I am a licensed professional counselor who works in the ‘greater Atlanta area’ with – at this stage of my career – adults with ‘chronic mental illness’.
Or “persistent mental illness’.
Or ‘devastating mental illnesses that drag people down into poverty for a variety of reasons, not all of them having anything to do with being ill but more due to the ravages of a capitalistic society that does NOT value helping the sick and the poor”.
Yeah… that last one. THAT’s what I do.
I will start by directing your attention to things I have written about mental illness and the absolutely pathetic situation here in Atlanta/Georgia with regards to “personal care homes”:
Keep in mind the ‘stabbing’ story from Snellville, Ga, just about one month and a half ago, wherein an ostensibly ‘properly’ credentialed “house manager’ for a “personal care home” was not consistently providing medication to very sick people who NEED their medication pretty much EXACTLY as the prescription is written, and who created a severely dangerous situation by this negligence. A fight broke out (over cigarettes) and one man stabbed another one in the head. The stabber had been out of meds for maybe 5 days – absolutely dereliction of duty by the “personal care home”. The “care manager” has been charged with negligence and is truly culpable in this easily preventable tragedy.
The ‘care home” situation there in Snellville became SO bad – 80 police visits to that one street alone in 2011 – that the city has suspended the issuing of any new licenses.
A growing number of personal care homes in the city have put a strain on the Snellville Police department because of their high volume of calls for service. This year Snellville Police have been dispatched over 80 times to multiple facilities on Sonya Lane.
The latest call took place on November 26 when officers responded to a report of a stabbing at Best Care of Georgia. Upon arrival, they found a resident stabbed in the forehead after an argument over cigarettes between two patients escalated out of control.
The State of Georgia is scrambling to discharge as many people as possible from long-term psychiatric hospitals and have them “served in the community” by ‘private businesses”, the so-called ‘privatization’ of mental health.
Let me tell you MY perspective on “privatization’ and what it REALLY means: it means some slack, half-assed, semi-criminal individual will set up a half-assed “small business’, rip off employees AND the state to do a half-assed job at taking care of people who are very difficult to care for.
It appears to be the case that ANYBODY with enough cash to buy some crappy old house can do so and put 8, 9, 10 or more mentally ill people in it and systematically take all their money and food stamps. People have to be stabbed in the head or a house burn down with fatalities before this situation is even reported, and then it’s hushed up as soon as possible: a search for incidents at personal care homes in Georgia returns almost nothing and mostly just references to the Snellville stabbing.
Nobody friggin’ cares.
Kim Kardashian isn’t in a PCH being brutalized so what’s to report?
In addition to these abysmal PCH’s, there are a couple of service-oriented scams run by vultures with the apparent complete blessing of the State and Federal Government: Assertive Community Treatment programs and, to some similar extent, Intensive Family Intervention programs. These are “community-based programs’ ostensibly serving people with extreme needs in their community, in their homes. They look really good on paper, a relative fine idea, in theory.
In practice, it’s just more vulture capitalism: half-assed agencies springing up over night, running a scam on both people and the professionals they hire to do these jobs. They manage to mostly meet managed care stipulations for documentation which pays the bills but often are screwing their employees out of a paycheck in order to live their vulturific lifetyles.
The Bridges Center provides mental health services for children ages 3 to 12. They contract with Georgia's Department of Family and Children Services, and are paid by the state's Medicare system.
Employees tell CBS Atlanta they haven't gotten paid, some for months. Every few weeks they say the center has a massive turnover as employees are fired and quit because the center can't pay them.
Workers tell CBS Atlanta News the center terminates case workers just a day or two before their pay checks are due, and may be hiring people in their place who lack qualifications and the proper background checks to enter your home.
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They are upset not only that they haven't been paid, but also that the center has remained open for business in spite of problems they warn may impact not only employees, but the kids they serve too.
I actually interviewed at this place 3 times for a clinical director position in 2009. The pay was sweet and it would have been – so it seemed at the time – a great move for me. However, I didn’t get the job and now, I can see, that was the best choice. I have worked for too many crappy little half-assed agencies which, for whatever reason, utterly failed to pay me ontime correctly and there was always some bullshit surrounding payday.
Managed care agencies police these agencies to ensure they aren’t defrauding Medicaid, which is pretty rampant, really, but these agencies get the notes written a way that auditors like and the auditors have NOTHING to say regarding the agency’s hiring/business practices – they only care about Medicaid’s funds. So these shitty agencies thrive in place of proper businesses.
It’s not like this is a mystery to our ‘elected representatives’: the problem is well-defined and very expensive and it is that expense, of course, that hobbles the process wherein the CORRECT decisions will be made. Now that the business of America is enriching the already filthy rich, we can just forget public funding designed to alleviate suffering, abuse, waste and fraud.
While the data available from the 2007 Consolidated Plan, the Board of Education Homeless Count and the Tri-J Census indicates a need for 1300 supportive housing units, the goal may be adjusted based on new data. To reach this goal, the recommended housing approaches contained in this Plan require an intensified effort to increase the supply of rental stock for very low-income households in DeKalb County. Without an increased investment in affordable housing for people who are paying an excessive amount of their incomes for housing, or are living in unsafe, substandard housing, the demand for high-cost emergency housing and crisis oriented services will not diminish. A significant percentage of these households will become homeless in the next three years. The growing signs of economic recession which customarily have a greater impact on low income persons may push the numbers higher than normally would be the case. New studies are needed to identify the housing available to very low-income persons in the County and determine the gap that exists between need and supply. The survey of weekly stay motels, planned by the DeKalb Department of Community Development, will provide more information on the circumstances of the families attempting to raise their children in motel and hotel rooms, an environment not conducive to childhood. Unless the gaps in the housing continuum are filled, households will continue to lose access to housing and increase the demand for emergency housing and more jail cells.
Note that is from 2007, BEFORE end-stage Reaganism had set in. All that I write about has come after this period. These crappy homes are thriving right now and demonstrating in Technicolor what that bolded bit above warned about.
What needs to happen, of course, is that “journalism” needs to occur, this story/these stories need to be told and Americans need to know such things are going on. Many people tell me “nobody cares”. I think that’s true, but it’s also true, they don’t really know.
Thus I think the one ideal occurrence would be for FOREIGN journalists to be looking into this. “Look what’s happening to these extremely vulnerable people in America”, to see if Americans cannot be shamed into doing something more to protect people and so America can understand that the process of de-institutionalization is merely feeding a nest of vultures right now, people are not being helped – they are being ground down further than they were when they were in some god-forsaken hospital. At least in the hospital there were more people seeing them. Now it’s “out of sight, out of mind” and vultures pick these people clean and don’t give a rat's ass what becomes of them.
However, I think many people reading this would agree this is WRONG and somewhere in that sentiment is a journalistic story that will sell papers, if somebody will just write it and post it..