We need to see people with mental illness as a gift, rather than a problem.
Pope Leo’s October 2026 prayer for mental health ministry within the Catholic Church coincides with World Mental Health Day (10 October). Both events stress the need of the wider community to address mental illness which has affected increasing numbers of people in Australia. The theme of the World Day is ‘Together we thrive’.
Pope Leo’s prayer also emphasises the importance of the community. He asks that a specific mental health ministry be established within the whole Church to meet the challenge facing people suffering from mental illness. This shared emphasis on community reflects the reality of mental illness and the need for a communal response to it. Mental Illness isolates people and makes it different for them to maintain relationships. Their withdrawal and the symptoms of the many varieties of mental illness often alienate and build fear in others who then avoid or criticise them.
OVERCOME STIGMA
That is why Pope Leo insists that we must overcome the stigma of mental illness. Stigma does not affect only people who suffer from mental illness. It also entraps their families, friends and the wider society. It leads to withdrawal from friends, family, social life and work. They, too, may feel defeated and withdraw from people at a time when they need most support. Stigma describes the retreat of people and communities into shame and silence.
Because mental illness affects people’s lives so deeply and is so mysterious, others can fear and flee from it. They avoid meeting friends who suffer from it at a time when they lack the energy and the words to describe what they are suffering. Silence can become deadly as people feel blamed, ashamed and excluded.
Silence does not affect only personal relationships. It can also poison public attitudes to mental illness. People associate it with fear-laden images of people who are not like us, who behave strangely, are violent and unpredictable, and are not persons but alien powers. They are seen as people who need to be protected from, not given protection.
PREJUDICE
This prejudice perhaps helps to explain the familiar cycle of public neglect of the needs of people who are mentally ill, of outrage at the discovery that they are neglected, of public inquiries, and of continued neglect by governments and by people more generally.
The fear and avoidance of people who are mentally ill makes them invisible and forces them to remain so. As a result, governments, affected by the same stigma, fail to see and appreciate their needs and fail to provide adequately for their needs. Stigma feeds discrimination.
Pope Leo’s prayer acknowledges the spreading effects of stigma on people who suffer from mental illness, their friends, and the wider society. That stigma is also found among Catholics. For that reason, ministry to people who are mentally ill must overcome stigma within the Church as well as accompanying the people who are its victims.
In Pope Leo’s vision our Church is a healing community in which all need to be involved in the response to mental illness. We all need to change from seeing people with mental illness as a problem to see them as a gift.
Ministry to the mentally ill invites us both to treasure the people who are called to live so courageously with it, and to invite their fellow Catholics to visit them in their need, engage them in conversation, invite into nurturing communities, and support them in their cry for respect, and by their example encourage others to join them in their ministry.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ is an editorial consultant at Jesuit Communications
