One-day event at cathedral will focus on strengthening parish-based mental, emotional health care
By Bill Brewer
Catholic Charities of East Tennessee is reaching out to Diocese of Knoxville clergy, parish leaders, lay ministers, diocesan school personnel, and faith-based partners to address mental-health concerns that every community in the diocese is facing.
Catholic Charities and the Diocese of Knoxville are leading a one-day summit focused on strengthening parish-based mental and emotional health care that is guided by the heart of the Catholic Church’s mission: accompaniment, compassion, and healing in Christ.
The summit will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, March 20, in the parish hall at the Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. There is no cost to attend. RSVP to Sloane at sschneller@ccetn.org.
“We’re inviting community partners; we’re inviting our parishes; we’re inviting our clergy. We would love to see our priests and our deacons. And we want them to bring their lay ministers,” said Deacon David Duhamel, executive director of Catholic Charities of East Tennessee. “If we have 51 parishes and one Catholic mission, and if we have three or four laypeople per parish, we’re looking at around 250 or 300 people. That would be a great success for us. If nothing else, they will walk away more informed about what’s going on in their communities regarding mental-health services that are out there.”
According to Deacon Duhamel, mental health continues to be a leading issue throughout East Tennessee, and Catholic Charities feels called on to respond by partnering with parishes.
Deacon Duhamel explained that diocesan priest Father Michael Maples served Catholic Charities for years as a licensed psychologist who provided counseling to adult individuals and couples. However, Father Maples is no longer at Catholic Charities. Last year, he accepted the positions of associate director of counseling services and assistant professor at Conception Seminary College in Conception, Mo.
“Since Father Maples’ departure, we’ve been trying to brainstorm what it is we need to do for mental-health services here in East Tennessee. Our chief operating officer, Paul Ritter, and I talked to different groups and community partners in the area to find out what services are out there. There are the Mental Health Association of East Tennessee, the Metro Drug Coalition, and counselors,” Deacon Duhamel said.
“What we’ve come to recognize is, as good of a program as what we had with Father Maples, we probably needed something different and something broader,” he added. “We can’t afford to have five or six therapists on staff, and the reality is we wouldn’t be able to staff a clinic like that. So, we’ve started thinking about what the needs are out there.”
Deacon Duhamel said Catholic Charities’ study of the issue found that everyone struggling with a mental-health issue doesn’t necessarily need a clinical therapist.
He said some individuals may just need someone to talk to, or they may need emotional support. Some may need to be part of a group of peers in grief support.
Catholic Charities is turning to parishes in the diocese for assistance in meeting the challenge where it exists: in communities throughout East Tennessee. Deacon Duhamel believes each parish has staff or volunteers who want to help their neighbors.
“The problem is they may not have the training; they may not have the knowledge; they may not understand what early-childhood trauma looks like,” he said.
The deacon, who serves at St. Mary Parish in Oak Ridge, has personally experienced the uncertainty of what to do in certain situations. He described assisting the homeless as part of CCETN’s Bridge Ministry and encountering people in mental- or emotional-health crises.
“I started wondering how I can help this person. I don’t feel properly trained to help this person, so what do I have to do to be in that position. I was observing some of our other volunteers. We would have situations where a client was in line for food and would have a disagreement with another person. Their tempers were short-fused. They are suffering from real trauma. They may have PTSD from being on the streets,” he recalled.
“What I saw was, and this is no fault of anyone, but we tend to withdraw when we see conflict. People were too nervous to talk to some of these clients. When I came back to the office and shared with my social workers what I had seen, they said that is so normal for laypeople who aren’t familiar with those situations,” Deacon Duhamel said. “The social workers said the way they overcome that is through training.”
He noted that those unprepared encounters are the foundation of what Catholic Charities volunteers and staff face with people in mental-health crises.
“That’s the baseline; that’s our foundation of what we’re looking to do in providing training on how you talk to people in crisis. How do you talk to people who are in conflict, who are agitated and upset, in a way that you can disarm them and help them and realize you may not be able to solve their problem, but maybe you can diffuse the situation and look at what the real problem is,” Deacon Duhamel said.
He described another level of mental-health assistance where a teen in a youth group reaches out for assistance with a problem. This child may not have a strong support system at home. The key is to be responsive to the teen in a responsible way, such as speaking to them one-on-one in a private but visible way with proper precautions.
“It’s just being able to know how to talk to someone and provide the emotional support someone may need. They may not necessarily be in crisis, but maybe they just need to be heard, to be listened to. They may feel they’re not being seen. That’s part of it,” he said.
Deacon Duhamel believes it’s vital for parishes to be able to provide some level of service at each level of mental-health need. He noted that some diocesan parishes are affiliated with Stephen Ministries, which offers training and resources in Christ-centered care for people experiencing difficulties in life.
“Stephen Ministries is really focused on one-on-one counseling. We are certainly going to include them, but we also are partnering with the International Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministries, and they have training programs,” Deacon Duhamel said.
He pointed out that the IACMHM executive director will be a speaker at the March 20 mental-health summit.
“We’re going to talk about what these different levels within the ‘hierarchy of care’ look like. Where do we feel like our Catholic parishes and lay ministers are and what level of support and care can we provide,” he said.
There will be discussions on grief support, divorce support, and other support-group networks. And there will be training on assessments and being able to refer cases that are beyond the ability of clergy, parishes, and lay ministers to handle.
“In the Catholic Church, I think we’ve expected our pastors and our parish priests to do a lot of that counseling. As a deacon, I went through training in pastoral care, but I never felt like I was equipped to do pastoral care the way it needed to be done. So, another passion of mine is how can I help our parishes be more than what they are today and equip them and walk with them,” Deacon Duhamel said. “Each parish is going to have to figure out what they want from this mental-health summit.”
He emphasized that another goal of the summit is to listen to what the parishes say they want to be. Do they want to provide group support sessions? Do they want only to provide one-on-one care? Do they want to have some entry-level training?
As an example, the deacon said a parish may want its volunteers who work in the food pantry who encounter clients in mental-health crises to be more equipped to assist.
Social-service organizations like Catholic Charities of East Tennessee often find themselves on the front lines of crises, whether it’s a weather-related disaster, a sudden rise in demand for necessities like food such as with the recent federal interruption in SNAP benefits, or crisis pregnancies.
However, Deacon Duhamel doesn’t believe Catholic Charities has risen to the level of being a front-line mental-health response agency.
“We’re not on any line right now. We’re just trying to figure out where the line is and what is it that we can do to make a difference,” he said.
And he emphasized that Catholic Charities is unable to go it alone.
“We’re not the only ones that will need to provide the support and structure within the Catholic community. The parishes have a vital role to play. We just don’t have the money or the manpower.”
In some ways, responding to the need for mental-health care is very similar to Catholic Charities’ other programs, he noted.
“I’m just trying to see how we can become a partner and a resource to our parishes to be a force multiplier in this space where if we’re not providing the services, can we enable others within our Catholic communities to provide that service,” Deacon Duhamel said.
He pointed out that Catholic Charities has no locations in communities such as Rogersville, Jamestown, or Soddy-Daisy.
“Well, if we can’t be there, what can we do? Maybe we can provide training for people who already are members of those communities, who know those communities and know the needs there,” he said.
Deacon Duhamel pointed out that governments formerly assumed the role of providing mental-health care in state-run hospitals, and he reminded that what is now Lakeshore Park in Knoxville used to be a hospital for those needing such care. Tennessee, like other states, stopped operating those facilities decades ago.
“There was a tremendous amount of deinstitutionalization that happened in the 1980s and ’90s across America. The patients didn’t go away. They just closed down the facilities. Part of the problems that we are now seeing out on our streets are probably a result of that,” he said. “I’m not an expert, and I couldn’t qualify that, but it doesn’t take much to add one plus one. So, what do we need to do?”
There isn’t an easy answer to the question, according to the deacon.
“We need to look at the spectrum of capabilities. And if we can get the Catholic community to get involved, then hopefully we can make a difference. Personally, I’m driven by the fact there is such a large number of teen suicides. It’s heartbreaking. My daughter lost a good friend of hers who she was in class with. That shouldn’t be, but we’ve seen this,” Deacon Duhamel shared. “We, as people of faith, have to figure out that if we can’t fix the problem are there other things we can do. Can we provide other resources that can at least stop someone from considering suicide?”
He noted that the tragedy of suicide goes beyond teens, pointing out that the incidences occur within the community of veterans.
And another factor of the mental-health crisis is homeless individuals getting caught out in extremely cold weather because they will not go into warming shelters.
Another aspect to mental and emotional health-care needs is what Catholic Charities sees in its other social-service ministries. Deacon Duhamel noted that young women dealing with crisis pregnancies may need counseling or just someone to talk to; women who have had an abortion may need someone to talk to; and CCETN immigration services is working with many individuals and families now under tremendous stress.
“Unfortunately, when it’s acute like this, that isn’t the time to try and fix the problems. We have to figure out ways to create structure in our parishes where this is an ongoing capability. This isn’t going to be Catholic Charities telling parishes what they should be doing. It’s going to be each parish determining what is appropriate for it. Then, when it needs resources, we hope Catholic Charities can be that resource,” he said.
Deacon Duhamel is hopeful that parishes find the summit helpful in addressing some of the challenges they are facing.
“My hope is that coming out of the summit, we will have provided knowledge and training to people and we will have given them a clear understanding of what the hierarchy of care might look like for them in their communities,” he said.
An immediate outgrowth of this initiative for Catholic Charities will be retaining a licensed counselor to lead Catholic Charities’ mental health-care services.
“We are taking steps to hire a licensed counselor who will be heading up this effort. We are very excited about Casey Merrill coming on board to help us formulate what this program is going to look like long-term. She will be a contractor to our staff focused on developing this program,” Deacon Duhamel said.
Deacon Duhamel is looking forward to working with parishes, clergy, and laypeople in addressing mental-health challenges in East Tennessee.
“We’re not going to solve the problems. But we’re certainly going to look to see what we can do to mitigate some of the challenges that are out there,” he said. “I certainly don’t believe this summit will be a waste of their time. Whether or not the parishes are prepared and want to do something more in depth, that is up to them. But if they want to turn to us to help them with that decision-making process with resources and training they might need, then we can certainly look to partner with them and talk to them about that.”