After Seeing the Soloist - Letter to NAMI - Tyler

Dear NAMI-Tyler,
After seeing "The Soloist" it makes me want to ask the question does having a mental illness make us criminals? Then we should at least be treated with medications in prison. Does being homeless constitute a crime? Then I think society may need to improve it's treatment of us.
If friendship can help a person who is living with mental illness recover then we need to use the people that are living with their mental illnesses to help those suffering the same things. The sick need a friend that can listen not with judgement but with an understanding mind and heart. The sufferers may find that the survivors of mental illness are particularly more able to understand them than someone that hasn't lived through similar situations. While we all have suffered loneliness, maybe not to the extent of sufferers of mental illness, we can in our humanness identify at least a little bit with them and can give sufferers a prayer, a kind thought or word just to say that there is a way out. There is a rainbow after the storm. You can live with a mental illness. You can have hope.