"In reporting on the rise of community centers for mental healthcare, I do not categorically endorse them. Given that mental illness itself is subject to endless definitions and cultural biases, not to mention predatory claims by spurious healers of various sorts and by errors among the best-intended professionals, it would be foolish to believe that a decentralized archipelago of self-professed clinics and treatment enterprises is uniformly safe or even legitimate. My personal belief is that oversight and credentialing — by affiliated hospitals or state agencies — must be a mandatory component of any community system. The lessons of deinstitutionalization are too recent, too destructive, and too clear to ignore.
"That said, the future of care for the mentally ill will depend upon whether Americans can recognize that their psychically troubled brothers and sisters are not a threat to communities, but potential partners with communities for not only their own but the community's regeneration. That the mentally ill need not be distractions from pursuing the good life. Instead, they can be instruments of the good life for others, even as they each enjoy a good life themselves. Their needs, their stories, their presence in our lives, and their capacity for responding to the outstretched hand of a neighbor can immeasurably enrich not only the ill person but the neighbor as well. The mentally ill people in our lives, as they strive to build healthy, well-supported, and rewarding lives for themselves, can show us all how to reconnect with the most primal of human urges, the urge to be of use, disentangling from social striving, consumer obsession, cynicism, boredom, and isolation, and honoring it among the true sources of human happiness.
"To put it another way: the mentally ill in our society are awaiting their chance to heal us, if we can only manage to escape our own anosognosia and admit that we need their help."
