Commentaries

Please give those with a mental health diagnosis the gifts of dignity and respect, the gift of concern without pity and unfettered by stereotypical thinking. Please understand we are as broad a cross-section of personalities as any.

Please take away the stigma and leave the gift of public awareness that those with a mental health diagnosis are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, that we are them and need services and each other’s support. Please give the gift of understanding that concern and change have to percolate up from the public and flow down from the top. For if leaders treat “consumers” and family members as lesser, as children who just don’t get it, it legitimizes and entrenches the status quo.

Triumph for Inclusionists

Critical Access Behavioral Health Agencies. In less than 2 months, it’s gone from concept to an acronym to a word (officially pronounced “kah-bah” by DHHS Assistant Secretary Michael Watson in his presentation at the December 9 Legislative Oversight Committee for the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services).

But whether concept, acronym or word, CABHA has been a godsend for proponents of greater “consumer” inclusion in mental health policy-making. And the level of esteem with which DHHS and its divisions hold those consumers is incredible.

A time to listen, a time to howl

There’s simply no better way to describe the relationship between the state’s mental health policy makers to the grassroots mental health community than to say that the latter, to paraphrase the old saying, are continually left as the last puppy to get to mom’s belly at feeding time.

Same old, same old

There are just too many analogies to choose from when it comes to the recent birth of Critical Access Behavioral Health Agencies (CABHA) - immaculate conception (certainly no irreverence intended), “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of The Missing Link,” “Poof the Magic Medicaid Definition.”

Deep in our hearts, we must believe

Like a good old-fashioned revival, how good to be in a room full of true believers.

When the choir falls silent

Like many advocacy groups, North Carolina Mental Hope expends a good deal of its efforts preaching to the choir. But we hope to increasingly turn our evangelical efforts to the congregation, knowing that Joe the Plumber, Bob the Banker, and Sue the Sous Chef need to care as well.

But what happens when the choir stops singing altogether?

Time to flinch

I’ve read that what’s going on this year with North Carolina’s budget is equivalent to a political game of chicken – a three-way game, even though two of the players aren’t really participating. - 6/08/09

Too many questions, too few answers

I’ll be first to admit I don’t understand (but am always learning) how government works. So I don’t understand the cuts recommended last week by the House Health & Human Services Appropriations Committee nor the process by which those figures were reached. Judging from Tuesday’s committee meeting, I’m not alone. – 6/03/09

What the #%! can they be thinking

Fill in the blank as you like, but it’s obvious those legislators who favor $74.5 million in mental health spending “adjustments” (i.e. cuts) and hundreds of millions in the future no longer have contact with reality. - 6/01/09

Just say no

Although some might disagree, I’m a stickler about trying to be fair. And so, while it seems common sense that the best way to sell public policy is to include stakeholders from the very beginning of planning, I called a couple of randomly selected public policy institutes to make sure. – 5/19/09

Legislation from thin air

Sometimes it just makes your head hurt. It’s certainly made my head hurt this past week, searching for the MH/DD/SAS “Antipsychotic Workgroup,” Googling the Net and searching my fingers to the nub on the Health and Human Services and the Division websites. - 5/12/09

Crisis Intervention? We need less crazy people

The title above is just one of the online comments made in the last 24 hours to the Gaston Gazette’s story: Police standoff comes to a peaceful end near historic Gastonia neighborhood. In a sense, those comments, both respectful and not, represent another story, the continuing debate over the need for Crisis Intervention Training of Law Enforcement officers. - 5/6/09