Commentaries

The following column perhaps provides as good of an update as possible. NC Mental Hope is moving ahead, including its website, pages such as this which are being updated. Older columns, although not complete, follow this post. My appreciation for all for their concern.

David Cornwell
Executive Director
North Carolina Mental Hope

Where does the hurt stop and the healing begin?

It’s a core question of no little significance, and a common base for a person’s health — mental and physical, if such a division needs be made. It’s a question that deserves at very least a glance as part of the healing process.

The mind can be a commanding power, as often as not malevolent, or a compassionate and healing servant. Ultimately, just as when freshwater meets salt, there cannot be any true separation. I know the malevolence firsthand. I hope to harness the latter.

The past few months have been a grueling and frustrating trip into our country’s physical healthcare “system,” as much of an oxymoron as the state or nation’s mental healthcare “system.” It has been our — my family’s — trip. As I have suffered, so have they, if not more.

In March, perhaps earlier or later, I experienced the first symptoms of what was ultimately diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. Four months ago, I thought arthritis was arthritis. Now I know differently. Six years ago, I would have crossed the street to get away from the mumbling disheveled black man coming my way. People grow, people change. And I, fully noting a vested self-interest, would like to applaud people for at least trying.

Among the lessons learned from several months on the floor was one of humility. But a lesson learned and not put into practice is an empty shell, easily cracked. Suffice it to say, I strive to stumble forward.

I say this in no way seeking your respect, your sympathy, even your sensitivity. Self-honesty is hard to communicate without being perceived as self-promotion. Please consider this simply an honest effort toward a non-judgemental observation of the human condition.

North Carolina Mental Hope needs your support. I hope we have earned your respect. I hope we have somehow touched or helped you. If not, we have tried.

We have tried to be the twig that does not bend, simply insisting on the truth, whether its consequences be deemed good or bad. We have simply insisted on equality and respect for those with mental health diagnoses. We have tried to help and we ask for yours.

David Cornwell

Dear Santa

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