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‘It’s important to get to the parish level with people who have a lay ministry way.’ – Dick Collyer
February 28, 2019
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Mental health care is on track to become a pastoral priority in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
After winning a grant from the University of San Diego, the archdiocese has hired Dick Collyer, a former businessman, to organize a network of mental health resources in local parishes modeled on an initiative in Diocese of San Diego.
Four years ago, the San Diego diocese launched a mental health ministry to equip as parishes as mental health resources and help remove the stigma around mental illness. San Diego’s ministry teams do not assume professional counseling or therapeutic roles, but offer prayer and support for parishioners with mental illness. Ministry teams are also educated on how to talk appropriately to people with mental illness. No services are provided at parishes: instead, ministry teams connect Catholics to local professional resources to help treat their mental illness.
In August 2018, the University of San Diego announced grants for dioceses to establish their own mental health ministry based on San Diego’s model. In California, San Francisco, San Jose and Orange dioceses won grants to establish ministries, along with two others nationally.
Collyer, who will lead the archdiocese’s mental health program for the next two years, has experience in both corporate and ministerial work. After taking an early retirement from Chevron Corp., Collyer became involved in ministry in the Oakland diocese, where he lives. Shortly after graduating from Oakland’s St. Francis de Sales School for Pastoral Ministry, he worked on diocesan projects to celebrate the Year of Mercy in 2016, and served as an interim director of faith formation and evangelization in Oakland. Collyer and his wife also helped open a sober living home in Contra Costa County.
Collyer also has a personal passion for helping people who are suffering with mental illness. “I’ve had a lot of situations in my family, addiction, troubles, grief – a little bit of everything,” he told Catholic San Francisco. “When this position came up, it was really something I could sink my teeth into.”
Ed Hopfner, the archdiocesan director of the marriage and family life office who hired Collyer, said “part of what parishes are supposed to do is deal with the needs of parishioners. I think this is a great thing for the church in the Bay Area, and I’m just excited about the possibilities.”
The archdiocese has a vision of what it wants to achieve with the San Diego model, where lay teams of between eight and 10 people wil help pastors by identifying local mental health resources for parishioners. In addition, the Bay Area has significant mental health resources available for people to take advantage of. Much of the work will also involve building connections between currently existing ministries that address mental health.
“To have one person dedicated to building these connections is going to be great,” Hopfner said.
Collyer said his immediate challenge will be persuading parishes to get involved in the program.
“Not everyone understands this is a huge issue in our society, but when you ask, everyone has experience of this,” Collyer said. “We have to reduce the stigma, so it’s important to get to the parish level with people who have a lay ministry way about them,” he added.
California’s Catholic bishops last year released “Hope and Healing,” a pastoral letter urging Catholics to offer accompaniment and solidarity to those experiencing mental illness. The bishops urged people to end the social stigma around mental illness, and said it was not “a moral failure nor a character defect” nor a “sign of insufficient faith or weakness of will.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, in 2016 about 45 million adults in the United States had a mental illness, and only 19 million received any treatment for their mental illness.