Seeing ourselves in the other, and what it teaches us about ourselves.
Story by Rev. George Doebler | Photography by Nathan Sparks
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (July/August 2026)
As we age, we tend to reflect on what we have experienced and what we have learned. When we do, inevitably there are a few of these experiences that stick out in our minds. One of these, for me, was early in my career when I found myself in a residence program at the second largest mental hospital in the U.S., St. Elizabeth in Washington, D.C., with over 12,000 patients (yes, 3 zeroes).
That core memory for me is a statement that the superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Winfred Overholser, made the first week I was there: “The mentally ill are just like us – only more so.” Little did I know in June of 1965 that I would spend the next twenty years of my life in federal and state mental hospitals as a clinically trained chaplain. The persons I met there, these people we call “mentally ill”, became, and still are, my teachers about the struggles of this thing we call daily life.
Moving from the mental hospital to the University of Tennessee Medical Center was a curious shift. In 1985, Dr. Albert Biggs, the then-medical director of U.T. Medical Center, asked if I would come and begin a Pastoral Care/Chaplaincy program. I told him then, “My work, my training, is for the mentally troubled.” His response: “What makes you think there are not those who come to the Medical Center that are struggling with mental issues?”
He asked if I would come with him and sit in the emergency room waiting area. I did – and to my surprise (naïve as I was), I saw people with more acute mental struggles than I saw even at places like Lakeshore Mental Hospital.
This began a 39-year adventure at the Medical Center. What began as a single position is now a Department of Pastoral Care of five staff, five resident chaplains and five intern chaplains Through it all, the statement that Dr. Overholser made in 1965 never left me. “The mentally ill are just like us – only more so.” Every day I saw that same lesson being taught to the students in Pastoral Care, mostly clergy: that when someone is “sick”, that just makes them even more like us.
The time in which we live, with all of its technology and knowledge, can easily lead us to forget that what is happening around us in the world is “just like us”. I tend to think that what is happening somewhere else is not affecting me. It’s not a part of me. But I am coming to realize how much what happens to others does affect me. It is here the dilemma emerges. How do I find my role, my place, in this thing we call life?
Not an easy task! It appears that anxiety and fear can become so pervasive that I can become sidetracked, angry even, that there seems to be no answer to what I feel. Yet if I stay in touch with others, both those I love deeply and those who are “just passing by” each day, it helps me find meaning in all the noise and chaos that seems to inundate us in this time of technology and unfettered data.
This can have its own problems, of course. I sometimes find myself looking to others to “fix” the anxiety and fear for me, and I become disappointed when those “fixers” do not fix it (whatever it is). Yet within myself I know the only fixer for my own life and its anxieties is myself. That is our struggle, I think. Again, not an easy task, and one that takes time – a lifetime.
The history of humankind is a history of trying to find peace, yet we end up with the opposite. There is something about being human that brings about tumult, not only in culture, but in our families, our marriages, and our communities. Finding peace – with ourselves, our family, our community, our neighbors – is an unending process. It is not something that can be fixed in a few days. It is somehow learning to know that what I consider to be sick may be “just like me – only more so.” ◆
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