Hayes Mental Illness and Your Town

37 Ways for Communities to Help and Heal
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-61599-893-7
Verlag: Loving Healing Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 188 Seiten

A Blueprint for Community Action From Award-Winning Journalist Larry Hayes
Written with authority and compassion, this is the book that rescues mental illness from the shadows and takes the disability into the community.
Learn how each person can play a role to help those who so often suffer alone. Hear the stories of the people who've found how to triumph over this disability. Discover how everyone can work together to create a treatment revolution that enriches and saves lives. Let this guide open your heart and mind to be inspired and challenged to do the work ahead.
A Book that will Change Your Community!
'Larry Hayes provides families with a real self-help manual that is personal and compassionate, yet practical and hands-on. It is long overdue and can only come from someone who has been there--in the trenches. Larry certainly has.'
--Stephen C. McCaffrey, President, Mental Health America of Indiana
'With a father's wit and a reporter's well-honed writing skills, Larry Hayes uses his family's story to offer practical suggestions about how communities can help persons with mental illnesses recover and thrive. This is a wonderful blueprint that spells out ways to change lives and help persons seldom seen or heard.'
--Pete Earley, author, CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
'Larry Hayes demonstrates in this book a very rare gift that he has, the ability to reduce complex social problems to simple terms. In addition, he fills the book with practical solutions and ways to reduce the somet-imes debilitating effects of mental illness.'
--James C. Howell, Ph.D., juvenile justice researcher

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hayes, Larry

Leseproben

Part I
The Faces

Just as mental illness comes in various diagnoses, it shows up in different kinds of people, at different stages of their lives.

1. Start with Mother and Child

Let me say at the outset that mothers don't cause mental illness. That myth was dispelled long ago. But a mother can foster lifelong mental health. That's tough to do when she's depressed.

In the early months, no doubt Wanda was.

I didn't know it as post-partum depression. Was there such a term in 1965? But I can still see her sad face as I'd walk through the door in our Shirley Place apartment in Cincinnati's western hills. She might still be in her housecoat, strawberry blonde hair not combed. She seemed so frustrated, so inadequate with this baby who had no interest in taking naps during the day. The child seemed happy. The mother wasn't.

I tried to be sympathetic. But in truth, I didn't know how to help her.

Wanda, who died in 1997, was my first wife. We'd been married about three years when Robyn was born, in October, 1965. I had dropped my plan to be a minister and was doing student teaching in the morning and early afternoon, then typing freight bills at Mason-Dixon Truck Lines during the evenings. So the two of them, mother and child, were stuck together for much of the day.

It's pretty common for a new mother to get the blues. Most snap out of it within a few weeks. But for others, the blues turns into a major depression. Untreated the depression can last for years. It can become a lifetime of battling the disability, with only periodic remissions.

The story doesn't end there. Most of us can readily grasp this. The relationship between mother and child is critical to the child's mental health. It's the early bonding. It's the thousand ways a mother communicates to the child that he or she is wanted and loved without condition. Or, in tragic cases, she fails to communicate all that. Maybe the father's love rescues the child, maybe not.

The mother's mental health could be the most precious gift she can give to her child. If you see a baby who appears depressed, listless, it's not a great leap to assume that the mother has been depressed too. She hasn't been able to engage the child.

When the depressed child becomes a toddler, you're apt to find the child cries more easily than other children. That child is the one who develops sleep problems and might act out. In pre-school, that child's problems take on a social nature, disrupting a class and driving the teacher crazy.

As any clinician will tell you, mental health problems in a teenager can often be traced back to early childhood. Fortunately, professionals are beginning to find ways to connect young parents with resources. But reaching everyone who can use the help can be an uphill battle. New mothers may not admit they're depressed. Family members might not pick up on the mother's distress. Or the stigma associated with mental illness blocks out sympathy and understanding.

Outside the family, things aren't much more enlightened. Family doctors aren't well-trained in the pathologies of mental illness. They're especially likely to misdiagnose depression in racial and ethnic minority mothers. Other health care workers face the same limits of knowledge. Further, few persons who work in child care have more than the most cursory understanding of mental illness. As for high-school-age babysitters, I hate to guess. I imagine ignorance abounds.

I'd start with the pediatricians. I don't assume that they're as uninformed as the rest of us. But I'd conduct an inventory on how they deal with a new mother's depression. See if they include any material on post-partum depression in the packet they send the mother home with. Meantime, I'd approach the pediatricians. Find out whether they see any shortcomings in their training and get their proposals for addressing those gaps.

To raise awareness for professionals, we're talking about regular workshops on mental illness. The practices of family doctors and some specialists could be greatly enhanced by adding a psychiatric nurse, psychologist or social worker who is experienced in helping children who suffer a mental illness. As a rule, doctors know that many of the physical complaints people bring to them have an underlying mental health problem. Do most doctors know enough to diagnose a mental illness in the case of an infant or toddler? Do they know enough to treat such a child? These are issues any community's advocates in mental health can investigate.

Short of organizing conferences, advocates can invite doctors to put out reading materials on infant and childhood mental health. They can encourage doctors to run videos on mental health instead of the cable news shows on their TV monitors in the waiting rooms. What about after-school training in mental health for parents? What about offering tips on mental health on the back of menus the schools send home with the kids? And don't assume it's the first time mother who is most at risk. Often, the mother's depression doesn't develop until the third or fourth child. Ask beauty shops to subscribe to parenting magazines. Or barber shops. Be sure to include fathers.

Helping young parents cope pays dividends years into the future. I've interviewed a number of prison officials in charge of young men and women who've become a menace to others. It's as if these officials have memorized some required catechism: “We don't start to fix these people early enough.”

Don't misunderstand. Again, I'm not saying that a child's mental health problems can be traced back to a mother's depression. (My daughter, a mother of two teenagers, is a successful teacher and parent.) But even if a child suffers no long-term ill-effects from the mother's depression, the stress on both isn't the best way to begin a lifelong relationship. That stress can only reinforce whatever mischief is in the child's genetic inheritance. Further, let's say the mother got lucky and completely skipped any episode of depression. That fact doesn't completely insulate a young child from a risk of early mental illness.

In recent years, national organizations and a few at the state level have cropped up to offer programs that address mental health in infants and children. Yale's Child Study Center has been a leader. Zero to Three in Washington, D.C., has coached people not to think of the issue in infants and young children as one of a serious mental illness. Most times, we're not even considering medications for treatment anyway. Instead, Zero to Three advises us to think of the issue as one of mental wellness. That's the whole point, isn't it? Nurture mental wellness in a new mother and she then can nurture it in her child. Mom isn't the culprit. She can be a child's best therapist.

2. Let Them Be Workers

This often is the crown jewel of recovery for persons with a mental illness.

Consider this simple fact. Those who work at least part-time seem do better with their illness than those who don't work. It can beat therapy. It can beat medications. It ranks right up there close to family love. Surveys have found that most people with the disability do want to work. Contrary to the stereotype, about half of these folk actually hold jobs.

I'm most familiar with the clubhouse model. We know it here in Fort Wayne under the name Carriage House. Like nearly 300 worldwide, our clubhouse is modeled after Fountain House in New York City. This is a highly successful pro-work program I'll describe in detail in Chapter 28.

Despite this and other job programs, persons with a mental illness are employed at only two-thirds of the rate of persons in the general population. That figure could be much better. Trouble is, most programs tend to direct people into low-status jobs: dishwashers, custodians, file clerks. Otherwise talented, often highly educated people not only find such jobs boring but also demeaning. Indeed, one thing we've known for years is that persons whose employment is a match for their schooling are more likely to stay on the job and to better manage their illness. Education is the best predictor of success in a job.

Hurdles to greater participation in employment remain. Since some mental disorders strike a person in his or her teens, they often get to middle-age without ever having held a job long enough to develop a work ethic. They don't understand the dos and don'ts. Even at that, a person can start a job, find it stressful and give up within a few days or a week. The person often assumes the illness tripped them up. That's not necessarily the case. Employers, family members and job coaches should encourage the person to stick it out, at least until the disabled person has learned the job. Fact is, you don't have to be mentally ill to find a new job stressful at first. A new job is likely to be stressful for anybody.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a person with a mental illness doesn't have to disclose his or her medical history. Unfortunately, if that person is discriminated against in the workplace, he or she might not know to invoke the ADA, fearing retaliation.

I'd like to see it become...