Dan Gerlach, financial advisor for Governor Mike Easley, has stated, regarding accusations that Governor Easley has done very little to address the problems within the mental health system: “Gov. Mike Easley and his administration have been working to make sure it gets fixed.”

Money doesn’t fix everything and money won’t buy you love but money will buy professionals’ time (no more silly $800,000 consultant reports please) which could have been used to create a superior system that would not implode—-which is where we are now.

We’ll be lucky not to have a Republican governor. The smell of blood is in the air and the Democrats created it themselves.

Instead, mental health professionals have been excluded every step of the way and have been assigned the role of robber barons by Hooker Odom, Benton’s predecessor, who sure high-tailed it out of town—-since she had to pay attention to her job up in NYC, where she had been moonlighting for a few years (during the time she was Secretary of NC DHHS).

So, non mental health professionals, seasoned administrator types at NC DHHS, have created messes like the most recent Community Support Services outline of what the ‘high school graduates’ Associate Professional Paraprofessionals are supposed to do which reads like a format for psychologist doctoral training. And not a word out of NC Psychological Association.

NC DHHS has attempted to get doctoral level services for a third or less of the price, pinning the problems on the Endorsed Provider companies when NC DHHS stupidly created a list of Service Definitions, changing them frequently so as to keep everyone from doing their work, turning around and gigging the Endorsed Provider companies when they didn’t do the doctoral level work at the high school level reimbursement rate.

Too little, too late, governor. You should not have robbed the kitty when mental health reform was being created so that the system could have been more carefully laid out—-and we would not have the problems we are experiencing—-everyone stupidly accusing every other someone of deficiencies. And Dr. Janowski, psychiatrist and in the UNC Medical School, does not have the on ground experience of psychologists or mental health workers who have been out in the community seeing the clients, realizing what the difficulties are.

Keep it up. You’ll dig your hole deeper. And elections right around the corner.

Lest we forget: in 2001, the NC State Legislature appropriated $47 + million to the Mental Health Trust Fund for the infrastructure development. Soon after that (and you might know about this, Mr. Gerlach, as you are the governor’s financial advisor or so it seems) the Governor raided this ‘trust’ fund as he decided that other parts of the budget needed more money.

And so, a question to Mr. Gerlach: was this money placed back into that Trust Fund and/or what happened to it?