By David Cornwell
Rodney Dangerfield gained fame with the trademark line, “I get no respect.†Compared to the respect mental illness gets, though, he was as revered as Mom, baseball and apple pie.
“D’ja hear about the man who waited nine days to get into Broughton?†No joke. The average wait for a bed in a state psychiatric hospital is 2.7 days.
“How many schizophrenic centenarians does it take to screw in a light bulb?†Chances are there aren’t any. Life expectancy for the 3 to 6 percent of the population with severe mental illness is 25 years less than average.
It’s no joke that people are dying in the state’s adult care homes because more than 6,000 individuals with severe mental illness are being warehoused there. Our state’s prisons hold six times as many people with severe mental illness as state psychiatric hospitals. No joke. Suicide, not homicide, is now the leading cause of violent death. It’s no joke that parents with children in crisis have had to wait up to eight days for adequate treatment. There’s nothing funny about our state’s imploding mental health system.
It is a joke, a sick one (pun intended), that construction has begun on a replacement hospital in Goldsboro and will begin at Broughton in Morganton within the year. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on new facilities when deinstitutionalization and community treatment is the goal. Millions spent on bricks and mortar while budgets for services are cut to the bone. Why? Because it is part of an outdated plan. And needs be damned if they are not part of the plan.
Here’s a plan: Let’s build more jails and more hospitals. Without funding for services, they will be needed.
While not a joke, mental health advocates must appreciate the irony of the coverage Breast Cancer Awareness Month generated throughout the state in October. Just one example was a shocking pink background run on the Asheville Citizen-Times website that month and a full-page photo front on its Oct. 8 edition showing hundreds turning out to form a human pink ribbon. The irony was that it was also Mental Illness Awareness Week and the same week the World Health Organization reported that up to 85 percent of those with mental health diagnoses in developing countries don’t have access to any form of mental health treatment. Low- and middle-income countries have only one child psychiatrist for every 1-4 million people.
More power to those who have made breast cancer awareness their cause, and kudos to the Citizen- Times for its part. My heart is certainly with those who have to face it. But what is it about one illness that can garner such public support while mental illness seemingly has to be in your face or in yourself to create concern? At a core level, I think it’s the way society views mental illness, not as an illness largely out of a person’s control, but as a condition largely within control. “It’s all in your head.†“Snap yourself out of it.â€
How else to explain our dichotomy of language. People with cancer or heart disease go to the hospital, not the funny farm, the madhouse, the nuthouse. “As sick as a dog†is about the most unflattering thing said about most people who are sick. But those with mental illness have been described as: berserk, cracked, crazy, demented, deranged, flaky, flipped out, fruity, lunatic, mad, maniacal, nuts, out of their mind, out to lunch, psycho and schizo, just to name a few.
How in a society where a manic bird going “cuckoo for Coco Puffs†is symbolic of the iconic nature advertising can reduce mental health to, do you make people care? The public would be outraged if someone had to wait a week to get proper care for a broken leg, but where is the outrage for those who wait with a broken mind?
Prayers for Our Peace of Mind, an interfaith prayer initiative slated for Nov. 14, is North Carolina Mental Hope’s attempt to create an answer.
On that day, we simply ask faith leaders to pray for healing of those affected by our state’s mental health crisis and for wisdom and compassion for state leaders in planning and budgeting state services. We hope to create public awareness and perhaps even send a message to lawmakers that the public does care what happens to citizens with mental illness. More information can be found at ncmentalhope.org/prayers
“Did you hear the one about the state where mental illness isn’t a joke?â€
No, but we hope to.
David Cornwell is executive director of the advocacy organization North Carolina Mental Hope and can be reached at david@ncmentalhope.org
Fantastic piece, David. We have many of the same problems here in Australia – though here after a long period of deinstitutionalisation and ‘community-based care’ – never adequately funded – which turned out quite badly we are re-evaluating that policy.