For those seeking mental health services, the city of Chicago is one large waiting room. We need help. Desperately. But reopening six clinics, a plan the City Council is expected to vote on Wednesday, is a Band-Aid when we need intensive care.
The state of our mental health as a community has deteriorated considerably for a host of reasons since those clinics were closed in 2012, and we need to think much bigger if we want to truly help a city experiencing a mental health crisis.
This is a public health challenge we cannot afford to ignore. Mental health conditions are more common than breast cancer or diabetes. Just 50 percent of adults experiencing severe psychological distress received any treatment in 2017. Those statistics don’t take into consideration the thousands of people — our neighbors — who are suffering from trauma and grief, violence, drugs, and food and housing insecurity. It affects residents from West Ridge to Roseland and from Austin to the Loop. It affects older adults, office workers and, in growing numbers, our children.
Ignoring their common struggle is morally unacceptable. It is also costly. Many people who are living with mental illness end up in emergency rooms and interacting with law enforcement. How desperate is it? Our 911 system is effectively the central intake line for mental health needs.
The burden is felt by their relatives, who are forced to navigate a byzantine system looking for help, but also by first responders, teachers, Chicago Park District and CTA employees who are called on regularly to go far beyond their scope of work. This is the system we’ve paid for.
It doesn’t work.
The city must think much, much bigger than six clinics. First, we must stop politicizing mental health, and we must stop treating those living with mental illness as punching bags.
This council and the next mayor need to make mental health a priority. The Chicago affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and its partners have created a blueprint for what mental health investment looks like. The task force must look at long-term, innovative, sustainable programs that expand social supports, lift up providers and ensure equal access to all. These programs exist. Further, we should expand the voices involved to include providers and those living with mental illness — yes, they have a voice and the most expertise.
The city can walk the walk by making sure public employees — from police officers and firefighters to teachers and CTA drivers — have adequate insurance so they can access robust mental health services.
The city can reframe the issue so that mental health is primary care, that mental health is community health. Clinical treatment is extremely effective, but this current plan ignores the impact of a person’s environment.
The city can create dedicated teams in schools who can respond to individual and community trauma, in place to provide the long-term support we know is necessary because as many as half or more of all mental illness first presents in teens. Importantly, it would also model that mental health is important.
The city won’t have to go it alone. Chicago has many passionate, skilled providers and tireless advocates eager and willing to help. Together we can transform Chicago from a massive waiting room to the model of a progressive, urban mental health wellness system.
In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
He said those words here in Chicago while attending a human rights conference. Health care isn’t optional; it is a moral imperative.
We must think bigger.
Alexa James, a licensed clinical social worker, is the executive director of NAMI Chicago.
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January 22, 2019 at 04:03PM
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