It’s a long, tough road to mental wellness
Frankly, these days it’s hard to tell which is loonier — tales of the region’s troubled souls or news stories about the system designed to treat them.
One day I read of an Idaho woman with bipolar disorder scalping a teenage girl.
Another day I read of Spokane County paying $1 million to United Behavioral Health simply to manage its mental health spending — $1 million that could be paying for treatment.
One day I read of a man wearing a blue-and-red striped robe and a pistol into Knight’s Diner and claiming he’s Jesus Christ.
Another day I read of Spokane County being forced to pay $1.4 million in fines to the state of Washington for sending too many patients to the state psychiatric hospital.
None of this makes any sense. And now the federal government’s drastically cut its Medicaid funds, and the county’s slashing programs ranging from Spokane Mental Health to Lutheran Community Services to Catholic Charities — all to offset a projected $7.5 million shortfall.
In 1847 Charlotte Bronte wrote “Jane Eyre” and tucked a madwoman into the novel’s famous attic. Awareness and treatment for mental illness has transformed in the last century and a half, yet that impulse remains.
Sometimes the extent of these diseases astounds even the field’s practitioners.
Last Sunday Laurine Marcinkowski, a forensic psychologist at Eastern State Hospital, gave a sermon for fellow members at Plymouth Congregational Church in Spokane. She described the prevalence of mental illness.
The five major mental illnesses are more common than cancer, diabetes and heart disease, she said.
Afterward church members lined up with tears streaming down their faces to tell her of their own heartbreak.
“Did you know that my father was bipolar,” her fellow parishioners asked. “Did you know that my mother was schizophrenic?”
Marcinkowski didn’t realize that. But she knows she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Each year 1 in 5 Americans suffer a diagnosable mental illness and an estimated 9.9 million Americans suffer from major depression alone, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
Marcinkowski urges people not to tuck the stories of their troubled family members into a collective cultural attic. Mental illness is not a sign of weakness, and many forms are inherited. “You either get the genetics or you don’t,” she said. “There’s no blame.”
She points out a roadmap to patients and families seeking treatment. If MapQuest were to plot it, the route would feature stops and starts, detours and course corrections. If one therapist isn’t the right match, families must press on until they find another. If one medication doesn’t alleviate symptoms, they must keep trying until they find one that does. It can be a frustrating journey, but, ultimately, today’s treatments are highly effective.
The community needs a similar roadmap for treating its own ailing mental health system. County commissioners want to ask voters to approve a sales tax increase that could help offset that missing $7.5 million.
There’s bound to be anger both from voters who resent paying taxes and those who resent the federal government’s priorities. There’s certainly plenty of irony in watching the Bush administration siphon away Medicaid dollars to help fight a war in Iraq, when that war’s bound to create thousands of traumatized veterans who will return home needing care.
Most American families can think of veteran relatives who came home deeply wounded by wars of the past. They were the tormented fathers and mothers, the uncles and the aunts, who ruined marriages and damaged children when they returned.
Some mental illnesses get passed along through the gene pool; others are created by miserable public policy. Our community’s going to need to figure out how to treat both.
If MapQuest were to devise the route out of our community’s crazy mental health mess, it wouldn’t be an easy trip. We’ll need to travel a rocky road of tax increases and avoid the blind alleys of managed care and loopy government accounting. But we can still reach sanity from here.