Gardening keeps Milton Sewell grounded. The 56-year-old North Park resident embraced the isolation brought on by the pandemic by leaning on his hobby. Throughout the spring and summer, he’d scout backyards belonging to friends and church members, converting bare, patchy spots into small fruit and vegetable gardens.
“I was always in constant fear that I would come out of remission,” he recalled. Sewell talked about being physically exhausted and mentally drained, until he reached a breaking point: “I just cannot go back to another hospital. I just can’t do it anymore. I just feel like I don’t want to live anymore.”
Sewell began going to therapy twice a week. His therapist spoke to him like a friend, and for the first time in a long time he felt hopeful. “They just have a way of leading me down the path,” he said. “They don’t go directly and tell me what to do or think, but they do have a way of asking certain probing, therapeutic questions to get me to see what’s behind any statement, ideology, or way of being that I have that I’m not seeing.”
The fight to sustain resources, which have already been cut to their “bare bones,” isn’t new, said Roderick Wilson, executive director of the Bronzeville-based Lugenia Burns Hope Center. A new mental health clinic in Bronzeville comes when residents were on the verge of losing another resource: In February, Mercy Hospital, one of Chicago’s oldest hospitals, filed for bankruptcy, and was briefly slated to close by the end of May.
“I had to live with that. Any time the thoughts would come to my head, I would shake my head and try to shake them out—I still do that today,” he said. Unsure of where to turn for help, Sewell kept to himself. Twelve-step programs led him to learn about mental health, but even then, he didn’t know how to start therapy and thought treatment programs were exclusive to hospitals.
Cuzan received cancer treatment at the University of Chicago Medical Center and was referred to therapy at Friend Health on South Cottage Grove Avenue in Hyde Park, a six-minute drive from the King Center. While he found talk therapy helpful, because of scheduling conflicts and a high turnover, he had three different therapists at Friend Health.
