Have you ever been told that your voice doesn’t count? Have you ever been treated like you don’t matter? Have you ever felt unloved, unwanted, or unimportant?

I think a lot of us have, for various reasons. Some still receive that message today because of some physical or social characteristic like their race, gender, or sexual orientation. For many of you here at North Church, you’ve been made to feel unheard, unloved, unwanted, and unimportant because of your disability status or mental health diagnosis.

It seems like there is no quicker or more efficient way to dismiss a person’s voice in the public forum than to identify them as mentally ill. A lot of the time, when others find out that you’re a person who lives with mental illness, they very quickly seem to stop the “person” part of that sentence and just focus instead on the “mental illness” part…