For over 700 years the 35,000-person town of Geel, Belgium has had a saying “Half of Geel is crazy, and the rest is half crazy.” Based on the legend of Dymphna, the Catholic patron saint of the mentally ill…who was also the decapitated victim of her mentally ill father, the town created a social responsibility to care for the mental health of all of its citizens.
There’s also a long-standing tradition In Geel of taking in mentally ill strangers to live in your home. The methodology of this care is that nobody is trying to “change” or “fix” people, even if they hallucinate or have violent tendencies. One family recalls taking in a man who saw lions and that rather than denying that the lions were real, the family would protect the man from these lions until they no longer appeared in his vision. Through acceptance and creating bonds with strangers where there is no emotional baggage or negative past experience, even the most extreme cases get better.
I have autism so this idea struck me as quite profound. So often my only real problem is that other people cannot accept myself, my character, or my symptoms because of the unusual nature of how I express myself.
I ran into the following quote from none other than Mr. Rogers:
“Part of the problem with the word disabilities is that it immediately suggests an…