The Story of Mental Health Podcast Episode

Over time you started seeing people as having worth and needing some kind of dignity and understanding and compassion and actually Christians had a big part of this. So, as we come into what we would think of more modern for us, then you see a shift in how we treat people. Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services.

Excellent to have everybody along. This is May and as Mays have been, is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I’ve got Ted Witzig and Ron Messner to talk about mental health. Welcome both of you. Hi Matt, yeah, thanks for having us. 1949 evidently is when May was declared mental health month. But I think it is telling, because there’s usually an impetus behind a month being declared some sort of awareness.

And that really posits our conversation nicely back in 1949. There’s probably a story there, right. But even beyond that. Mental health, certainly ACCFS has a lot at stake with mental health and being thoughtful about mental health. But I thought about how appropriate it would be, and I think it would be beneficial for our listeners to hear somewhat of a story.

I think we’re going to hear some stories here today. I’m hoping so. Sure. Hear some stories today but also help us connect some dots to mental health on the radar being understood in terms of general welfare and general knowledge. It hasn’t always been that way. Right? Is that fair to say?

Sure. And I think there’s a lot to be learned. Well, there’s always something to be learned by history, and so I’d like to push into some of that history, Ron and Ted, both of you, to help push into that history. And I’m going to go ahead and recognize and call out here at the beginning that some of this history is very central Illinois based, and I know our listeners expand beyond that border, but that’s the history that we’re familiar with. That’s the air that you two breathe, but yet it probably isn’t too far off the mark of a larger national scene. Sure. Am I right about that? Yeah. The original response from Illinois very much fit what was going on nationally.

The things that were occurring in the questions being raised. Yeah. They fit a national context. So, Ron, I would like you to share this topic of mental health and awareness. But what do you think was the impetus behind the mental health profession saying we need to raise awareness. And this happened back before the fifties. So, some of this is speculation I’ll share because I think it matches the timeframes. Prior to 1900, I’m pretty sure up until that time that all mental health was seen as a moral and character issue. And so, it was addressed and if we look at Scripture, all the references were there.

We really don’t know what an evil spirit was, but there was no other context. If somebody was mad, that was the only explanation. And I’m pretty sure that probably continued until really the late 1800s and early 1900s when people began to be seen as people with difficulties, but they didn’t understand what was going on, but realized it was something happening to a person.

And I think that the treatment reflected both that and the fact they didn’t know what to do. I was just rereading again this morning, somebody who was interested in the movement going and visiting somebody. When you say interested in the movement, what are you speaking of? Knowing how people were being treated up until that point and wondering what could be done. And they described a person visiting somebody who lived in a basically a log pen outdoors. He had no feet because they had frozen off and they would open the pen and hose it out once a week at least, except in the winter when they didn’t do that and there was nothing to do with this person.

It would’ve been probably said to be mad then that’s probably the word they would’ve used. They couldn’t be kept in the house; they couldn’t be around people. They were not safe. So, the only possible way to manage was just to build a pen and lock him in it. So, Ron, you’re tipping your hat at a movement that was coming to see how people were being treated. And there was a movement here to think differently about the plight of people. That’s right. The farther you go back, everything was kind of lumped together and treated together. And so in the old time, in insane asylums, even if you go back into England and things like that, you would’ve had people that had, you know, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but you would also have people with other kinds of disabilities and you would have people with seizure disorders and all different kinds of things that today we would say, oh no, what you do is this, or, oh no, what you do is that.

And because their only context was either moral failure or a demonic thing or whatever. Then that was what drove the treatments. Over time you started seeing people as having worth and needing some kind of dignity. And understanding and compassion and actually Christians had a big part of this, then you also started seeing things shift as well.

And at the same time, the understanding of human anatomy and just even the social aspect that community makes a difference to people. Being a part of something makes a difference to people. So, as we come into what we would think of more modern for us, then you see a shift in how we treat people. And it seems to come also on the raised awareness of the complexity of life. Yeah, I mean, today they’re starting to break the atoms down into parts. Right. We understand at the atomic level the complexity that no other generation has understood. Sure. And that’s happened on many different fronts.

And this idea of mental health would be one of those fronts where complexity is now being seen, whereas in the past it was painted with a pretty broad brush. I think one of the things, Matt, that you’d notice, if you go back and look at historically what happened, I’m going to say interventions because they weren’t treatments, but the interventions were based on what was necessary to manage the person’s behavior.

So, there is what we’d probably call a state hospital now, but a hospital by Colonial Williamsburg that has the equipment they used at that time. So yeah, whatever, mid 1700s and besides all the manacles and those kinds of things, there’s a cage that is like two feet high that somebody was in. It looked like an enlarged chicken crate.

Yeah. And it would’ve been the only way to keep that person from hurting themselves or others so that it aligned with what was necessary to manage the physical behavior which was occurring. For sure. Yeah. And they were in iron cuffs or camisoles or things in which their arms were captured inside because it was necessary to keep them from hurting themselves or someone else.

Yeah. Some other things, when they thought it was a demon or whatever, sometimes they would do a little bit like the Salem Witch Trials, right? Where you dunk people, you do things to try to get the demon out, you know, those kinds of things. And unfortunately, it just led to people not being treated well.

But I think the other piece is they were well intended. I think that’s the other part. You and I would say they were not treated well. And then there’s another part, it was the best that they knew. Yeah. Well, and I want to go back to this and I realize we have to walk a very fine line in understanding demonic possession.

Sure. And we’re going to say we believe based on the Scripture and example and living in a world where we wrestle against principalities and powers and things that we can’t see that these things are real. But that might be for a different conversation and discussion. What I’m interested in here though is it would be easier to keep a person in a cage if I believe that they were demon possessed.

Is that part of the shift in mental health awareness that humankind has taken, do you follow my question? Yes, no question. It’s not unlike what happened with slavery. In order to keep people as slaves, they had to not be fully human. That’s the mental gyration that gets us there.

Yes. It is necessary in order to manage your own sanity. So, if you had a child or a husband or a sibling, whatever it was, who was blatantly psychotic and harmful. I mean, if people just run up and down the streets and scream, they’d probably let him. But if somebody was breaking into houses or in danger of fire setting or harming someone, and you would have to come to grips with, they may not be fully human as we perceive that. And so, these interventions can and need to be done. Yeah. There were no other answers. Yeah. And I think, Matt, what’s really interesting today, the characterization that mental illness equals dangerous is not an accurate representation of it at all.

It’s come to that. It was kind of a danger over there. Then it started to be able to come to, there’s some humanity here that we need to somehow care for. Now we’ve gone. Then there was a whole period of time where there were treatments being developed and things like that.

Then what do you see? It’s very interesting now, seeking out good mental health treatments and online care and things like that are good stewardship. It is like, hey, you’re worth it. Why don’t you see a counselor at such and such? And so, we’ve seen a pivot now that mental health care is both important, but also available and revered. Yeah, go do it.

And so, what I caught with all of that too, Ted, is the shift in the posture that the health community has had with the ill health or those who are struggling has been the difference. Ron, I’d like you to go back then tell the story then, you know, pick up in the 1800s or whatnot. What did that look like here in Central Illinois as this wave of understanding and then shifting of posture changed towards mental health.

So, the pieces I know would indicate this was a national movement and probably international in first world countries. But one of the things I just found amusing when I read it, nobody would ever think of today, but when they started to develop state hospitals, they were large places with thousands of people there, and the primary purpose or component of it was to rest.

It was thought that if we could get these people removed from busyness or commotion and just take them to a place where they could rest. That didn’t work. But it does show that there was a beginning of compassion and that it was seen that there might be a cure or at least some resolution to those symptoms if we could figure out what it is to do.

So, if you think about that. It means they’re now being seen as a person. Yeah. And a fully valued person, even if the interventions were mistaken. Well, and the big shift there from the cage that you described earlier, or the log cabin was to protect me. That was the posture to now. How do we care for this individual is a 180-degree difference.

It’s huge. And that’s what launched even back then when they still were in the cages and the pits and those things. One of the stories that I read, and I think it might have been the fellow who was in that pit, they talked about his feet being off, that his family said we could give him to, or send him to whatever the county or whether that’s jail or poor house, whatever. Yeah. But we were concerned about how he would be cared for. So even at that point, there was compassion for this broken person at the level. They didn’t want to send them someplace. But I think probably the majority were sent to prisons. Poor houses if their behavior was manageable.

But if not, they were imprisoned in cells. Because it was the only way to contain that. I do think that’s a really important thing to see the role of prisons in mental health care inside jails and prisons. There is a large mental health component, and jails are huge providers of mental health care.

Sure. For all different issues from addiction to untreated depression. I mean, the amount of trauma that’s in there is profound. So, that’s a different discussion also. Yes. But from old times up to now, you’ll find jail or the prison being a place where a lot of this was treated. Yeah. I’m interested in these shifts.

So, you mentioned the state hospital. A shift away from protecting ourselves to how do we help this individual? Yeah. With whatever level of success. Yeah. Or failure. Yeah. I mean they were trying Sure. Well, there were successes in that. They were managed, they weren’t leaving people outdoors and freezing. Yeah. And they weren’t locked up. Yeah. So, it was interesting when Illinois, I think there might’ve been originally five state hospitals or something like that, and there was another one needed. And the Peoria Area decided to go for it to try to get it here. And I don’t think it was entirely because of need.

I think there were probably some pieces of prestige or of wanting to be known as a place that cared. And it actually was a group of women who drove that here in Peoria. Yeah. Looking to make it local, to have it here. Yeah. And they were successful. It wasn’t just women who did it, but they, they largely led that, I think this was 40 or 50 years before suffrage, before women could vote, these women took hold and did that.

And in the, the parade for the opening day of the Peoria State Hospital, the mayor and Saudi were in the first car. And the second car was the women who were the leaders of that group. So there was this, it, the treatment of mental health corresponded in some ways with women gaining credibility and and seen as having the ability, yeah.

Just the, the ability and the wherewithal to pull that off. But the clarity of world view, the clarity of view of human came with these women right here locally. The other piece that I think is really interesting locally is that, and I think it was Dr. Zeller, he had a different view of what should happen than what other state hospitals did.

Okay. So, introduce Dr. Zeller a little bit. What, what era are we in here? I think this would be early 1900s. Okay. I’m going to avoid dates, okay, but somewhere between 1,900, 1910, but early. But after these women. He would’ve been in the same era. Right. Okay. And he believed that you shouldn’t use cuffs, restraints, bars in the windows and advocated strongly for that.

I actually think, I’m not sure I have the time right, I think he was off in the Philippines war or something. And came back and they’d put bars over the windows, and he was very upset. He had ordered them all removed. Okay. And they were actually used to create a bear pen or used in a zoo that he created on grounds.

So, he very much advocated that people should not be restrained unless absolutely necessary. And he would do things like if the police department called, because somebody had escaped from Peoria State Hospital and was walking around town, people called the alarm because they could probably tell either by what they were wearing or maybe how they were acting.

And he would purposely send a single female to retrieve them and bring them back on the streetcar. So, he was radical. He was radical. There’s more to it, but he wanted the public to see this person as not dangerous. That a woman could take care of them and that they could ride in public, and they didn’t need security guards.

So, he actually developed a reputation which concerned the other state hospital administrators. And they reported him to Springfield about the poor practice which was happening in Peoria. And so, like today, a nursing home would get somebody from the Department of Public Health. I don’t know who came then but he was ahead of his time. But was, there was a lot of heartburn with that. Now a lot of that was very intriguing. When you say he had his own facility along with a state hospital. Oh, he was the director of the state hospital at the time. He was the director of the state hospital. I missed that.

Yeah. Which is why they called the state to come and check. So, this what we’d say, state surveyor, I don’t know what they were called then came and observed and reported back that the people were doing well and not only was he found in compliance, but they recommended that other state hospitals follow his lead.

Interesting. Just a major change in thinking. And of course there were restraints at the state hospital. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist. Sure. But they were used very sparingly, and they didn’t have the bars on the windows because of what it looked like. Yeah. They called it the cottage model, which kind of blows my mind because they didn’t look like a cottage. Yeah, yeah. But it looked like a cottage compared to the prison.

I think the other thing, and Ron will talk about this more, but it started to see people too, as there were people who were living there that would have a room and those kinds of things. But then they started saying, hey, let’s give this person something to do. And that’s a really important aspect of the shift away from a person is ill and dangerous and then useless. Okay. And they didn’t really realize that they were ill at the time, but something was wrong with them.

They were dangerous. Useless. And so, we’re saying, wait a minute, they have something, they’re dealing with an illness. They need to be treated as human beings. And we need to figure out how best to engage them in a life of value. Ted, they were rewriting the script. Sure. Oh, totally. It looks very archaic and, and sometimes even a bit cruel when we look back on it, but from where they came from it was the best they had. So, one of the things he advocated is that people should be working. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, I could look for them, but I think they had a dairy herd. Yeah. I think they had 140 cattle. And that’s what the men did. Plus, they had hundreds of hogs that they would slaughter each year. Yeah. And fields that they farmed.

So, they started using what today we would call occupational therapists. So, they were very gender based. Women didn’t milk the cows; the men milked the cows. The women started in sewing programs and cleaning programs, and so they made the linens for the beds, made the clothes, made the aprons that the people working there would wear and, and thoroughly enjoyed doing that. When a minimum wage was put in place, they didn’t have the money to hire all those people, and you couldn’t allow them to work because that would’ve been treating them unfairly.

Wow. So, all of the animals were dispensed as there was no more farming operation. It undercut that vision, and the people were back to sitting around and they couldn’t sew. They couldn’t be used for housekeeping. Yeah. So, it was a serious setback from this idea, which was a very positive one even today.

Even when we have clients, we would look for some kind of work they can do. How can they be engaged in the community? How can they be part of something? Yeah, totally. And he achieved that. I mean, that was a really frustrating change when that was taken away. But the point I wanted to make more is how much that was his way of thinking.

It was what would help these people? Not how do we maintain them, but what will be helpful to their healing? Yeah. I think another thing that really impressed me, it was a number of years ago, Ron and I actually went there to the site and there were a number of cemeteries on site. Go ahead Ron, tell a little bit about the cemeteries.

Yeah. You almost have to go there to understand partly. So, one of the things that stands out is many of these people were lost. They came there without names. They just were given numbers because they didn’t have a name. Some family had taken them to a prison, and the prison maybe put them in the poor house. They could end in the process. Nobody claimed them. They didn’t have identities. So, in the cemetery, you see unmarked graves, they are numbers. Yeah. And cataloged. And some of the numbers are names that are known. But many are not. Or they were given a name when they came there and they weren’t necessarily able to say their name, you know, they were psychotic enough, but even if given a name is powerful.

Yes. Powerful drive. That’s true. And I think that’s part of the thing that many of them didn’t have families and things of that day, or they had families but didn’t know them. Yeah. And so, when they passed, I think one of the things that impressed me so is that Dr. Zeller made sure that each one had a funeral.

Yeah. I’d forgotten that. And there are simple gravestones with sometimes simple names, sometimes not much. But there was also some kind of recognition that life was honored. Yeah. Life was honored even in the fact that they each had their own grave site. There was no mass grave. It wasn’t an unmarked grave site. No, everyone had a marker. Even if the marker only had a number and they kept catalogs, so they knew where each person was buried and which number they were. It speaks of a shift in humanity, a juxtaposition to the cage, right?

Yes. Where it’s like, we’re going to hold this person until the threat is over to now, we have an eternal marking. Yeah. Life was lived is worlds apart from the cages. Yeah. It even speaks to the spiritual piece of that. I mean, we as believers, most of us don’t reverence a grave site, but there is something meaningful about that.

The dignity is, as believers in a church, as we give somebody a funeral, a cemetery and a marker at the cemetery. Yeah. It means we intend to remember and acknowledge who they were. It’s not spiritual in the sense of sin or salvation, but just the integrity of humanity. Right. And it was reflected in how they were treated.

Do we know what Dr. Zeller’s faith was? I don’t know. He certainly was endowed with a grace that understood. Yeah. He was not a psychiatrist. Okay. He was just a regular physician who took a deep interest in the mentally ill and really led the mental health field, but not because of his own personal training.

Yeah. It was his own conviction or desire really, to reach out and care for those people. Obviously a very remarkable man. Yeah. That’s really fascinating. And you partly answered this question, where did the individuals come from? It sounds like the facility wasn’t just the Peoria area.

Is that true? Do you know? I’m glad you asked. If you think about the area it was built in so people didn’t arrive in cars. They didn’t come in ambulances. It was purposely built on a railroad because the only way to bring people in was by train. So, the tracks are still there.

And if you go down, I’m pretty sure the stairs are there. They were when we went and looked. And so, the staff of the hospital would know there’s a train coming with people and they would come and so they would be coming from anywhere in the United States? In Illinois, okay. Necessarily Central Illinois facility in Illinois. So, this would be a place you could go. Yeah, Dr. Zeller’s intent was to have it open to everybody, but the funding piece controlled that most of the people had to come from a poor farm or a prison. And he wanted to be more open so he would negotiate or find ways to admit people from home who needed to be there.

So, they would be told, I don’t think they knew how many were coming, but that there were people coming, they’d go down to the cars and some of them they just had thrown in straw. And the people were just lying on the straw. Not all of them were mobile. There’s this story, and I can’t quite picture how this worked, but a nurse thought she got a box of clothes and was carrying it, and it started to move and there was a woman buried in these rags of clothes.

I think they nicknamed her Betsy because she didn’t have an identity. But it’s just interesting to picture, you know, it’s intake day or whatever you would call that. Yes. And they would go down and they didn’t get records. They just got people clearly defined as that. But I’d like to just capture one concept. You talked about funding and how that was limited. Okay. When it comes to the care needed, it requires community care. And we know this, right? Yep. As a church, it requires community care. I can care for my children, but when there are complications, you require a larger community to care for them. Yes, exactly.

And so there would have to be winds of change in the way people thought about mental health, if they were going to have a facility in this area that could care for it. Sure. In this model, the state hospital became a residence. Okay. That is very different from today. If somebody is psychotic or is a danger to themselves and they need to go to Peoria to Carle Hospital today, they’re going to spend a few days to a week or two there, but then they’re not going to live there.

I want to make a comment on the model. It was interesting when the Peoria State Hospital was first built, they pictured residents. They would’ve said patients then come there temporarily for a few weeks. That never panned out because they had in their mind that they could take them out of these stressful circumstances and that would be the cure.

Yeah. For the madness that they were experiencing. And of course, it wasn’t because these were people with really severe permanent mental health problems, which they eventually learned to treat in a different way. So, it was not pictured that people would come and spend their lives there. That was a major shift in what they had pictured would happen.

Yeah. So over time there were some big shifts in the United States in terms of healthcare and mental healthcare. And during one of those periods of time, they started a lot of closures of those kinds of facilities. That would correspond, I think, with the introduction of anti-psychotic medications.

Yeah. So that short term treatment could be done. And that was a major reduction that the move was from those state hospitals to more community-based group homes. So, this would’ve been like Timber Ridge? Which still exists, but there were large homes like that. Not so much for mentally ill, but it was for mentally retarded.

But it was a part of that same movement. So, the sixties and seventies maybe was a time period where there was a major move into the community. So not just a place to be but existing in a community where people lived as opposed to separate. Well see you add onto those a place, you know, moving away from danger to purpose, as you mentioned.

Right. Ted, and then this idea of being a part of a community and having that piece. Yeah. So, I think the best word to think about is that the whole system was downsized. Okay. So, the concept is when people are in a severe state, they’re here in a residential facility, but then you go back home or you’re in a more of a group home or you go back to your house or whatever.

And again, for some people it was great. It’s a good thing. It’s a wonderful thing. And I think that one of the challenges is that, you know, you talked about simplicity. What we also want is one size fits all in terms of this is how it’s going to be treated. Yeah. And this is going to be the outcome.

And the fact is that just isn’t how it goes. But what it started to do is to kind of differentiate care. Okay. So that you have care in one place when something is severe care in another place when it’s mild care in another place when it’s moderate care outside of facilities, you know, all these different things, which is different from what we have today, but similar to what we have today.

Sure. And so, you can start to see how that arrived. The way you articulated that the profession is developing. Yes. Maturing and maturing in terms of understanding how to best care for individuals. Yeah. I want to pick up on that because I think it’s a really key point.

One of the things which was different is when you were admitted, it started with an assessment. So, you were seen by a doctor, you were seen by a nurse, you were seen by a physical therapist with uniqueness. Right? That’s what an assessment does. Right? And then that developed a care plan similar to the way we would think today. That wasn’t true in the state hospital. It was just how do we maintain that person and the care plans were intended toward discharge. Which is also a different way of thinking from the past. Discharge was dependent on not just one factor, but it was dependent on an appropriate medication and compliance to the medication, a place to live which then defined a support group also, so families could do that.

They could provide a place to stay if the person stayed on their medication. Except for those people had disorders that weren’t understood. People who were non-compliant. I’ll just use an example, if somebody was paranoid enough, they wouldn’t trust their parents, or the caregivers and they would end up on the streets.

So, the homeless, the homeless mentally ill, or those without support systems, without submitted care, without compliance to medication or who would not and could not trust the system. But there were many. If you look at the numbers and there was a time, there were multiple state hospitals in Illinois with 5,000 people a piece in them.

I think they said Peoria at the highest was 2,800. We’re talking about thousands of people. If you compare that today, the majority of them are in safe, relatively productive places. So, it was a huge advancement. It’s like they’re all out in the street. Yeah. There were those.

So, here’s what I’m interested in, and I want you to check what I’m learning here. I’m interested in the development of therapy. Yeah. Development into medication and those types of things. And I want you to now trace my finger here. What we went from is a paradigm that was fearful, a paradigm that was trying to manage disaster or manage harm.

And then there was a shift to seeing people for who they are. And so, let’s label that love, but that love brings us into facilities to try to care. And then as they did that, it pressed them into the best care, which was unique care in many ways. Therapy coming out of that; brain science coming out of that, I’m guessing. Is that fair enough? All of the above. Yeah. So, yeah, go to that Ted. Either therapy or meds. Yeah. So, you know, where is that?

So, one of the things we’re really tracing here is we’re tracing the history of dealing with what we would refer as severe or persistent mental illness for a lot of it. And so, the concept though is that back in 1900, you’ve got Sigmund Freud also in Vienna, and he’s doing therapy amongst the wealthy.

Okay. Right. So that’s a different kind of a track. But so, early on you’ve got dream analysis and interpretation, you know, if you have a dream about a spider, it means you don’t like your mother. That kind of stuff. All coming out of the Freud stuff.

Okay. The interesting thing is, as goofy as all that sounds, he also picked up on some things, like he was the first to identify denial. Okay. Which today we all go, oh, well, everybody knows it’s denial, common usage. So, that was going on. And that met a certain group of people’s needs or helped or didn’t, whatever. And then we came through a period of time where things really reacted to that. Went very behavioral. Reinforcement schedules and very stark models of reinforcement and even punishment models. You could train it out of them. Yes. And things of that nature, but it was very stark. It was almost like the person was robotic. The mental mind over here was kind of symbolic and deep dark stuff with Freud. And then you get kind of a robotic program. This really? Is that where Pavlov’s dogs come in? Yeah, you bet.

And so, what you had is BF Skinner here. Okay. He was the big behaviorist. And then as it’s coming along, you had the cognitive revolution where people started to go, your thoughts really matter. That was Aaron Beck and Beck’s model started saying like, hey, if you think this way you’re going to have this outcome play out in your behavior. Yeah. And so, the cognitive model occurred. So as that’s kind of going along, one of the things that’s also happening is the awareness that you can help people with depression, with anxiety, with grief. Okay. And so, you start seeing opportunities to help people along the way.

Not only were those schools of therapy emerging, not only these ways of dealing with the persistently mental ill, but you also need to understand the impact of war. And the reason is because so many went through World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam.

So, now we have to deal with another factor, and that’s trauma and addiction. And that’s a whole other vein. It wasn’t until 1980 before post-traumatic stress disorder was put into the disorder manual. And so, that means that there’s all these different rivers and tributaries coming along, but then as they do it develops an awareness that both professionals are starting to understand, but also society’s understanding. And then the other thing is family. It gives families and churches different options as well. What a way to make sense of it. Yeah, for sure.

Well, if you track the church or the spiritual understanding all the way back to the 1800s to today, it’s always been cautious. Because much mental health behavior looks either non-consistent with a believer’s life or looks demonic. And the question of where people would go, even today that piece of what is somebody responsible or not. We don’t need to go into pieces of it. Yeah. But it helps for people to understand how their son, who was in Vietnam is acting this way. Having the context of PTSD means he’s not just a terrible sinner. There’s something else which is occurring.

Yeah. It’s very helpful to have that and because of that, when you see that this son with PTSD who drinks maybe out of control, we’re not going to minimize the fact that he has a drinking problem and that drinking to excess is sinful behavior. But it gives us a context to figure out what we need to do to help.

And that goes back to understanding the individual, how the community helps. And things like that. Okay. So, can you do a quick play on that? Yeah, please. So, this is a bit of a segue, which we won’t do it at this time, into the church, the, the Apostolic Christian Church. And that alcoholism, I think, was the first thing that they began to address and try to understand what it was and see it in a context.

That was the opening that this wasn’t all just sin based, although it often resulted in sin. But that there was more to it and that caught the attention of people who were dealing with alcoholics in church leadership. I think probably the first presentation to the Elder Body was on alcoholism.

Interesting. I think that’s fascinating. I think we’re going to just pull this to a close now. Obviously, we’re not done with this conversation and so we’re going to continue it. You just tipped your hat, Ron, to our church and I think we’re very interested to know how our church has matured through all of this.

But maybe I can just bring some sort of summary. The impression that I’m left with is really the power of love. Isn’t love powerful in terms of bringing us from one understanding of a situation back in the 1700s and prior to where we’re at now with care for people and providing for them is just a stark difference.

And love really carried that journey and seeing people for the beauty God had bestowed upon them as image bearers. And so, it has forced us to really ask hard questions and give over simplicity and to accept complexity. And a lot of good has come out of it in terms of even your profession, right?

In a different way. So, thank you both. We’ll have another round of this. Thanks. And to our listeners, I hope this was helpful at some level in bringing some clarity to mental health. May is mental health awareness. Thanks, each one for being on.