important.
This is something that I coach the teams on: before you build your teams out, you can start right there with educating your parish. If you have a couple of people on your parish team who really know this area well, give that responsibility to them and have them put on some seminars. Maybe they have some video series they want to show at night, or perhaps they want to talk with other people in the local area to come in and put on events.
There are certainly a lot of different ministries out there that people can tap into for educational opportunities. What I tell the teams, too, is that they tend to struggle with the spiritual companionship: it's like how far do they go with that? Here's the text you provided, punctuated correctly: Where's that role fall in play?
We don't really have people coming to us. What can we do? We don't want to sit around and wait.
Well, you can build out your practical support, your resources, and you can educate your parish. I mean, even if you didn't have anybody come to the parish with a mental health challenge for themselves or for their loved ones, you can always build in practical support, and you can always educate the parish. So those are three main roles of the teams.
Teams do not have to be large; some teams are as small as, you know, three or four people, and others might be seven, eight, nine, or ten people. It all depends on what the needs and the size of the parish are. And if you do this well, I mean, we can radically transform the parish, right?
Where no one's alone on the journey; no one's excluded from participating in parish life. So getting to that healing and recovery process. And one more piece here on the teams is this kind of busy slide, but if you just kind of focus in on the top, is, you know, whether your team members are professionals or non-professionals, there's kind of a "don't do" list, and here's kind of a sample.
I mean, they cannot bring their professional relationship outside the church into this discussion, right? They can't prescribe, modify, or evaluate medication, and all these things are a complete no-no. If you find somebody on your parish team that is starting to go across that line, they need to leave the team, right?
If they're a professional, they have to leave the professional at the door. Certainly, their experience comes into the discussion, but they have to leave their professional responsibilities at the door, right? And that last bullet's kind of a catch-all: any services typically provided by mental health professionals.
And I had a gentleman—just tell you a quick story. I had a gentleman on one of our parish recruitment workshops; he was a therapist, and he struggled with looking at, okay, where would he fit into this parish team because that's his experience, and he wants to help and support and, you know, do all the things that therapists would do. It dawned on him, as we went through the three pillars there of the team, that one around educational opportunities, and he was a perfect fit for that.
He could come in and actually put on the training of the awareness seminars and educational seminars. So he kind of answered his own question just by seeing that, okay, maybe I don't want to be on a spiritual companionship because I don't want to cross the line or it may go too far with my experiences in there. Well, why don't I just go on the educational side of the team?
So there you have it, so that people do find the right places. The teams do need to sit down and have a lot of discussion around what they like to do, what works for them, where they see their responsibilities, and how much time they can allocate to something like this, which is really, really important. Okay, so let me shift over to training.
This was an area that, you know, we didn't really have anything lined up. We had some ideas about what we might want to do as far as training the parishes now that they have a team, and we want something that we could kind of cycle through and apply to the other parishes as we move forward. Through the rest of the teams, we have right now 13 parish teams that have been fully trained; we're looking—we probably got another five to seven that have expressed a lot of interest, so hopefully, we can get them on board now that we're getting out of the COVID era a little bit—that we can have maybe in-person training on some of these.
Either way, we videotaped, and we have that that we can use. We got caught in the middle of COVID; we were about ready to have a full-blown training session with all the speakers to come in, and COVID hit, and we had to back up and realign how we were going to train the parishes. Unfortunately, we had a parish—Saint Matthews and Monsignor Telesford—who was willing to kind of be a guinea pig with his parish on all of this and said, "Hey, we'll try this.
Let's push ahead and see if we can do this online. " So we ended up having the speakers change up their material, and then we ended up doing it through Zoom. It wasn't perfect; we got through it; we got better as we went, but it certainly was a challenge.
A lot of stuff is really meant to be in person, if at all possible. So the first piece of training—we have five pieces here that I'll be going through. The first piece was NAMI; we had the executive director for San Francisco come in and give a Mental Health 101.
If you haven't ever taken that, I encourage you to take it; it's very, very good. She also had two other people that had been struggling with mental health challenges for many, many years, and they gave their testimonies. They really brought to the discussion the idea of being able to get into recovery and that there is hope.
That was a really good add-on to her material. See, when we had someone talk about coping skills for caregivers, they were focused a lot on Alzheimer's and dementia, and the coping skills they'll apply to any situation. a little more time and that's okay too.
It's important to recognize that each parish is unique and will progress at its own pace. Another key lesson we learned is to prioritize ongoing support and connection among the teams. Regular meetings, sharing of experiences, and fostering a sense of community can make a significant difference in the success of mental health ministries.
Also, we discovered the value of being flexible and adaptable in our approach. What works for one parish may not work for another, so it's vital to remain open to new ideas and methods as we continue our journey. Encouraging creativity and taking feedback into account can lead to innovative solutions that better serve the needs of the community.
Lastly, we believe it’s crucial to celebrate successes, no matter how small they may seem. Acknowledging progress, whether it’s reaching more individuals or simply generating interest in mental health conversations, can motivate teams and reinforce the importance of their work. In summary, our training program is built on five main pieces that bring together education, implementation, and experiential learning while also emphasizing the importance of adaptability and community support.
As we move forward, we are excited about the possibilities and the positive impact we can make on our parishes and the lives of those they serve. More support may have people lead the team. I have a parish right now that the team leaders have moved; I mean, they've moved to other locations and stuff, you know, outside the area, and so their leadership is struggling.
So how do we get that team back on track, or does it pause for a while and then come back with different leadership? But there is no timetable, as much as we want to get there quickly. I think the last, but in a lot of ways, most important, is ongoing prayer.
I'm going for the team; I'm going with prayer with all the people that we're encountering on this journey. We can't go alone; we need to have Jesus in the middle of this. We really, really do.
[Music] Form a prayer team within the team. There's probably a person or two that's very gifted there, and have them play a very significant role, but don't forget the importance of ongoing prayer. So we just completed a mental health conference called "Hope and Healing" that the Archdiocese of San Francisco sponsored, just about two months ago.
The focus of this. . .
We couldn't have done this three years ago because we just weren't quite sure where we were headed with all this, but we felt that it was time that we could bring together the broader Bay Area and have people from other dioceses and parishes join us. We had a little over a hundred that attended. We had two keynote talks, and they're listed there: "Mental Health 101" and "Coping Skills," because I felt that those are two topics everyone needed to hear.
We had six breakout sessions. I had four of them listed here: one on suicide prevention, depression as it relates to co-occurring addiction, substance abuse, and mental health challenges; and children and youth is an area that we felt strongly we need to focus more on—children and youth. Certainly with COVID and the situation with schools and everything, it was really, really important that we had something in there.
We also had another session on dealing with our culture—the struggles of our culture—and then another on the psychological versus spiritual connection point of mental health. So they were all well attended. We're hoping we got good feedback on this.
We're hoping to probably have this again, maybe next year. But I want to kind of wrap up with that, because that was something that we just recently did; we did it at the diocesan level. You could not have done this at, like, a parish level; we did it at the diocesan level in support of all the parishes, so it was open to the public.
Before we go to questions, I have two more slides in here that you'll see in the material that we send out. We had a couple of parish team leaders that gave their thoughts on the ministry after we've been into it for a couple of years, so there's a slide in there. Then there's one more slide on what it means for a parish to belong to the mental health ministry network.
We have it broken into three pieces: what's it mean to the pastor, what's it mean to the mental health ministry team, and what's it mean for the families and individuals of the parish. Okay, and now Kate, I think we're on to questions. Yeah, we have a number of questions here.
The first one: Is this like the Stephen Ministers program? I'm somewhat familiar with Stephen's ministry, but I think it's much broader. Yeah, because we're dealing with all aspects of mental health.
So anybody dealing with any type of mental health challenge, whatever that could be, is covered. It's covering all of that, but yeah, the Stephen's ministry does play a role. Okay, here's another one: Someone works for Stanford as well as NAMI, and is a coach of individuals with mental health and chronic pain issues, referred to her by psychologists in the area as well as Stanford physicians.
She attended the St. John Paul Foundation conferences in previous years, and it's been mentioned that it's very dangerous to not allow new age principles and secular principles to mingle with Catholic thought. Any comments on this?
So, I guess, new age thoughts and practices mixed in with the ministry. . .
Well, we're Catholic, right? So this is a Catholic ministry at a parish, so we have to stay true to ourselves too. That doesn't mean that people aren't going to get assistance, help, and benefits in other areas, but I think we have to stay kind of true to who we are.
Okay, another question: What role, if any, does Catholic Charities play in the process, or do they not provide mental health services? We had, in our Archdiocese, probably right about the time that we started this ministry, a lot of funding—I don't have all the details on this—but funding got pulled around their behavioral health component of Catholic Charities, so we didn't really have anybody we could go to. So, you know, people have actually kind of come to us, and Ed Hoffner just said no; Catholic Charities no longer provides mental health services at all.
So in our situation, we don't really have anybody that we work with or use. How important is it to have a hired person? At the diocesan level, to coordinate this ministry, I think it's important to have someone because that's kind of their job, their role, to stay on top of it.
I don't think you necessarily have to have that, but it's going to take a commitment of time, you know, to get this up and running. So I think if it were more of a paid position, you'll get more out of it. But I have just a question on that, Dick.
Because I get this question a lot too about how many hours a week, roughly, have you been putting in on this over the last couple of years? Oh, probably 15. 15 hours per week?
Yeah. And what do you see going forward? Do you think this could be sustainable on its own or does it require some sort of support?
Well, it's going to require some care and feeding, you know. I think once we have another piece here that we're working on, which is packaging everything that we've done over the last three years and handing it off to the association here where people can kind of pick and choose the pieces that they want to use. Right?
So if they want to engage with the clergy, get the clergy excited about this—here, use this material—or take it and modify it in a way that you see fit. If you want to have recruitment workshops, here's the material. Do you have training?
Here’s training, and here’s videos tied to the training. So if someone else comes in later, the stuff is more packaged; it's easier to use. You don't have to start from scratch.
I think it'll be less time-consuming, right? But it sounds like it's been part-time, and probably someone at some point could work it into other job duties. I mean, a full-time role, yeah, I think that's the goal, right?
Yeah, I didn’t catch it. Maybe you said at the beginning how many parishes are participating in the archdiocese? We have 13 that have been fully trained, but I said we probably have five to seven more that we're hoping to get there.
So if we get to 20, I think 20 would be a pretty good goal for us to have. Okay. Another question is, have you used Mental Health First Aid in your training that you do at the diocesan level?
Oh, yeah, that's a good question. I forgot about that. We had Deacon Ed Schoener just come out last August to San Francisco.
We had about 30 parish team members covering 10 parishes that attended the first Mental Health First Aid training. It was well received; they got a lot out of it. We're hoping to have that again at some point.
A couple of other questions here: once a team is formed, how does a parish invite? Bulletins, notices, word of mouth, mass announcements, etc. What other recommendations would you have?
Well, some of the teams have built websites, right? They built a spot on their parish website where they'll advertise and acknowledge the mental health team, how to contact them, whether it's through email or a phone number. I’m going to share with you also—we have a brochure that I can circulate, and we'll put it in the material at the end.
So we created a brochure at the diocesan level that kind of explains all about the team, and then the parish team can then have a spot on the back where they can put their contact information. They could have it at the back of the parish and hand it out at different times when ministry sessions are going on, or what have you, and they can hand this stuff out. So a website seems to be one way, a brochure seems to be another way, and word of mouth seems to work well too.
Okay, no real set way of doing it. Would it be helpful to tap into an established diocesan office and look to a person in place to do this work? So I think what the question is: would it be better to tap into an existing diocesan office when looking to start this ministry or create something new?
Yeah, I’m not good at answering that. So we didn't have a role or anything around mental health, and it was placed under marriage and family life at the Archdiocese of San Francisco, so that's where I roll up into Ed Hoffner, who is the director of marriage and family life. You need to find a spot where this ministry should reside, right?
And so if you don't have a lot, you have to create one. So we’re in the pastoral ministry department for the Archdiocese. And, as I said, he really felt that they needed a separate person to start this since everybody else kind of was funded on other work.
Have you provided a retreat for ministers? Any advice on that topic of offering retreats? Well, we had the mental health conference, which was a little bit of a retreat a couple of months ago.
Some of the parishes' teams have had their own get-togethers and retreats, you know, a day away to kind of reflect and share on how things are going. We haven't specifically sponsored anything ourselves; we had the conference and the Mental Health First Aid, which we, you know, kind of sponsored to get going, but we haven't really sponsored anything like this. Think that's a good idea, and I think it could be a very good idea.
Um, I could see a number of parishes' leaders that would want to come. Did the initial invitation to the clergy to attend the luncheon come from the diocese, such as a letter from the bishop? How did you invite people?
Yes, it did. It came from our archbishop. He said he sent a letter to the clergy.
We scheduled this; he helped advertise and support it. He showed up at the clergy luncheon, so it all got off to a good start. I'm just curious to get that initial clergy luncheon about how many of the parishes said they were interested, at least.
I'm just wondering what the statistics are. I stick right around that 20 number: about 20 parishes. About out of how many in the whole diocese?
How many? What's the—? We had— we have about 90 parishes, so about 20 of them said they were interested.
Okay, and you went on to train? Okay, so you're hoping to get up to that 20 at some point. So that's interesting.
So 70 of them said no, thank you, for the moment, huh? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or are they in a—?
I mean, we had about 40 clergy attend, and they covered over 20 parishes. They all didn't attend; it's hard to get everybody to come, right? Like anything.
Sure. What were some of the objections? What were some of the concerns that they didn't want to do it?
You know [Music], I don't know. You know, I don't know specifically, but there are just pastors and other clergy who are just not— I think they're nervous and concerned about starting something like this. I think that's kind of a general concern; it's one more thing, right?
One more thing in our parish. And I think when we had Father Saroki from Our Lady of Mount Carmel in San Diego give his talk to the clergy—and we have a six-minute video posted on our archdiocesan website, and I think it might be a post on the association—yeah, what's up? If a pastor listens to that, you know, he gets a pretty compelling story of—yes, it's hard to get started; it's not easy; you have to have the right people.
But reflecting back on it now, he's got a separate group that is able to assist him with mental health in his parish, which he didn't have before. So I think once they see the outcome and see the benefit of it, I think more would probably be interested in joining. But it's just hard to get people to move.
Yeah, his little talk is very compelling, that 5-6 talk. Yeah, yeah. How is mental health support/ministry provided to the pastors, and the mental health ministers—providing the spiritual support at the parish level?
Are there ongoing diocesan meetings? We have—I don’t know if this answers the question, but we have meetings with the parish team leads every other month. We had them every month; you know, we have them every other month.
It seems to be a little bit better, and they're kind of focused on very targeted situations or issues that the team leaders want to talk about as far as how they are engaging. And then we do have a couple of pastors that show up at those meetings from time to time, so it all depends, you know, on how engaged the pastor wants to be with his team. If they want to have additional training, we're kind of—we're doing our work; we're pushing this out.
It's really up to them to kind of operate. They're kind of a standalone parish operating a mental health ministry, but they're part of a broader network across the archdiocese, which is where the archdiocese falls into place to help them. So we'll deal with additional training, additional issues that may rise up to the diocesan level; we'll take on.
But the local stuff, they're gonna have to deal with it. So if they want additional training or they want to get their pastor more involved or however they want to do it within their parish, they can do it however they want, as long as they stay within the boundaries of the ministry, the guidelines of having a ministry in their parish. Okay, um, do you offer any trainings in Spanish, such as the mental health 101 that you've mentioned?
That has been a challenge. We have a few things in Spanish; like, we have the brochure in Spanish, but we haven't had the training in Spanish. We’ve had requests from people to have that; we just haven't been able to find probably the time or the people to be able to do that at this point.
What I do suggest, that really any parish—especially in the Bay Area—is to have one or two members on your team that are bilingual. I think that's very helpful, and hopefully they can help connect some of the dots too to their communities. But that's been a challenge; that's been a big issue.
Here's the notice: I am new to our diocesan Respect Life Human Rights Office. I was originally working on implementing this ministry through our offices but recently found out I will probably play more of a supportive role. How can other offices/ministries in a diocese help to support implementation?
And maybe specifically, how can someone in a Respect Life/Human Rights/Family Life Office help build this up? Do we have Ed Hoffner? Is he able to connect into this?
Um, let's see. Well, I can answer this a little. Bit the experience I had with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
So, for example, it was the One Life event, the pro-life march in January. I spoke at it, as that you know, respect for life goes from conception to now, through natural death and everything in between. So they had me speaking about the importance of mental health as a pro-life issue.
So there are things like that you can do. Also, the Richards Rachel's Vineyard ministry has a mental health component to it, of course. So there are things that can work together on this and support the ministry.
I would say it really depends on the diocese. Some are very collaborative; some are not. The young adult and youth ministry people are sometimes very interested.
We tried to work with the schools department, but because San Francisco was so locked down, the schools department had all their hands full just trying to get the schools back online as they ordinarily would. But we're still talking with them. We talked about trying to do the mental health 101 training for teachers, or at least teachers who are interested.
Excuse me, mental health first aid or mental health 101—either one—and offering those. And then, of course, like they said, the Respect Life, we have a prison ministry that's pretty active, and we're trying to see if we can get some of those people interested. It depends on their interests and their availability.
Right now, we actually don't see each other a lot in our archdiocese because we're still just coming back from being locked down. So we have two years of not really talking to each other—not intentionally, but just because of the way things have been. There are a lot of possibilities for cross-fertilization; it just really depends on the diocese, what they're able to do, and how open people are.
The other thing I see—Rachel Chung from the Archdiocese of Washington commented that the Office of Disability Ministries is a good fit for this ministry too. Yeah, and there's absolutely, yeah. So I know a couple of different dioceses around the country where this ministry has found a home in that part of the chancery, so to speak.
The National Catholic Partnership on Disability supports this with the Mental Illness Council and provides other material to support, so that's a good fit in that office. You mentioned earlier a Q&A video—a conversation that you had with a woman. Will we be able to have access to that video?
Yes, okay. We're part of that package that we're talking about putting together from a diocesan level. That is one of the videos that we will have available because I think it does answer and hit a lot of the questions that people have when they first start up their ministry.
That was with Dick, right? That was from Laurie Dusa from Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the Diocese of San Diego. Diocese of San Diego, yes.
Okay. And it looks like I see one final question here, and it says, "Mental illness versus gun violence," as witnessed this past week, is providing unfair blame on mental illness. Any thoughts on how mental health ministry can address this fairly, and would it be appropriate?
Wow! Well, you know, we're kind of in a tough place sometimes regarding what is actually happening out in society. We get these different events that impact people around us; it's on the news, and our friends and family members are talking about it.
I don't think there's any easy answer to that. I think we have to—our biggest attribute is the ability to listen, right? Listen to others; listen to people that are struggling, whether they're struggling with mental health or something else.
Again, we can't solve all these things; there's no really easy way of solving it. I think being compassionate and listening, and seeing what other people are thinking and what concerns they may have—that's part of the pastoral side that I think we need to continue to bring into this. We're all lay ministers in this ministry, right?
And we are in our parishes; some of them are large, and some of them are small. In large groups and small groups, we know a lot of people in different areas. Just listening, reaching out, and getting people engaged in that discussion is, I think, really, really important because it's not going away.
We've seen with COVID that certainly, depression and anxiety have gone up across the board with really all of us. So if we add another event into that, it just brings a lot of concern into what's going on. I don't think we have an answer, but it's just being compassionate—compassionate for people.
Well, thank you, Dick. Yeah, I mean, I led our spiritual support group here in Scranton last week, and it's one of those things that continues to further stigmatize people that live with mental illness. The terrible events—the mass shootings over the past couple of weeks—lead folks with mental illnesses to get slapped with this stereotype that everyone with a mental illness is a potential mass shooter, which is not true.
We all know the statistics: people with mental illness are more likely to be affected by violence than to perpetrate violence. It's just one. Of those things that we have to keep chipping away at, I mean, maybe most mass shooters have some sort of mental illness or some sort of underlying mental health condition.
But the overwhelming majority of people with a mental health condition or mental illness obviously are not violent individuals, and we have to keep that in perspective and keep reminding everybody of that. Well, thank you very much, Dick, for taking the time to do this this afternoon. Um, our hour's up, and Ed Hopler, both you and Ed have been very instrumental in getting this ministry off the ground, along with the people in the parishes.
And, um, yeah, so for the folks that are listening, this will be up on our website along with the other ancillary materials that will be available. As we continue to network, we'll continue to provide this information to everybody as we go along. Next month, we'll have another webinar.
It's going to be on dementia, Alzheimer’s, right, Kate? And you'll be—yes, Kate will be the main presenter. That’s kind of Kate's specialty: pastoral care and supporting people and their families that live with dementia and Alzheimer’s.
And as Dick mentioned, that's part of their ministry too. So thank you all for joining us, and enjoy the beginning of the summer. God bless everyone.
Thank you.
