My nonprofit organization Helping Hands Hawai‘i provides a wide array of services, to children, to immigrants, and to families in need. For all of our programs, we receive a combination of government and private funding. In my eight years as
My nonprofit organization Helping Hands Hawai‘i provides a wide array of services, to children, to immigrants, and to families in need. For all of our programs, we receive a combination of government and private funding. In my eight years as executive director I’ve learned that among all of our programs, the generosity of individual donors tends to diminish when it comes to our programs for the seriously mentally ill. While this is one of the most important things we do, many people still can’t bring themselves to make a contribution to this worthy cause.
Why are we still embarrassed and shamed by mental illness? Words once used to signify hostility to all sorts of people are no longer acceptable in speech or writing. Michael Richards blew up his career as a comedian when he stepped over that line. And yet some still think nothing of making fun of someone with words like “crazy”, “psycho”, or “nut job”.
We aren’t embarrassed anymore by the most intimate aspects of a person’s life being discussed on a talk show or on the Internet. We are still embarrassed however by the sight, or thought of mental illness. There are more than 15,000 mentally ill adults in Hawai‘i. Ignoring this fact or avoiding eye contact with the strange-acting man on the street does nothing to lessen the impact of this problem. Our response to mental illness is in fact a big part of the problem. These people are our neighbors, our coworkers, our classmates, and our friends. Think about that the next time you hear someone tell a joke about a “crazy” person.
Many of the most seriously mentally ill adults in the state of Hawai‘i have no housing. Those nonprofit agencies that take care of adults with mental illness are spending most of their time trying to find an apartment or house that is suitable for these folks. As head of one of those agencies, I see this struggle every day. In the last 10 years, the housing problem has only gotten worse. A person with severe mental illness doesn’t stand a chance of recovery or living a functional life without basic stability and physical health.
We got into this fix more than fifty years ago when movies like the “Snake Pit” led to public outrage over the conditions in state run institutions. The desire on the part of mental health professionals and the public to move away from the idea of locking people up in an insane asylum was the driving force behind the community out-patient approach to treating the mentally ill. Good idea. Only one problem – we never built the facilities.
But putting the mentally ill out on the street to fend for themselves is immoral, a practice of a civilization that has lost its moorings. We need to fund apartments, houses and rooms to house these people, to ensure that those suffering from with schizo- affective disorder, paranoid delusions, or bipolar disorder don’t have their problems compounded by sleeping in the rain or not being able to put food in a refrigerator.
If you dislocate your shoulder, you go to a doctor. If you have a migraine, you take a pill, but many people with mental illness wallow in silence, shame, and confusion. We can all help by understanding that mental illness is just that — an illness that can be treated, just like a sore knee, the flu, or a headache. Maybe the source of our embarrassment and avoidance of the mentally ill is rooted in our own fear of mental illness. We need to get over it.
• Brian Schatz is the former chairman of the Hawai‘i Democratic Party.
