It was May 11, 2004, when the first e-mail message arrived in my inbox from Louise Jordan asking for help. Her brother Phil Wiggins was being released from a state psychiatric hospital after 43 years, and she was – rightly – concerned about where he’d be placed and what sort of care he would receive.

Soon, because of Jordan, buses will be tooling around Raleigh featuring images of famous people who have done great things while wrestling with mental illness. The wrap-around ads will be paid for by the local NAMI chapter and will feature iconic people from Abraham Lincoln to Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia).

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Henderson County commissioners want to take politics out of funding local mental health and human service agencies, but the potential disbanding of a local nonprofit could make that task more difficult.

The Alliance for Human Services was founded in 1995. The local agency helps the county decide which nonprofit human service agencies to fund. The agency certifies the nonprofits and makes funding recommendations to the board of commissioners.

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GREENSBORO — When it was so cold at 7 a.m. Monday that his police cruiser was slow to start, Capt. Wayne Scott knew what his first task should be when he arrived at work: dispatch a squad to check on the homeless.

Starting at 8:30 a.m., a unit of eight officers who were bundled up for cold-weather duty fanned out to bridges, railroad trestles and treelines of Scott’s central division, which encompasses most of the makeshift homeless camps near downtown.

With temperatures in the teens, the marching orders were to remind people outside that there was shelter available if they wanted to come inside.

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The REAL Crisis Center has been expanding to offer more services since its inception in 1971, when it was started by a group of East Carolina University students.

“That is what makes it hard to get the message out about what we do,” said Mary Smith, executive director. “We do whatever needs to be done to help the individual get help and have a better life.”

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Sunday, January 3, 2010 — CONCORD — Congressman Larry Kissell (NC-08) has announced that Piedmont Behavioral Healthcare will receive a Shelter Plus Care Renewal grant for $84,744 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to continue to provide housing and supportive services to homeless individuals with disabilities.

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Breathe Easy Live Well is a project of Fayetteville’s Southern Regional Area Health Education Center dealing with tobacco dependence and mental illness. Collier said about 75 percent of severely mentally ill people smoke, and heavy smokers in general die 25 years before nonsmokers.

Thomas Nunnery was enjoying a morning ritual at Lindy’s – breakfast, coffee and a cigarette.

Nunnery was sitting with his friends Tim Robinson, Josh Bain and Allen Jackson in a booth on the smoking side of the Raeford Road restaurant’s dining room.

“We’ll have a cigarette with our coffee,” Nunnery said. “Then we have a plate of food, and we’ll automatically light up another.”

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RALEIGH, N.C. — Betsy MacMichael knows that people with developmental disabilities are losing their services. As an advocate and Chair of the Developmental Disabilities Consortium she hears from parents daily. “People whose services have been reduced or who are on waiting lists call us daily, barely coping and needing our help. By documenting and counting their stories, we will have powerful information to share with policymakers..”

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Families looking for an assisted-living home for a suddenly declining older relative often make that crucial decision in a hurry.

This week, by setting up tougher standards, a state system that has given the top three-star rating to about 95 percent of adult-care centers will become more useful to people under the stress of that situation, officials said.

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At least one Rocky Mount shelter is bracing for a surge of overnight residents as the National Weather Service warns of what could become North Carolina’s worst and longest cold snap in more than 30 years.

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Maybe some of the thousands of disruptive, violent or criminal students Wake County suspends each year need a more constructive alternative than getting kicked out of school.

In-school suspensions, reform schools or community service might be better alternatives than life at home, in a gang, or on the street, away from the chance to learn.

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What to call a what?

If you’ve never had to deal with an LME, you probably don’t know what one is.

A “local management entity” is a local government agency that manages services for people with mental-health, disability or substance-abuse issues. People in the field talk about LMEs constantly because they do vital things – not providing direct care, but making sure that people who need help get the services and support for which they’re eligible. A network of public and private providers deliver the services.

But the name LME is so uninformative that Wake County is holding a contest to pick a new label for its, you know, LMEs.

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Tonya Scales had earned associate degrees in music and medical system administration — but also a criminal record — when she latched on to the offerings at the Welfare Reform Liaison Project.

“It gave me the opportunity to reinvent myself, ” Scales said.

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Last winter they came to church, seeking not God or deliverance, but a warm place to sleep through the coldest months.

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Crisis intervention team training will be offered in January to 27 local law-enforcement officers. The purpose of the training is to better prepare officers for encounters with people with mental illness and to increase the chances that those with serious mental illness will receive treatment rather than incarceration.

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One of the state’s leading newspapers has said its time for Senate leader Marc Basnight to go, and time for new leadership in that chamber.

In a Sunday editorial, the Winston-Salem Journal noted that Basnight, D-Dare, is rapidly losing key allies in the Senate as other long-serving leaders tender their resignations.

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RALEIGH — So here we are, once again, facing not only the end of a year but the end of a decade. Indeed, hopefully the end of an era, that era being mental health reform in North Carolina and its legacy.

We find ourselves at the dawning of a new year, a new decade and hopefully a new era – an era of transformation and true mental health revitalization.

We come to this point suffering from what I am increasingly calling the cumulative effect.

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As Albemarle Mental Health Center crashed and burned this past year, patients accustomed to the agency’s therapy services often found themselves choking on the smoke.
Debra Belangia was one of those directly affected by AMHC’s demise.
The Currituck County resident began outpatient therapy at AMHC’s Dare County unit about a year ago. She said it took all the courage she could muster to acknowledge she needed treatment for her depression and to seek help.

Belangia said she found a compassionate, helpful therapist who she was able to see every other week. In addition, one of AMHC’s psychiatrists prescribed her medication that made her symptoms more bearable.

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Just two years after nearly doubling in size, the region’s premier mental health provider in 2009 collapsed in stunning fashion, racking up nearly $2 million in unpaid debt, laying off scores of employees and surrendering management of services to the state.

Albemarle Mental Health Center spent most of the year in a self-imposed limbo after its board of directors turned over the agency’s operations to state officials in January. The board took the extreme step in the wake of a scalding state review that declared the agency was essentially broke and found AMHC administration had misled the board.

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“So many homeless people have mental health issues and other health issues. In whatever community I’m in long-term, I’d like to help mobilize resources to help [those] people,” he says.

CHAPEL HILL – When Dr. Tyler Jorgensen walks in, there’s a dead horse on the screen.
Usually, the first thing the emergency medicine intern does when he introduces himself to a new patient is turn off the TV. But the dead horse stops him in his tracks.

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On a balmy July evening 18 months ago, Drug Treatment Court debuted in Brunswick County—the first in the state at the superior court level.

The brainchild of Superior Court Judge Ola Lewis, Drug Treatment Court has now hit its stride. Seven people have successfully completed and graduated from the program, with another 30 actively participating.

Drug Treatment Court coordinator Vicki Prince said, so far, the program has a zero-percent recidivism rate for drug offenses.

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RALEIGH — A federal judge on Monday prohibited the state and a local mental health management office from cutting services to two Wilson-area people with mental illness and developmental disabilities until a full hearing on their lawsuit seeking to continue independent living.

U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle said it’s likely that two residents identified in the lawsuit as Marlo M., 39, and Durwood W., 49, would suffer irreparable harm if a local mental health office went through with a money-saving plan to move them from their apartments. Their lawyers contend that the two would end up in institutions, though a lawyer for the mental health office disagreed with that conclusion.<strong Story continues here ➤<strong

Video Report On Website

RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal judge on Monday granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the state from terminating two people’s community-based mental health services until a lawsuit over the matter goes before the court in a full hearing.

Disability Rights North Carolina filed the complaint earlier this month against the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and the Rocky Mount mental health facility Beacon Center, claiming the patients – who have developmental disabilities and mental illness – stood to lose state and federal services that allow them to live independently. Story continues here ➤

A new contractor for the state’s mental health department has come under fire for a host of technical glitches that some mental health providers say has resulted in lost revenue.

The snags with ValueOptions Inc. have resulted in a loss of anywhere between $800 and $50,000 a month for health care providers who want to get paid by the state for treating Medicaid and uninsured patients, said Herbert S. Cromwell, executive director of Community Behavioral Health Association of Maryland. Story continues here ➤

Video of Perdue Interview on website as well. Considering the importance of the question and how Gov. Perdue answered it, that answer is run in its entirety. Link to the full article is at the bottom of this entry.

Q: Advocates mental health and developmental disabilities felt like they were disproportionately hit hard last year. Can you talk about whether they’ll be facing more cuts in 2010?
 
“I don’t believe the cuts will be as severe as they were last year. But the fact of the matter is any cuts to the system are severe. If you happened to see our Christmas card, you’ll see our granddaughter Rachel on the card. Rachel is 100 percent special. She has 24/7 care. She can’t be alone and I was with her mom (last) weekend in Atlanta. We talked about Rachel’s nurse. She has a nursing assistant that comes in. She was there 10 hours. So Michelle has 60 hours of help a week so Michelle can keep a full-time job with two other children who are out in the community.

“I kept thinking when we read the stories here about the mental health cutbacks of those special children and adults who need so much care. But for those services, our Rachel would be in an institution. I think those are the decisions that (Secretary) Lanier Cansler and the department have to make as you go into the summer.

“What are you going to do if the General Assembly tells you to cut $10 million from here and $20 million from here and $50 million from here? What are the priorities that you’re going to outline with where you take those cuts? And in my mind the cuts that were taken around mental health were hard, hard cuts. … Horrible decisions, horrible choices, nobody wants to make them.”

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DURHAM — Shortly after her son was born, doctors told Polly Medlicott that Chris was not only a nonverbal, spastic quadriplegic with visual impairments, he also had a mental disability.

The family focused on raising him in a loving household, never feeling sorry for themselves. Still, he grew up isolated from such developmental essentials as friendship, social interaction and human touch because of his traditional schooling.

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