Less than a week after my first New Year’s in New York, there were newspaper headlines about a subway pusher, Andrew Goldstein. He was arrested for pushing Kendra Webdale in front of a subway train that took her life. Later that year, The New York Times Magazine ran a special edition featuring Michael Winerip’s exposé, “Bedlam on the Streets,” which exposed the mental health system that had failed Goldstein, and consequently, Webdale.
I had just moved to New York from DC, where I had spent the previous two years working at the international headquarters of The Nature Conservancy in the Latin American Division. While I was there I wrote grant proposals to encourage donors to provide funds and continue doing so to support nature preserves in the Andes and Southern Cone. Once in New York, I looked for opportunities to “transfer my skills,” and before long, began working for a small PR agency that mainly represented large non-profit organizations.
One of the leading mental health groups was my primary account and our assignment was to establish them as the leading patient advocacy group in the country for people with mental illness. We created a campaign to expose the stigmatization of people with mental illness. In my entry level position, each morning my task was to “monitor the media.” So, every day the first thing I did was scour the internet and comb through print editions of major newspapers for articles that touched on mental illness and alerted my client to the tone and content of the articles. We identified when there was a significant opportunity for our client to make a comment on an issue affecting people with mental illness and worked with journalists to ensure a quote from a representative of the organization was included in their story.
Goldstein’s trial was cause for a media frenzy and our efforts for our client were tireless. In the end, the divisive case ended in a hung jury and society was no more the wiser about the real issues of why something like that had happened, nor how to prevent it from happening again.
In 1953, there were 93,000 patients in New York’s state mental hospitals; at the time Kendra Webdale was killed, the number was 6,000 and dropping. The deinstitutionalization of the mental health system has largely become the burden of the prison system, with the cities’ streets and homeless shelters doubling as waiting rooms.
Not long after “Bedlam on the Streets,” another journalist wrote about deinstitutionalization as it began to take hold around the world. He had traveled the world, conning his way into mental institutions, smuggling in a video camera to document the insane state of those mental health systems. By exposing the conditions, that for centuries had been acceptable institutions for treating the mentally ill, he hoped the world might learn from the mistakes we had made and instead of transferring the burden to their prison systems—or in many cases, to the patients’ families—develop an approach that provides mental health care that enables people with mental illness to be part of society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/asia/11psych.html
Du Bin for The New York Times
Wu Xiaoyu, 20, holding a photo of her brother, 8-year-old Wu Junpei. The boy was killed by Yang Jiaqin, a mentally ill man who failed to receive adequate treatment.
“Life in Shadows for Mentally Ill in China” in the November 10th edition of The New York Times is a quick snapshot of the current mental health system in China, or the appalling lack of one. It is also as an eerie reminder of Winerip’s article—on the dangerous and sometimes fatal consequences—of society’s continued marginalization of people with mental illness.
As I look back on the work I did more than a decade ago I remember at the time being impressed by the grassroots awareness efforts of family and friends personally affected by mental illness. They did so with letter-writing campaigns and rallies. Today, as trusted advisors, we have the power of real-time communications and social media channels to help shape the agenda and public discussion to create awareness and drive action around important public health issues.
