The crazy NRA aside, the
issues surrounding gun safety are many and varied. In my mind, however, the issue of mental
health programs is paramount. When I was
first was sworn in as a County Supervisor on the first Monday of 1999, the
Mental Health Board of the county was where the Chairmen, and I use that term
advisedly, always assigned the newest Board members who hadn’t a clue what they
were doing to that Mental Health (MH) Board.
In California, there is a state law that requires that a certain number
of members of the MH Board be made up of clients of the services the county
offered. At that time, the clients were
referred to as “consumers”, a term to which I heartily objected. Turning people into economic ciphers really
upset me. One of our County Board
members made the comment one day that these people should just pull themselves
together and get on with their lives. This
did not sit well with me since we have members on both sides of our families
who suffered from mental illness. One is
schizophrenic and the other bi-polar. Obviously
this was an area of county government over which I had a great interest.
A few years before I was
elected one of our daughters and her husband adopted three little girls. The girls were half-sisters. They were from Santa Ana in Orange County,
California, and had lived in a city all of their lives. The first morning they were here on a visit,
one of them got up early with my husband, stared out our window for a long
time, looking at about the 1,000 acres of watershed owned by various ranchers
which could be seen from that window and commented, “Boy, do you have a big
backyard!” We knew the girls had
problems, but assumed that these problems could just be overcome by love from
us. But we learned soon that love was
not enough.
To make a very long story
short, the youngest girl, who had wormed her way into our hearts in a very
special way, on the first day that her parents had left her alone for about 20
minutes, went out into their garage, took a bungee cord, and committed
suicide. She was 11 ½ years old.
Not too long after that,
our Public Health Director started fussing at me that I should attend a
workshop with other county staff at the Children’s Research Triangle in
Chicago, operated by Drs. Ira Chasnoff and Richard McGourty. After some nagging by our Director, I agreed
to go. During that workshop I realized
that what the girls underlying problems were, other than their horrific first
years, was that their birth mother was an alcoholic and substance abuser, and
had been that way through all three pregnancies. The eldest daughter was not as impacted as
the younger girls, and of course, Martha, the youngest suffered the most from
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, or FASD, as a result.
After many years of
organizing, finding funding, and all of the many, many things that were
required, with the county’s help, we opened Martha’s Place on 1/7/2007. Martha’s Place is now the portal where any
child between the ages of 0-5 exhibiting at-risk behaviors or obvious FASD, is
admitted for both physical and emotional evaluations, and then either referred out
into the community for treatment, or if there is nothing, receives treatment
in-house. I am still on the coordinating
committee for Martha’s Place, and it is through my contacts there that I have
come to realize that very small children can suffer from emotional trauma and
mental health problems. Consequently,
when we all became concerned for the younger surviving daughter’s son because
he seemed to be almost at times out of control, we brought him down to Martha’s
Place for an evaluation. His mother, the
younger surviving daughter, has both emotional and mental health issues. Sure enough, our boy had some real anger
problems, at the age of three years. With
appropriate therapy he is progressing nicely and getting his anger under
control.
But what if we didn’t
know what to look for and what to do about what we saw? We shudder to think what he could have become
in ten to fifteen years with all of that anger lurking inside of him. Would he have taken a gun and taken his anger
out on anyone in his chosen location of mayhem?
Maybe not, but then again, maybe yes.
My point in talking about something we know very well, and have
experienced very well, is that in all of the talk about mental health issues,
the major problem is funding.
There should be a
concerted effort to educate women and the men with whom they live, that
drinking during pregnancy is a big no-no.
Some women might be able to metabolize the alcohol without too much
damage to the developing brain, but the horrible part is that the effect on the
developing fetus will not be known until well after birth. This educational effort should be intense and
ongoing, and be on a national scale.
And there should be
enough funding so that every community could have its own, geared to its own
needs, center for the evaluation and treatment of children from 0-5 who exhibit
at-risk behaviors. We tailored Martha’s
Place to our county. With organizing
help, every county in this United States should have their very own Martha’s
Place. After all, there was a concerted
effort to educate people on the dangers of smoking cigarettes, and also of
second-hand smoke from those doing the smoking.
Can we do any less for our children?
That we need to regulate
the sale of weapons, the sale of magazine clips that hold over 6 bullets, and
ban completely the sale of military style weapons is a given. We also need to revise our tax code so that
on a national level we can have the educational program concerning pre-natal
alcohol and substance abuse and its effect on the developing brain, and on the
local level, in every county in this nation, an evaluation and treatment center
for children 0-5 exhibiting these at-risk behaviors.
After all, an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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