mental health in the sacramento area

“In 2015, a Sacra­men­to Coun­ty grand jury re­port con­demned the county’s ‘shame­ful lega­cy of ne­glect’ in its fail­ure to pro­vide ad­e­quate ac­cess to men­tal health ser­vices. In 2009, the coun­ty closed the Cri­sis Sta­bi­liza­tion Unit and re­duced the num­ber of beds at its men­tal health treat­ment cen­ter by half, from 100 to 50.”
—Mol­ly Sul­li­van, Sacra­men­to Bee

“The rea­son there’s a lack of men­tal health care in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia is be­cause there is a lack of men­tal health care every­where. • Cur­rent­ly in­di­vid­u­als with an ur­gent men­tal health need go to hos­pi­tal emer­gency rooms wait­ing for hours in a bright, noisy and chaot­ic en­vi­ron­ment. This en­vi­ron­ment is not pre­pared to at­tend to the needs of some­one in a men­tal health cri­sis. Even though men­tal ill­ness con­tin­ues to be high­ly stig­ma­tized it is very com­mon and wor­thy of good care.”
—Di­ana White, Chief Op­er­a­tions Of­fi­cer, Turn­ing Point Com­mu­ni­ty Pro­grams
So this ar­rived to­day:

Oh, good! The ter­ri­fy­ing psych hos­pi­tal where I lived the dark­est ex­pe­ri­ence of my life is hir­ing nurs­es.

Nurs­es.

(I am a web de­sign­er.)

Thanks for that com­plete­ly use­less re­minder, ran­dom job site I used once. Maybe give a girl a trig­ger warn­ing next time.

Fuck.

I have like, 9/10ths of an AA and zero med­ical ex­pe­ri­ence. If I’m qual­i­fied to be a nurse at this place, well … It cer­tain­ly would ex­plain a few things.

Dur­ing my own stay there, I saw nurs­es laugh­ing in a patient’s face as he told them some­thing that – ad­mit­ted­ly, sound­ed like non­sense but – was ob­vi­ous­ly very se­ri­ous to him.

No­body cared that I have an au­toim­mune dis­ease, all my meds were tak­en away and I le­git thought I was go­ing to die.

My mom used to work for the health de­part­ment and, af­ter hear­ing me de­scribe my ex­pe­ri­ence there, de­cid­ed to look them up. This place has hel­la vi­o­la­tions. Here’s an ar­ti­cle, al­beit from a while back. The time frame is from around when I was there.

I could prob­a­bly come up with some more elo­quent words to de­scribe the smeared fe­ces on the wall that wasn’t ever cleaned up, the con­stant ca­coph­o­ny of scream­ing voic­es that one is not al­lowed to even close a door to shut out, the com­plete lack of clocks or win­dows, or how far down a hall I had to walk, off my meds, with chron­ic fa­tigue and aching joints, just to ac­quire a glass of wa­ter … But most­ly I try not to think about it.

Pa­tients were get­ting into phys­i­cal fights. This was the place that was meant to be res­cu­ing me from an abu­sive home en­vi­ron­ment, yet I could not shake the feel­ing of be­ing ac­tu­al­ly in more dan­ger than ever be­fore.

Over break­fast, I asked the stranger sit­ting across from me, “How are you?” He said, “Well, I would tell you but … it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter if I don’t.” I as­sured him that I was not judg­ing – af­ter all, we are sit­ting here in this mad house to­geth­er. But he ex­plained that what he had meant, was that some­one might hear him sug­gest he’s not hap­py, and make him stay longer, and we all have to be care­ful that way. The oth­ers sit­ting at the ta­ble seemed to agree.

Even­tu­al­ly one fig­ures out the only way to leave the hos­pi­tal with some san­i­ty still in­tact, is to tell the staff ex­act­ly what they want to hear. Whether or not you were cared for, all you have to re­al­ly learn is to obey your guards nurs­es.

Learned that from sea­soned pros on the in­side. As in, there WERE sea­soned pros.

Af­ter my ex­pe­ri­ence, I came up with a tagline,
“Sier­ra Vista: If you did­n’t want to kill your­self be­fore, you will now.”

There are so many more sto­ries of this place far worse than mine. Some of which are up on the Hospital’s Yelp page. The con­clu­sion to most of them is sim­i­lar: If you love some­one, don’t let them go to Sier­ra Vista. The place needs to be shut DOWN. But then, where do the peo­ple go? Oh, wait. What’s this?

There is a bea­con of hope right now in the area
for any­one with men­tal ill­ness. Sacra­men­to County’s new Men­tal Health Ur­gent Care clin­ic opened Wednes­day on Stock­ton Blvd., just south of the ⁹⁹⁄₅₀ split. And it’s kin­da free. Kin­da. (Watch the video I’m link­ing to)

Di­ana White (quot­ed above; who has worked hard to get this new clin­ic up and run­ning, and who is also mar­ried to one of our hard­core flom­mists) pro­vides more de­tail:

“A men­tal health ur­gent care pro­vides a way to both sup­port some­one with ur­gent needs and link them to re­sources for on­go­ing care in a calm, quite and com­fort­able en­vi­ron­ment. • The stig­ma of men­tal ill­ness has led to a lack of par­i­ty in treat­ment as well as need­less suf­fer­ing and death. A men­tal health ur­gent care open to any­one of any age nor­mal­izes the need and pro­vides an easy front door to help.”

This is soo cool – and lit­er­al­ly, they have a front door. It’s in the pic­tures in this ar­ti­cle and video.

And for you lo­cals, here’s a a MAP.

Peo­ple with “brain shit” – as Steve Mehal­lo so grace­ful­ly puts it (for lack of a bet­ter term ’cause he feels just ‘de­pres­sion’ or most clin­i­cal lan­guage isn’t strong enough) – need to be cared for.

Not locked up, or thrown away, or some­how forced into an en­vi­ron­ment as vi­o­lent as the one they just left.

And the more things hap­pen – like this clin­ic – the more we try to un­der­stand how our minds work, and ap­proach crises with real-world com­pas­sion rather than made-up, to­tal­ly-not-based-in-sci­ence bu­reau­crat­ic rules that mean lit­er­al­ly noth­ing, the bet­ter hu­man be­ings we can be.

I don’t know any­thing about this new place, but there’s a fair chance it will be do­ing some­thing more pro­duc­tive than tak­ing some­one with se­vere prob­lems and putting them on lock­down in a place that (ap­par­ent­ly) hires un­em­ployed art school dropouts as nurs­es.

Don’t drink that Kool-Aid.

I think a home­less guy’s beard got in it.

—bwargh von mod­nar

Flom­mist Bwargh von Mod­nar is. Copy­right © 2017 Bwargh von Mod­nar. Top im­age ruth­less­ly swiped from Ex­plod­ing Dog. Thanks to Di­ana and Don for their help with this piece.‬

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