The Power of Words
Simple sign taped to the door of the reception office at Domio Community Mental Health Center.
In 2017, I had the privilege to travel to Trieste Italy with a delegation of professionals involved in mental health services and policy in Los Angeles. I blogged about that trip here.
During the week we spent in Trieste, attending an international conference and touring their remarkable system of community care for their residents who experience mental illness, we were struck by the different words used by our new Italian friends to describe their work. Within a few weeks upon our return to Los Angeles, while our experience was still top-of-mind, we shared our impressions with a diverse group of Angelinos who gathered at the LA County Department of Mental Health headquarters on Vermont Avenue. That group report from December 11, 2017 is available via You Tube.
During that report, we presented a word cloud that captured the words we heard over and over in our conversations with the psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, peers and others who worked in their system.
Language is powerful. Perhaps one clue to changing the mindset of how we see people with mental illness in America -- their potential, their aspirations, their worth as human beings -- is to change the words we use.
In Italy, we were told over and over again that users of their system were shown hospitality. That people deserve to wake up on the morning with a senseof purpose to their day. That the system should empower people to make decisions about their life. We learned about the importance of community and social networks in recovery.
What was also interesting was a discussion about the rights of citizenship. There was an entire panel focused upon the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a topic for a future blog. Citizenship in this context does not carry the same meaning (or baggage) as it does in our current American context.
That said, the word that jumped out at me most often was the Italian word for hospitality: accoglienza. (Aah-kohl-YEN-za) It doesn't suggest the same connotation we attach to that word in American English. In the reception area for the Domio Community Mental Health Center we recently toured when I returned to Trieste in December 2018, this sign was taped to the door. What did "reception" look like in this center? It was hard to distinguish the difference between the users and the workers. People walked in off the street and were greeted warmly. They might hang out and talk a few minutes to the person at the desk and then wander off to see someone else in the center. There were no security guards. No imposing bag checks. No waiting room. No "us" and "them." It was fluid space. Accoglienza space.
Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest, in his book, Reaching Out, describes the journey from hostility to hospitality. In that book he says:
“Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.”
As I read more about his description, I came to the realization that this can be a guiding principle for how we think about hospitality in our community when accommodating those who suffer from mental illness. He challenges his readers to consider "a new dimension to our understanding of a healing relationship and the formation of a re-creative community in a world so visibly suffering from alienation and estrangement."
As I read Nouwen, and considered the ways in which I saw accoglienza displayed in Trieste, I knew this would be the title of my blog. I will be the first to say that I do not do this well. But, I know it when I see it, and I want to get better at this, and I hope you will join me on this journey.
Words that are frequently used by those who work and participate in the mental health system in Trieste.