How To Help The Mentally Ill: Look To Jesus Healing The Leper

The chaplain of Archbishop Riordan High School in San Francisco, Father John Jimenez recently spoke of his experience working with the mentally ill, learning from what Jesus did to heal a leper as a sign of the Kingdom of God, found in the Gospel of Mark chapter 1.
Jesus manifests some of his most significant signs of the Kingdom in the most unlikely places, like healing a leper living on the fringe of town, in the isolation of a desert.
In those days, lepers had to live apart from everyone else because the disease could easily spread upon touch or presence. Yet, Jesus seeks this person out. Today, many who are homeless in our society are also mentally ill. Perhaps they once had a good job, even a family. Then, a nervous breakdown trying to live up to a fast paced society, or live up to an image and peer pressure on social media, or, propagandized to use marijuana and succumbing to its addictive contents, and gateway to smoking heroin, and now recently, fentanyl.
Maybe they were depressed, victimized by abuse growing up in a culture of sexual objectification, or perhaps hurt by a profound infidelity, which objectification often leads to, and now living with a deep sense of lack of self-worth. Instability, lack of trust, becomes schizophrenia and inability to connect or find direction or meaning, lost in a sea of cultural and familial breakdown.
How do we treat those with mental illness, when their actions and behaviors say, "I'm unclean, I'm unclean!" ? Do we recognize the forces which breakdown the fabric of society, of connection and meaning? Do we recognize the effects of our own sins on other people and how they separate us from God?
About 10 years ago when I was chaplain at General Hospital, I met an elderly man in the psychiatric unit named Bill. For years he had lived on the streets, sleeping in doorways, living on handouts. It was hard to say if his mental illness was just from the instability of living on the streets, or from some other trauma that he had suffered, being on the front lines during the war in Korea, bombs going off, the constant tension of always being alert for attacks, the horror of seeing your friend step on a land mine and explode in front of your eyes.
After all that he had been through over the years, it was amazing to see the healing effect that the stable, caring environment of the psychiatric unit had on him. Here he did not have to fend for himself against sudden attacks. Here he had people who listened and were interested in his story. Here his own religious upbringing of prayers and devotion could awaken again and bring him again to his relationship with God and our bond with the good that God has created.
For those who are displaced by our high tech society, here is a way to work instead for the Kingdom of God