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- Mental Health: A Community Challenge
The health and happiness of children is never a gift but the result of the actions of an entire community. Jorge Barudy
With these words of Jorge Barudy, Dr. Magdalena García Trovero, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, concluded her speech on the evening of March 26 at the Waldensian church in Montevideo, Uruguay. These words of Jorge Barudy remained projected on the screen while conversation continued in small informal groups, accompanied by cookies and soft drinks.
My curiosity led me to ask Google who Jorge Barudy is. Google told me that Jorge is a Chilean neuropsychiatrist, child psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and family therapist. I was impressed by the volume, importance, and international recognition of his work, which focuses on child development, especially in situations of violence. “Consultant and supervisor of child abuse prevention and treatment programs in Latin America, Belgium, France, and Spain; supervisor and trainer of professional teams working in this area. Professor at Spanish, European, and American universities in postgraduate courses related to the prevention and treatment of the effects of violence on children, women, families, and the whole community,” says an excerpt from his curriculum. His list of publications is as extensive as my ignorance. I can only imagine how much work he had to do to arrive at such a simple formulation, to discover such a fundamental and ancient wisdom!
Dr. García Trovero recalled another of Barudy’s key phrases, an African proverb whose origin is lost to time, which says: “It takes a tribe to raise a child.”
The Community, The Place We Start From
Jorge Barudy’s pregnant sentence and the timeless African proverb have one truth in common: Community is important.
The importance of community was emphasized in one way or another in the remarks of each of the four panelists that night.
The seminar, titled Mental Health, Adolescents and Youth: A Community Commitment, was coordinated by the Evangelical Waldensian Church in Montevideo and the Evangelical Hospital. We hope it will be the first of many such events. The fact that mental health in our children and young people is such a galvanizing issue was demonstrated not only by the large number of people who were present that evening but also by the concerns they raised, the questions they asked, and the suggestions they made. There were young people and those who work with youth, a diversity we valued because, as Dr. García Trovero says, “Mental health is not the monopoly of adolescents and youth but a matter of concern for everyone.”
In the presentation that opened the event, Víctor Geymonat, a licensed psychologist and Gestalt therapist, emphasized the concept of integral health and the concomitant need to overcome a mechanistic view that separates body and mind as if they were not each part of a whole. “It is necessary,” Victor Geymonat said, “to have a holistic approach that overcomes the false understanding that mind and body are separate entities.” Moreover, a holistic approach to integral health recognizes that one must consider not only an individual person, but also the social and physical environment, the broader culture, and the person’s relationships. “Culture produces pathologies, it produces people who are permanently dissatisfied,” said Victor Geymonat. So, in sum, we understand that culture can also generate health, and generating health is the great community challenge.
“Creating a ‘pause’ is also a community contribution,” said Silvana Fontoura as she began her presentation. Silvana Fontoura is also a licensed psychologist with a specialization in crisis intervention, a subject to which she specifically referred. “We live ‘accelerated’ lives,” she said, “a perspective which we all can intuitively understand and share. The question perhaps should be, accelerated for what and for where? Creating pauses is necessary.”
“How can we help?” someone asked after the presentations were finished. How is it possible to help someone in a crisis situation? They asked, almost certainly with a particular situation and person in mind.
“Listening to the person in the crisis situation, believing in the intention to be truthful of the person in the crisis situation, and accompanying them until the crisis is resolved” was the unanimous response from the panel. How can I help myself if I am the one in crisis? was another immediate question to which Ana Mansilla, also a licensed psychologist who had addressed the issue of suicide, replied: “Talk, talk a lot, find someone to talk to.”
The four presenters were health professionals, and more specifically, they deal with mental health. The four of them agreed that the answer to the problems we face in this field demands more than just an increase in the number of professionals. But increasing the number of mental health professionals is not the magic solution; what is required is community, human closeness, loving relationships, giving people a reason to feel loved, and giving people the idea that they are, in fact, doing something for someone.
“Meet up, go out to have yerba mate tea, talk about silly things,” was some of the advice for young people. The four presenters emphasized the need for face-to-face, in-person encounters, with fresh air between us, with bodies present—encounters that can never be replaced by communication mediated by the internet. Sometimes it seems so basic that I can hardly believe it. The outlook can appear quite bleak, and we can get the sense that what might give us health is what we lack or what we don’t have time for. In these dark places, we are called to shine a small light. The image of little lights marking paths and yellow lights warning of dangers was recurrent in the presentations. The challenge to us is to see them and show them to others.
“Unfortunately, we are always learning that we have to give up something of ourselves to be accepted,” said Víctor Geymonat. He said further that a community that generates trust is a space that allows us to be ourselves without the need for such renunciations of self that disfigure us.
And the Community of Faith
That night we talked about community and, in particular, the community of faith. The church is a community; there are other types of community, and each has its own particularities. The community of the church is defined by its faith in God as its center and reason for being. Does the church have something to offer that is based on its specific identity? The question was posed, and the answer is clear: Yes. As a community shaped by its conviction that human beings were created in the image and likeness of God, the church is a community called not to exclude. It is a community called to practice love of neighbor, which is part of the first and greatest commandment. The church is a community for which certain gestures of belonging, such as the Holy Supper, are significant.
Finally, the church is a community called to serve. Becoming that serving community is its great challenge. In reality, the church as a community is always an imperfect stage and, therefore, always called to improvement. The path is long. It did not begin with our seminar on March 26, and it will continue after we are gone. Our challenge today is to walk in that path.
This report was written by the Waldensian pastor and writer Oscar Geymonat and appeared first in Este periódico Valdense.
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