According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness Fact Sheet, one in four adults–approximately 57.7 million Americans–experience a mental health disorder in a given year. One in seventeen lives with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder, and about one in ten children have a serious mental or emotional disorder. Mental illnesses can affect persons of any age, race, religion or income.

As a clinician (Crisis Intervention Specialist with Children’s Mobile Response and Stabilization Services for the NJ Division of Child Behavioral Health Services) and a consumer (I suffer from chronic depression and I’m in recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder), I know that sound clinical treatment of mental illness is critical to healing. But just as important for healing, if not more important, is compassion.

I am able to write this blog today because of the compassionate treatment I received from my wife, my therapist, and my pastor. I know that without their compassion I would be dead. These three people gave me hands-on lessons about the compassionate treatment of mental illness. They taught me that compassionate treatment of mental illness requires a heart that forgives, an ear that listens, and a mouth that speaks encouragement.

Because we all knowlingly or unknowingly encounter people struggling with mental illness, in our families, at work, in school, in the community, at one time or another, I would like to pass on what I have learned to you through my posts over the next several weeks. How we treat someone struggling with a mental illness can make a difference, postively or negatively, in their healing.