CONSUMER AFFAIRS BULLETIN
Volume 4, No. 2 Spring 2000

White House Presentation for the Unveiling of the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health

As a child, I used to sit with my grandmother as she stared at the fire warming her living room. She would rock and stare, and sometimes an impish smile would creep across her face. I loved her deep, infectious laugh. Born Naomi Brewton, her father founded a small University near Vidalia, Ga., that still bears his name. My grandmother attended a women’s college and graduated at the top of her class with a bright future ahead of her. But after giving birth to her youngest child, she experienced mental illness. For all the years that I knew her, no one ever talked about her psychiatric hospitalization, or why she never ventured beyond the fence surrounding her home.

When I was a high school senior in Atlanta, we took a field trip to Milledgeville, the site of Georgia’s infamous state institution known as the “largest insane asylum in the world.” Some 30,000 people have been buried on the hospital grounds since it opened in 1842. We walked through wards and gawked at the patients. I remember feeling shameful to be intruding on these outcasts of society, and concluding that mental illness must be the most horrible thing that could ever happen to a human being.

Never did I imagine that one day I would be four-cornered in the bed of a psychiatric hospital, having people stare at me through a small window in the door. So I think you understand that I’m truly humbled to be here today.

The journey has been a long one, but not without a valuable learning curve. First, I learned about the power of peer support. During my three hospitalizations in the late’80’s, I believed God was communicating with me, and neither my family nor the doctors understood that taking medication was Satan’s plan to undermine my divine mission as a chosen prophet. The more medical professionals tried to force treatment, the more I retreated into madness. The spiral resulted in a brief incarceration in the correctional system; my family and friends intervened and charges were never filed. I pray this report helps spotlight the tragic national trend of criminalization of those of us with mental illness.

The first person to truly reach me was another patient in the hospital who had become a trusting friend. One day he shared with me that he also talked to God, and that taking lithium had actually helped his relationship with the higher power. He encouraged me to give the medication a chance, which I eventually did. The mutual trust and respect of a peer gently opened the door to meaningful dialogue that began the process of self-directed recovery. But let me stress that medication alone could not bolster the overwhelming hopelessness consuming me as I began to realize that I needed help. The first place I found real shelter from the storm was at meetings of the Depressive and Manic Depressive Association, where I bonded with new accepting friends, and found role models who gave me faith that recovery was possible. I learned that I had to stop self medicating with alcohol and drugs. That lesson struck - I have now been clean and sober for nearly 12 years. These critical outcomes that result from self-help, peer support and peer-run services are well documented in the Surgeon General’s Report and will emerge as essential to our recovery in the new millennium.

Also critical to my recovery was having something meaningful to do during the day. A longing for suicide did not begin to fade until I joined the ranks of the employed again. I will always be thankful to the Gainesville Times for hiring me, first as a correspondent, and then as a staff writer. Work is treatment and the Surgeon General’s Report promotes the merits of psycho-social rehabilitation. Allow me to thank this administration for the Work Incentive Bill that recently passed Congress - it will prove critical to supporting our return to employment in the community.

But I suppose most of all, the Surgeon General’s Report and the fortitude of people like Tipper Gore to publicly acknowledge their treatment for mental illness, will have its most significant impact on stigma, so people like my grandmother don’t waste their lives in tortured isolation. For you see, the greatest potential for improvement does not lie in mental health systems, it lies within the individual who has faith that she or he can recover, does recover, and then shares that good news with others. And I believe the Surgeon General’s Report helps carry that message.

Consumer Affairs Bulletin
Volume 4, No. 2 Spring 2000