Families and friends

Compos Mentis offers something to apprentices and their families that clinical medicine often cannot: reassurance that it is possible to live with the challenges of a serious illness. Doctors, psychiatric nurse practitioners, therapists, and hospital staff are necessary. Conventional treatments make a diagnosis and treat the symptoms, but may not treat the difficulties that remain after the symptoms are under control.

Illness isolates people. Friendships are stressed, and peers develop their lives in directions where an ill person cannot follow. The family may be left as the only refuge. But even within a family, someone may feel isolated.

One of our main aims is to help someone to recover their position as a member of a family, and to become a participant in the Compos Mentis community and a citizen of the entire community—in spite of the illness. Compos Mentis offers an apprentice a daily destination, a structure for their time, companionship, and meaningful work.

Rarely can anyone with an illness overcome the challenge alone. We believe, and we have seen, that family and friends are integral to the process of a person's regaining strength and equilibrium.