We must stop turning backs on our family

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill early this year launched a non-partisan voter registration and education campaign, I Vote. I Count! Campaign 2000.

Working the primaries with the purpose of supporting mental health issues, such as equal insurance coverage for brain disorders, like other biological disorders receive, the campaign may have contributed to the defeat in South Carolina of Sen. John McCain. Through a union survey, presidential candidate McCain admitted he was opposed to equal coverage or parity. NAMI went to work to educate voters on his position.

The Kansas campaign aims to identify, register and educate voters with concerns for mental health issues.

The goal is to register every Kansas consumer, family member and advocate to vote in time for local, state and national elections this November, said Stephen Feinstein, president of NAMI Kansas and chairman of the Kansas Mental Health Coalition.

"It has taken hard data, logical argument, expert testimony and examples of heart-rending struggle and suffering to educate our legislators on our issues," Feinstein said. "Still some are not listening."

Based on epidemiological data from a number of different sources, there are about 49,000 seriously mentally ill adults in Kansas. Add to that thousands of seriously emotionally disturbed children and adolescents, said Feinstein.

Anyone who would like to volunteer to help with any part of the I Vote. I Count! Kansas Campaign 2000, may call (800) 539-2660 or in Topeka, 233-0755.

By ELIZABETH ADAMS

Special to The Capital-Journal

There was a large family with many children. To no one's blame, half the children were found to have mental disorders that affected their thoughts and emotions profoundly.

Like concerned parents, thinking to focus on the normal children 's strengths, less time and attention was given to the ill children. Fearing the cost of care for so many, the parents chose to do nothing about the illnesses. Eventually, it seemed best to move the ill children out of the house.

Every day the normal siblings walked by their brothers and sisters who were wandering the streets, huddling under the bridges when it rained. They turned their heads and tried not to notice them. But they were family. In guilt and discomfort, the healthy children began to squabble. Some ridiculed and called the outcast children names. Others wept for their brothers and sisters.

The parents made home improvements. They paid to build a nice new driveway to welcome the neighbors. Surely this would make their children feel better. It didn't. They invested in worthwhile things like books and education. But, the pain inside the children never went away, as they, day after day, saw their struggling brothers and sisters without a home or care to make them better. They were a large family, but family, after all.

Topeka is reported to have twice the population of people with mental illness than average cities have. While Kansas is lifted up as an example of successful mental health reform, what we see every day are the gaping holes in available services and outreach and treatment for people with mental illnesses. Closing the local medical center won't prevent heart disease from taking lives any more than closure of the Topeka State Hospital made mental illness go away. Being community-debased individuals, cast out, is not the way for people to be treated. If we have decided community-based services are ideal, then they must be available to those who need them.

U.S. Surgeon Gen. David Satcher has issued a call to accountability and action for America in his landmark Report on Mental Health, released this year. He notes the combined paramount productivity in neuroscience, pharmacology and effective treatments for mental disorders. He credits the transformation in our society's approaches to organizing and financing mental health care. Yet, he writes, disparities in the availability of and access to services must be resolved.

Insisting that mental health flow in the mainstream of health, Satcher states, "the efficacy of mental health treatments is well- documented and a range of treatments exist for most mental disorders. Brain disorders are not mystical. Physiological organs, like the heart, the brain, the liver or stomach, all will need medical care at some time. Existing treatments work for brain disorders. The success rate of heart disease treatment is 45 percent. With schizophrenia the success rate is 60 percent, with major depression it is 65 percent and with bipolar disorder success rates are at 85 percent for those treated. Treatment works; if you can get it."

Fear of the unknown and ignorance have endowed anyone with a mental illness with an undeserved stigma. "Stigma leads to low self- esteem and hopelessness," Satcher notes. "It deters the public from seeking, and wanting to pay for, care."

Did you know there has been only one cost-of-living raise at local community mental health centers across Kansas in the 10 years since mental health reform? Yet these employees are expected to treat the increasing, aching need of people with mental illness. Several sources have confirmed that there are waiting lists for services that are six to eight weeks long.

Did you know that opportunity for equal insurance coverage for people with biological brain disorders, like any other physiological disorder, was voted down again this year in the Legislature?

Kansan families have been forced into bankruptcy when a member became ill, because the expenses (as any major illness with today's medical costs) were too great to pay and insurance for mental illness was not available. They lost the homes they had worked for and self- esteem that dollars cannot repay.

While an esteemed team of professionals examine our collective mental health and question the cause for Topeka 's "inferiority complex," as Mayor Joan Wagnon has put it, perhaps we should take a serious look at our family.

Elizabeth Adams is executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill-Kansas.

Copyright 2000
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