Mental Health & Adult Children

Joshua Wall, 26

Newfoundlanders proved once again how tough and generally good-natured they are, enduring the recent snowstorm which dumped in excess of 75 centimetres -- that's 30 inches -- in just over a a day. The storm was so severe that everything on the Avalon Peninsula and in the city of St. John's was shut down for a week, and the army was brought in to help dig people out. Newfoundlanders are experienced in hunkering down, so we didn't get reports of serious injury or death, with one exception. 

In the height of the storm Joshua Wall decided to leave the shelter of his home and walk through a wooded area to see a friend, despite the protestations of his parents, with whom he lived. Joshua had mental health issues and was not taking his medication so he may have struggled with making sensible decisions, including this one. He called the friend on his way, lost, and he perished in the storm. His family tried to search for him but realized they were endangering themselves and the RCMP found his body several days later.

I hope we can all remember Joshua and his family on this Bell Let's Talk mental health day. I am thinking about all the families in congregations through the years which had to address mental illness with adult children. Attempting to provide loving, practical support to adults who often resist help while in the grips of mental illness is incredibly demanding and often terribly lonely. Sometimes it is dangerous, yet parents are regularly shut out from essential information about the diagnoses for adult children even when they are still living at home. For parents there can be a sense of shame, along with the helplessness, which keeps them from sharing what is going on with even their closest friends.

Today we can pray for the individuals who are trying to live meaningful lives and striving toward mental health and wholeness and independence.  We can also uphold the parents and other family members who are doing their best to be that loving, non-anxious presence for their adult children. God comfort those who have experienced alienation and loss, that they would know they are loved by the Christ who entered into human existence, with both its joys and sorrows.