Two Eyes Are Never Enough by Sonya Huber

Author:Sonya Huber [Huber, Sonya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2014-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

How did our care for society’s most fragile people degrade into this dismal state? Who’s to blame? In the 1980s, President Reagan’s policy for the mentally ill was deinstitutionalization, which meant that large state hospitals began closing, their patients discharged. Mental health services were farmed out to private agencies that could do the job cheaper than the state. Today there’s almost nothing left to privatize. More state psychiatric hospitals were closed in the 1990s than in the ’70s and ’80s combined. Between 1965 and 2009, the number of residents in state-run facilities declined by almost 85 percent.

In some ways, the closure of mental health facilities was a reaction against the previous era’s practice of warehousing the mentally ill, putting them out of sight and out of mind, with little chance of reentering society. The policy change was seen as a win-win, and the argument for deinstitutionalization was framed as a budget boon. The problem is that since that time, we’ve learned that mental health services for the most vulnerable people in the country are not a place for bargain shopping.

For families who want to transition their loved one into a less-restrictive environment, deinstitutionalization is a good thing. But for most families, the opposite problem occurs: the waiting list to get into a residential facility is long, or private insurance won’t cover it, or the patchwork nature of the offerings means a client is bounced from one place to another. Yet what these families may not know is that their loved ones’ caregivers are apt to have had scant training and only a vague idea of what to do to keep that brother or sister or son or daughter safe. These families don’t know that the person preventing a teenage girl from committing suicide may be distracted by the pressures of making a life at minimum wage.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness, a lobbying and advocacy group for people with mental illness and their families, discovered through surveys that money saved from deinstitutionalization did not get channeled back into mental health care at all, so communities have been required to deal with ever-increasing mental health needs on fewer dollars.

Certainly, some people have taken notice of our country’s “de facto mental health system,” as then surgeon general David Satcher referred to it in the year 2000. What he meant is that the network of services and centers was—and still is—so fragmented that it is almost impossible to get a picture of what is happening and who is caring for whom. Not to mention who is caring for the caregivers. Rates of staffers injured on the job and other vital data are difficult to come by since facilities are often small and private, which means they’re not required to report employee data in the same way that public facilities are.

To address some of these issues, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created the National Direct Service Workforce Resource Center in 2006. It was intended to respond to the direct-care-worker shortage, and to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.