Thanks for your interest in NCMentalHealthVote.org. To get things started, I'm posting the remarks that I made at our formal announcement/press conference this morning in front of the State Legislative Building in Raleigh.
We really would like to hear from you - your experiences with North Carolina's mental health, substance abuse, and developmental disabilities system - good and bad - as well as your thoughts about how to improve things. The new DHHS Secretary Benton has made some very impressive first steps, but we all know the problems are so deep and pervasive that it will take years of committed leadership to bring real improvement to North Carolina's mental health system - hence our focus on the 2008 election and the next leaders of North Carolina.
My remarks:
I’m Dr. John Gilmore, a Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I am Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Treatment and Evaluation Program. I’m also Chair of the Legislative Committee of the North Carolina Psychiatric Association.
I’m here to announce the creation of NCMental HealthVote.org, a project intended to raise awareness of the enormous problems facing the mental health system in North Carolina. We hope that this effort will help make mental health care in North Carolina an issue that each candidate will address during the upcoming election, one that each candidate will offer solutions for.
Through our website, bumperstickers, advertisements, and other activities, we hope to help educate the candidates and voters about the critical issues that need to be dealt with. NCMental HealthVote.org is non-partisan and is endorsing quality mental health care for the citizens of NC – not specific political candidates or parties.
The mental health care system in North Carolina has undergone a so-called “reform” over the past several years, one that has included the privatization of the public mental health system and the downsizing of state psychiatric hospital beds. This reform has left a system in chaos.
The evidence of the system’s failure comes every day as North Carolina’s citizens are falling through the cracks, unable to find a psychiatrist or other provider who will take care of them. We wait, sometimes for days, in emergency rooms because there are not enough psychiatric hospital beds in the community or in our state hospitals. There is no safety net and we are all paying the price.
When psychiatrists stand up and speak out, you know things are really bad. As a group, we’d rather sit back, listen, observe, and quietly do our job. But things are really bad, and we are speaking out. We do believe that once the citizens of North Carolina and our elected leaders understand what the problems are, they will want to fix them. Mental illness is very common, and we all know someone, a family member or friend – even ourselves - who has had to deal with a mental illness.
NCMentalHealthVote.org was developed by the N.C. Psychiatric Association, and has been joined by other partners, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in North Carolina, the Mental Health Association of North Carolina, the Foundation of Hope, and many other organizations and individuals. Today, NCMentalHealthVote.org is starting a constructive, non-partisan discussion that will stop the ongoing failures and create something all North Carolinians deserve - a decent mental health care system that works.
6 comments:
Thank you for setting up this website. As an RN at Dorothea Dix I have seen first hand how the mental health system is failing. The merger of Dix and Umstead has caused many concerned. We are losing many staff and are using more agency nurses and health care techs then ever before. They have poor training and many are not here long enough to know policies and procedures. This is affecting our patients. The management to merge these 2 hospitals as been poor at best. No one seems to be listening to the concerns of the staff that work with these patients on a daily basis or addressing the patients concerns, fears and anxieties of moving. I am so glad there is somewhere we can finally go to voice our concerns. Maybe now someone will start listening. Thank you for giving us a voice and advocating for the mentally ill. If we don't do it who will?
I'm a QMHP and I see the mess that is NC Mental Health on a daily basis. I hope that these efforts bring about needed change; and the sooner the better...
Very glad to learn about this website. I have worked in community mental health for a number of years now, and have watched this state's system (and Durham County's in particular) go from bad to much worse in the name of "reform". I applaud Dr. Gilmore for speaking out. Doctors within the system have more credibility than the rest of us, and are heard from directly all too infrequently. Let's see how many others can lend their voices to this effort. We must remember that the whole point of our system is to help those consumers who depend on us, and we are failing them. We promised that when we stopped warehousing people in state hospitals, we would provide community-based services that would keep people healthy in the least restrictive environment, and we are currently breaking that promise every day this continues.
I worked at a local Mental Health facility for 9 years. I provided therapy and intensice case management to a high risk population. I had one client that I worked with the entire 9 years, when I inherited the case she had over 250 admissions into Cherry, Dorothea Dix, Holly Hill, Coastal Plain, and the local hospital's psychiatric unit. I provided individual therapy, family therapy,intensive case management, and case support serives to this client. Out of the 9 years I worked with her she only had 4 admissions. That in itself says alot about the services I provided and the effectiveness of these services. From what I have heard she has had numerous admissions since I left the mental health center in 2003 and it's closure. My concern is the unqualified people that are in the private sector providing services and they have no idea what they are doing and are flying by the set of their pants. The so called reform has not looked at the whole picture and it is going to hell in a handbag quickly. The mental ill are turning to other agencies for assistance and these agencies are not equiped to assist them. Thanks for this web site and thanks for letting me speak my peace. May God be with the menatlly ill patients as they travel through this maze called reform.
Thank you for organizing this effort. The system is in shambles and it will take a lot of good thinking and hard work to pull it out of the ditch. I applaud the NC Psychiatric Association for pulling us together with this tool.
I add my thanks to those already given. I have worked in a number of ways with those who have a mental illness through the last 25 years. 5 years ago my son was dx as bi-polar. You would think that my experience would have given us an edge. It did not. Instead, my son's illness opened my eyes to the current situation faced by those who have a mental illness and by their families and friends. Today, I will not let my son live in the state of NC because I find the access to appropriate care so poor as to pose a risk to his health. I have grave concerns about the effects our system is having on the health of those with a mental illness, and the long-term impact this may have on their ability to function and benefit from treatment. I find that we do not have the solid supports in place which would enable families and friends to deal with this illness and to provide the support which is so needed from them. I believe that the continual struggle which we face with the basics render us unable to begin to address the equally important challenges of helping people to live lives which are as highly functional as possible, and changing the view of and beliefs about mental illness which continue to be mainstream.
While mental illness has always been present in many forms, the medical understanding and treatment of this illness is still in relative youth. This makes this time all the more crucial as the position which we take now can either pave the way to further advances in treatment and management of this illness, or continue to hold us back - with devestating consequences for those personally involved. I hope, I hope, I hope that there can be enough of a gathering and voice through such a venue as this to open the door to advancement.
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