“I want you to know we are with you,” said Greek Catholic Archbishop Borys Gudziak to those suffering from mental illness and their loved ones.
His words concluded a video message announcing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Mental Health Campaign. The campaign, launched in October, seeks to reduce stigma around mental illness and improve access to mental health care through a novena prayer, virtual roundtable discussions, and an advocacy campaign. In a statement introducing the campaign, Archbishop Gudziak and Winona-Rochester’s Bishop Robert Barron wrote, “You are not alone! You are loved. You are welcome in the Catholic church.”
This message of accompaniment and welcome rings hollow for members of the LGBTQ+ community whose mental health has been impacted by homophobic and transphobic church teaching and policies. While the USCCB’s commitment to advocacy for mental health services is laudable, its support of anti-LGBTQ+ policies contributes to the acute need for those services. According to a 2023 survey by The Trevor Project, nearly 1 in 3 LGBTQ+ young people said their mental health was poor most of the time or always due to anti-LGBTQ+ policies and legislation. The support of Catholic leadership for such measures severely compromises the message of love that the USCCB aims to spread through this campaign.
Furthermore, the refusal of Catholic schools and dioceses to adopt gender-affirming policies directly impacts the mental health outcomes of transgender and nonbinary youth.
The 2023 Trevor Project survey shows that those youth who find their schools to be gender-affirming report lower rates of attempting suicide. The bishops could directly contribute to the improvement of mental health among youth by making Catholic schools and parishes inclusive and affirming spaces; instead, they too often push schools in the opposite direction by codifying transphobia into school policies.
Praying for the mental health crisis without working to end homophobia and transphobia is tantamount to treating symptoms without addressing the underlying illness. While not all mental illness—and not even all mental illness among LGBTQ+ individuals—can be blamed on discrimination, stigma exacerbates mental illness by further isolating LGBTQ+ people from social and clinical support. Buried in the appendix of the National Catholic Mental Health Campaign’s Introductory Statement are statistics from the U.S. government’s Centers for Disease Control: “mental illness is particularly acute among high school girls and high school students who identify as ‘LGBQ+’,” “[c]lose to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” and “almost 25% attempted suicide”. The disproportionate prevalence of poor mental health in the LGBTQ+ community should make support for mental health in this population a priority for the USCCB.
The campaign acknowledges how poverty and racism are linked to mental health, highlighting each by making them the focus of a day of the novena. This is a fitting application of the Catholic social teaching principle of a “preferential option for the poor,” which tells us to prioritize those most in need. The USCCB missed the opportunity to include anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in the novena as well, which would have been a fitting acknowledgement of the particular vulnerability of the LGBTQ+ community.
The bishops must deepen their commitment to mental health by recognizing the church’s complicity in contributing to mental distress and stigma among LGBTQ+ people. Only by acknowledging this can they use their power as pastors and leaders to remove stigmas that further marginalize LGBTQ+ members of their flock. To borrow the words of Gudziak and Barron, “stigma contradicts the compassion of Jesus.”
—Ariell Watson Simon (she/her), New Ways Ministry, November 1, 2023