I am both a former Rockaway resident and served as Director of Staff Development at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center for fifteen years. This thread covers lots of stuff I care about deeply, even from my long time home in South Florida.
The Rockaways had (during my time at Creedmoor when I lived in Belle Harbor) the highest concentration of discharged psychiatric patients living in residential facilities in the country. Most of these people were more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Their disabilities that prevented them from resuming independent lives made them vulnerable to exploitation by organizations and individuals. Some of the medications they consumed to allow their discharge from the hospital had severe physical side effects and almost all of the medications did not address the constellation of so-called negative symptoms that constituted lost capacity needed for effective daily living. This is a huge topic with which I am still involved so I will move on to my next point with my usual brag about my wife who is a clinical psychologist and who for fifteen years ran a peer support group for discharged schizophrenia patients holding full time jobs that continued even after she moved on to direct a clinic in Westchester.
My next point is to restate the essential part of the dog and pony show that my late former boss at Bronx Psychiatric Center, Leroy Carmichael, and I would run at many different venues. I was at Creedmoor and he was Executive Director of Elmhurst Hospital Center when the consequences of the non-accountability associated with the Community Mental Health Centers Act passed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination became fully manifest. The law was so poorly written that almost all of the funds went to people's pet projects on the "worried well" rather than to effective aftercare for the thousands of psychiatric patients finally regaining some freedom after the introduction of phenothiazine based medications and scandals about mistreatment of the mentally ill in "warehouses of shame." It was a commission under the leadership of First Lady Rosalyn Carter that recommended cutting off funding to the Community Mental Health Centers Act which in it self is indicative of how bad things were; i.e. a Democratic President shutting down a supposed health care program because it wasn't doing what it was intended to do.
The consequences of that mis-expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars is still felt today, both in lack of services and distrust of providers wanting to innovate new services for folks with mental illness. When Covid finally dissipates to the point that person to person encounters are fully safe, the interested and adventurous on this board might want to find out about "The Living Museum", a program on the Creedmoor grounds that empowers recovering artists. There are in fact lots of things that work but the misdeeds of the past make it very difficult to get past NIMBY and funding obstacles.
The Rockaways had (during my time at Creedmoor when I lived in Belle Harbor) the highest concentration of discharged psychiatric patients living in residential facilities in the country. Most of these people were more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Their disabilities that prevented them from resuming independent lives made them vulnerable to exploitation by organizations and individuals. Some of the medications they consumed to allow their discharge from the hospital had severe physical side effects and almost all of the medications did not address the constellation of so-called negative symptoms that constituted lost capacity needed for effective daily living. This is a huge topic with which I am still involved so I will move on to my next point with my usual brag about my wife who is a clinical psychologist and who for fifteen years ran a peer support group for discharged schizophrenia patients holding full time jobs that continued even after she moved on to direct a clinic in Westchester.
My next point is to restate the essential part of the dog and pony show that my late former boss at Bronx Psychiatric Center, Leroy Carmichael, and I would run at many different venues. I was at Creedmoor and he was Executive Director of Elmhurst Hospital Center when the consequences of the non-accountability associated with the Community Mental Health Centers Act passed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination became fully manifest. The law was so poorly written that almost all of the funds went to people's pet projects on the "worried well" rather than to effective aftercare for the thousands of psychiatric patients finally regaining some freedom after the introduction of phenothiazine based medications and scandals about mistreatment of the mentally ill in "warehouses of shame." It was a commission under the leadership of First Lady Rosalyn Carter that recommended cutting off funding to the Community Mental Health Centers Act which in it self is indicative of how bad things were; i.e. a Democratic President shutting down a supposed health care program because it wasn't doing what it was intended to do.
The consequences of that mis-expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars is still felt today, both in lack of services and distrust of providers wanting to innovate new services for folks with mental illness. When Covid finally dissipates to the point that person to person encounters are fully safe, the interested and adventurous on this board might want to find out about "The Living Museum", a program on the Creedmoor grounds that empowers recovering artists. There are in fact lots of things that work but the misdeeds of the past make it very difficult to get past NIMBY and funding obstacles.
