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 We Need Another Dorothea Dix
by Tom Campbell
January 18, 2007
Dorothea Dix, the daughter of a Massachusetts Methodist minister, was incensed with the treatment of mentally ill patients and became their champion. This tireless advocate brought change to a system that previously did little more than imprison those with mental conditions. Dix helped initiate a new level of care for those with mental illness.
It was not by accident that North Carolina’s primary mental health care facility was named after Dix. This once proud and effective treatment facility has brought hope and treatment to thousands in our state. It is irony that it is due to close in coming months, an action taken as a result of another reform. The new delivery system is designed to provide treatment closer to the homes of those who need the help, however to date the reforms are not working. We should not close Dix or other such facilities until the new delivery system is working better.
Many families experience mental illness. If your family hasn’t, give thanks. Those who have are all too aware of the resultant problems. It is all too obvious that the mentally ill cannot help themselves, nor can they be effective advocates for their treatment. In many cases they do not have the resources with which to pay for the needed care and, in far too many instances, their families are unable to assume the costs.
As a rule, those with mental illnesses have lived with the instability and problems for years. Their families have often exhausted both their financial resources as well as their emotional capital in dealing with them. Even the most loving and sympathetic families often reach a point where they can no longer cope with the constant crises and resultant fallout. They urgently search for answers to help those they love find peace and better health.
Right now these families with mentally ill members are desperate. North Carolina’s statewide hospitals are closing, discharging patients to unknown futures and, in far too many cases, they have nowhere to go. Their families know that allowing the member to come back to live with them will disrupt any semblance of normal life and throw them once more into perpetual turmoil. The patients cannot live alone and acceptable group homes are few and far between. Many of these patients end up on the streets, picked up by law enforcement officers, or relegated to facilities like retirement homes, where staff members are ill-trained to deal with them. In these rest homes their actions may be a threat to others.
We believe our state and local communities as well as health care professionals truly want to help, but don’t know how. Many express frustration that money is spent without acceptable results. Conditions grow worse by the day while well-intentioned people wring their hands and shrug.
North Carolina’s mentally ill need a champion. Patients are in jeopardy. Families are in crisis. Professionals do not have solutions. Local communities do not have resources. And all the while, dollars are being wasted in the name of ineffective reform. In many aspects we are not much farther than when we locked up the mentally ill to protect them from themselves and others, only now we are no longer even containing them. We need another Dorothea Dix to be a catalyst for action. |
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