Our Broken System of Care
We have to go beyond yoga and Pelotons and make HUGE changes.
The #freeBrittany movement left a broken woman twirling alone in her living room, reportedly hooked on meth. In New York City, a homeless man slammed a random woman’s head into a moving subway. School closures during the pandemic accelerated a mental health crisis in our youth.
We are about to have a long overdue conversation about a topic that nobody wants to touch: mental health. Mental illness is unpleasant, after all. Those with issues might be living in homeless shelters and smell like old socks and urine. Their issues are expensive and messy. But the problems have become impossible to ignore with folks living in tents in Prospect Park and having full scale meltdowns on public transportation.
Are you still with me? Still reading? Or did you scroll down to see the fun links? Don’t worry, I’ll keep this newsletter short.
Mental health has been a constant topic at school board and PTA meeting across the country. Yes, schools can become toxic environments at time, and have contributed to the lower level issues like anxiety and depression. But the bigger issues are not their fault. Sometimes, people are just wired that way.
Students with severe mental health and behavioral issues are often given IEPs, which puts the school in charge of providing support. Many schools have set up special programs within their local schools that focus on those students, because it’s a lot cheaper than paying for private institutions for those students. But these efforts are scattershot with unknown benefits.
Mental health is healthcare. Autism is healthcare. As I explained in the previous newsletter about autism, schools have become the de facto providers of healthcare for these students, even though schools don’t do it well, and localities can’t afford it. Our healthcare/medical/insurance system must support people with disabilities comprehensively and generously, just as they would someone with cancer or a broken leg.
Schools cannot manage this crisis on their own. The scope of our country’s mental health problems, along with other disabilities, are too big and too serious for an institution, whose primary purpose should be teaching reading and math. And when students age out of public schools, there are few community supports and a clumsy transition to state services.
While my son does not have a mental illness, he does have autism and epilepsy, which have similar pressures. Like parents of children with mental issues, we gained guardianship over him (what if he’s unconscious in the hospital after an epileptic seizure) and have slogged through some truly insane level of bureaucracy to support him now and the future. I get notices from disability groups giving webinars to parents about what to do if their autistic adult children are arrested for just being autistic. It happens.
If we want to improve the quality of lives for folks like Brittany, the homeless guys in the tents, for parents like us, and for the guys with Aspergers who finish college but can’t find work, we have to make massive changes in our communities and in our legislatures.
We have to honor, validate, and support our caretakers. Listen to their stories.
We must build community centers that serve everyone in the community. (Our local YMCA has no services for people with autism, for example.) We must increase connections with neighbors and extended family.
We have to destress our lives, reduce demands for perfection, eat communal meals as a group, go for morning runs, go outside, and eat some yogurt.
Build beautiful dorm-like housing in downtowns and on college campuses for people with differences.
Free substance abuse clinics.
Teach the public about mental health differences, developmental differences, and intellectual differences. Destigmatize differences.
We need to prioritize wellness, beyond articles aimed at skinny young women about the benefits of drinking water and spinning on a Peloton. Real wellness and real change will be expensive and ugly and require some sacrifices. It will have to go beyond hashtag slogans and involve tough decisions made by people who know this topic well. I hope that we can do this.
LINKS
On my disability newsletter, an update…
Videos of smart people doing smart things.
Due Process, Undue Delays: Families Trapped in NYC’s Decades-Long Special Ed Bottleneck, Beth Hawkins, The 74
Record level of media job cuts. But they should expect to find work on the Internet, because many job ads on the internet are fake.
Royal Gossip: Prince Andrew won’t leave his palace during roof renovations, because he’s worried that the King will change the locks when he’s out. Megan was dumped by Spotify and won't get the full $20 payout for her podcast. How cute is Queen Margrethe?
Personal: I make my first TikTok video of our hall bath renovation. I’ll do the master bath renovation next week. Our town is covered with smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Campaign pictures. Weekend pictures. Photo dump on the blog.
Shopping: I am still completely obsessed with finding the best crossbody bag for travel. This bag by Minooy has spots for sunglasses and credit cards. Amazon’s Canvas KL928 Sling bag converts between a crossbody and backpack with plenty of room for shopping trip items. I chose Amazon’s Emperia Sling Bag because the pleather is strong enough to work as a camera case, as well as a purse. It will stuff neatly into my carry-on bag, which will have everything I need for the overnight trip.
Travel: Last weekend, we spent the day at Spring Lake and Red Hook, NJ. We’re leaving next Friday for Italy, so we’re staying close to home this weekend. I’m clean living right now, saving my calories for the good wine and pasta there.
We're in the special needs community here in Seattle and I know of parents who are banding together to buy homes where their adult children with special kids will live togther in a kind of commune. That takes enormous privilege to do, of course, but it does point toward the need for community-funded housing, as you suggest.