By T.J. Ray

Columnist

 

From 26 July 2011

 

My email brought a cute cartoon recently. It showed a small family room with a huge elephant standing in it. One character said to the other, “I told you there was one in the room.” 

As the hour hand on the clock in the Emergency Room inexorably crept toward 12, the doctor at the desk rapidly looked up phone numbers and made calls. His message each time was to ask if the facility on the other end of the line had room to admit a new patient that night.

No one said yes.

About 11:45 he called a number a second time, the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. This time the answer made him smile, and he started making arrangements to get the patient transported. Just after midnight, the ambulance left BMH-NM going south. 

This good doctor was caught in a terrible Catch-22. The hospital had no facility for holding a psychiatric patient overnight. At that terribly witching hour, the family had two choices if the doctor had failed to find a medical facility willing to take the patient—take the patient home or call the sheriff to have the person locked up in the county jail. In some jails such a person is housed in live general population. In some, the person enjoys a private cell but has all clothing removed for safety reasons. And the jail sentence is in force until the chancery clerk and sheriff release the person. Sometimes that takes days. 

The elephant in our community living room is mental illness. Families that must cope with real psychiatric agonies are legion. I’m not talking about adolescent movie stars who check into clinics as casually as they change clothes. I’m talking about mothers and fathers straining to make life bearable for a child who is bipolar. I have in mind adults who must somehow survive schizophrenia while trying to make a living for their families. And there are the very sad folks who simply can’t cope in our mad world and try to end their lives by their own hands. Meet any of these fragile individuals on the street or in a store and you wouldn’t have a clue to the desperation in their lives.

This elephant has many trunks. The saddest aspect of all this is that there is no public keeper charged with taking care of them. Oh, there are a few facilities around the State, but the Governor has moved steadily to eliminate much of the care and hope they provided.  And space is severely limited already.  Local hospitals tend to look through the elephant because treating him is an expensive undertaking. And, besides, he isn’t as glamorous as the latest techno surgery procedure. 

In our community, most folks with mental illness are forced to go out of town for help.

And that is totally true if they need hospitalization. Perhaps, hopefully, maybe, just possibly someday an ER doctor in Oxford will not have to develop a phone-ear while trying to help a patient before midnight.