For This Boston Doctor, Caring For Local Women Comes Full Circle

Dr. Eillen Reilly, a woman with a huge heart, and a passionate community ethic to match, has now come full circle. This is because this psychiatrist has returned to serving the needs of women at the welcoming Boston day shelter, Women’s Lunch Place (WLP). This is a hub that she set up as a twenty-something over forty years ago, as WBUR News, Boston’s NPR, reports.

Dr. Eileen Reilly and the WLP Team Are Remarkable Human Beings

Back in 1981. Reilly was just 26, and working part-time at a medical clinic in a crowded Boston homeless shelter which closed its doors during the day. She noticed women suffering with mental illness standing across the street waiting all day for it to reopen, “talking to their voices.”

Reilly and a colleague, Jane Alexander, resolved to create a safe space for women to come to and be fed during the day. With help and financial support from their sisters and friends, the caring pair appealed to churches for use of their basements, and the local Church of the Covenant agreed to be the location for WLP.

From the get-go, the team wanted the guest experience to be dignified, so real crockery, silverware and tablecloths, not disposable items greeted the first visitors in the early 1980s. Demand soon rose substantially, as news of the center’s excellent food spread. From serving lunch a few times a week initially, over the next few years, the day shelter progressed to serving breakfast and lunch every weekday.

In 1986, Reilly left for medical school, later specialising in psychiatry in her quest to help people heal from their psychological wounds. As Reilly herself tells WBUR News, “I feel that I want to just help people not to have to suffer and to make them have peace.”

Nowadays, WLP and its caring staff corps offer more than just food and warm hospitality to over 2,200 women each year. It functions as an advocacy center, and provides housing and job placement help, music and art programs, shower and laundry facilities, medical assistance, and mental health support, as we detail below.

Equipped to support guests who fall through the cracks of social welfare and healthcare systems, this center prioritizes trust, resilience and hope, and is open six days a week.

What’s more, WLP relies on the hard work and dedication of local volunteers who contribute to every aspect of WLP’s programs, as the following post shows:

Daylen Ala, a housing advocate with the center, tells The Huntington News that the first thing she tries to establish is a safe space and trust between her clients. “We’re so goal-oriented that sometimes I forget that people get so overwhelmed that they can’t even focus on their goals,” she reveals.

The strapline on its website, “Dignity is Everything” shows that WLP has not strayed from Reilly’s original respectful vision, even as it has grown.

Here’s what Reilly has to say about WLP today: “I’m always amazed that the spirit is the same spirit we had in 1982… . The sense that Women’s Lunch Place is all about hospitality, about kindness, and I think even about love.”

Grasping That Women Living With Housing Insecurity Face Mental Health Challenges

As community hub, Boston Cares, details, WLP strives to be more than a safe space covering basic and immediate needs for self-identified women grappling with homelessness or poverty.  It works to deliver critical support services to help clients achieve more stability and self-sufficiency.

One key service is mental health support. A 2020 study in scientific journal, BMC Public Health, found that women experiencing homelessness have greater mental health concerns than their male counterparts, and so stand to benefit from access to gender-specific and trauma-informed services.

In recent years, senior staff at WLP have observed that more women were coming to the shelter with serious mental health challenges, including trauma. The decision was taken to offer full-time mental health care, with a psychiatric nurse practitioner and clinical social worker joining the staff.

Henry Morris, who works on communications for the shelter, shares with The Huntingdon News that guests contend with such a wide variety of moderate to severe mental health issues and addictions, that WLP leaders must compassionately ensure that guests are never more than an arm’s length away from really good, free, and high-quality mental health support.

In mid 2023, Reilly returned to the day shelter as a psychiatrist. She also cares for unhoused people at a state-run clinic, and with Boston Health Care for the Homeless’s street outreach team.

Once believing that homelessness would be eradicated, Reilly is rewarded by the realization that some of the women she helps get healthier will be able to get off the streets and into permanent housing.

In her new role at Women’s Lunch Place,  Reilly helps the center’s therapist, Liane O’Reilly, address difficult cases, such as when a woman needs psychiatric medication or hospitalization, or conversely, when clinicians wish to keep a client out of hospital.

This therapist salutes the founder’s deep understanding of and empathy for the shelter’s population “I love to talk, get her opinion on cases, kind of get her perspective, since she just knows our population so well and she really just sees them with the most strengths and the most empathy… .  I think that can be missing sometimes with more traditional forms of psychiatry,” she says.

This view is supported by the shelter’s CEO, Jennifer Hanlon Wigon, who shares that “When I’m with Eileen [Reilly], my heart rate goes down. Like, she just has that incredible calming presence.

Shelter guest, Erica Harris, struggling with a raised rent after years of homelessness, praises the mental health support she receives from Reilly and the rest of the team as very welcome: “I feel happy about it, because I need all the help that I can get,” she explains.