Midsummer Mental Health Movie Nights begin July 8

For four weeks beginning Wednesday, July 8, St. Paul Lutheran Church’s Mental Health Awareness Team will host a midsummer mental health movie series. Come and watch a movie and join in discussion afterwards. Movies begin at 6:30 p.m., popcorn and juice included.

The series is free and open to the public. It will be moderated by Teri Hughes-Paulline, licensed social worker, and Christine Urish, occupational therapist.

The series includes the showing of:

Home of the Brave, July 8: Shortly after receiving the news that they will soon be reunited with their families back in the United States, a unit serving in Iraq is deployed on a humanitarian mission to deliver medical supplies to a remote Iraqi village. Upon arriving in the village, the unit is ambushed and many lives are lost. Now, as the surviving members of the battalion return home and attempt to readjust to civilian life, physical injuries and psychological scars continue to take a heavy emotional toll.

Proof, July 15:Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn, this is the story of the daughter of a brilliant mathematician (recently deceased) with mental illness. She tries to come to grips with her possible inheritance: his struggle with mental health.

Mary and Max, July 22: In this animated film, a friendless Australian girl picks a name out of a Manhattan phone book and writes to him, and includes a chocolate bar. She’s Mary Dinkle, the only child of an alcoholic mother and a distracted father. He’s Max Horowitz, an overweight man with Asperger Syndrome, living alone in New York. He writes back, with chocolate – and a 20-year correspondence is born.

Canvas, July 29: Chris Marino is a 10-year-old boy growing up in a small oceanside community in Florida. Chris’s father John is a construction worker who is struggling to hold the family together under difficult circumstances – his wife and Chris’ mother, Mary, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. While they pursue a variety of treatment options, Mary’s condition continues to slowly deteriorate as she hears phantom sounds, has hallucinations, and becomes increasingly paranoid.