Burgetta Eplin Wheeler: September 2016

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Aug. 12, 2016: Damaged by a dysfunctional system and determined to change it

This originally appeared in the news & Observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

In our state, an inmate with severe bipolar disorder can spend 4,800 agonizing days in a row – 13 years! – in solitary confinement.

In our state, a 5-year-old child in mental distress can endure more than 240 hours – 10 days! – in an emergency department waiting for a psychiatric bed.

In our state, Donna Kay Smith’s son can be committed four times in seven months because a hospital won’t keep him long enough for his medicine to work. And Tim and Dawn Woody’s daughter can be forced to enter a 23rd mental health facility, this one 800 miles away, because no affordable therapeutic communities exist here to ease her transition back to life after a psychiatric event.

Smith, the Woodys and scores of other North Carolinians scarred by our dysfunctional mental health care system have had enough. They are channeling their outrage into creatingStand By Me NC, an all-volunteer nonprofit they vow will not be ignored by those with the power to create a better system.

July 7, 2016: After an overdose, out of the ER into the rain

This column originally appeared in the news & Observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

Darkness was creeping over the rainy April evening when Dawn and Tim Woody got the call that their 24-year-old daughter had overdosed and been taken to a Wake County emergency department.

Frantic, the couple headed toward Raleigh from their home in the far reaches of Apex. On the way, Tim called WakeBrook to see whether the mental health facility had a bed for their child, whose bipolar disease manifests itself in substance abuse, cutting and an eating disorder. WakeBrook was full.

At the hospital, the Woodys found their incapacitated daughter on a bed in the emergency department with no privacy curtains pulled. A doctor explained that, though her vital signs were abnormal, their daughter was having a mental health event, not a medical one, and he would send the mental health counselor on duty.

The counselor arrived with three stapled packets. “Holly Hill is behind us, WakeBrook is across the street and then there’s Butner,” Dawn remembers the counselor saying.

Are there any beds?

We don’t know.

Is this all you are going to do?

We don’t offer detox here.

You’re going to give her these sheets of paper and let her walk out into the rainy night? What if her parents weren’t here?

We don’t offer detox here.

How would she get to Butner?

We don’t provide transportation or detox here.

As the Woodys’ disbelief and agitation mounted, a call came from WakeBrook to Tim’s cellphone. A bed had opened up, but they would have to come immediately. It’s first-come-first-served, and in North Carolina innumerable people in distress are always waiting. They grabbed their daughter and ran.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is your mental health system at work.

June 9, 2016: Stomping on the dreams of deserving students

This column originally appeared in the News & Observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

He should be waking up Friday, the day after his Wake County high school graduation, joyfully anticipating college in the fall, with admission to a Division III school in hand, a football position secured, a financial aid package all set.

On his resume are honor roll student, football team captain, Academic All Conference, N.C. Scholar Athlete.

This is a young man who worked throughout high school as a referee for youth sports, who spent his steamy Carolina summers laboring in construction with his dad. A phenomenal kid, conscientious, dependable, honest.

Every rule he could choose to follow, he has done so without complaint.

What he didn’t choose was to come to the United States at age 4 illegally with his parents.

Yet so many among us want to punish him for it.

May 12, 2016: In Europe, mayo mayhem, heroic hips and Donald Trump

This column originally appeared in the News & Observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

Only one thing could be worse than mechanics finding a fuel leak after hundreds of people have already wrestled their suitcases, snacks and security-weary surliness onto a jetliner and settled into ridiculous seats for an eight-hour flight across the ocean:

Their not finding it.

That’s the lesson in perspective that kicked off my recent once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe with my best friend, her husband and my guy.

Clearly, having to disembark like deflated cattle and spend 72 minutes talking to an airline representative only to have to go home and travel the next day was somewhat preferable to running out of gas over the Atlantic, even with an added stop and a six-hour layover in Chicago.

Perspective, in fact, like the wine and pasta, was plentiful on our 17-day journey to Italy and France. I also learned:

1 Large hips can save the day. At a stop in Madrid’s airport on the way to Venice, the doors to a train that would take us to a far-flung terminal were closing with two of us still on the escalator outside. “I’m not leaving here without them,” I shouted as I jutted my hip into the opening until my friends were safely inside. Forced at our stop to sprint to the gate, we realized that, without my heroic hips, we wouldn’t have made it in time.

2 Our national irritation – restaurant tipping – has its plus side. Initially, not having to add 20 percent to every bill was nice. Then we realized that meant there was only one seemingly well-paid waiter per 37 tables who had no incentive whatsoever to take our mangled order. Wait. Polpo is octopus? I meant pollo. Pollo! Chicken!

3 No wonder Europeans drink alcohol with everything. Asking for water at a restaurant meant buying a fancy bottle of it, so we reasoned that we might as well spring for water made with grapes or barley and hops instead. Although:

April 7, 2016: Depression confession elicits support, stories, suggestions

This column originally appeared in the news & observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

In conversations with editors about whether I had weighed every possible negative consequence of publishing a column confessing to living with clinical depression, someone asked whether I had considered how it might affect my significant other because he’s a public school teacher.

Insert every known exclamation of astonishment here. And then a couple more.

Affect him how? Would it affect him negatively if I had written about having cancer?

That such a question would arise only reinforced the importance of trying to address the stigma in that column that was published March 11. Any shred of hesitancy I might have had about sharing my struggles disappeared.

Sharing, I’m happy to say, begets sharing. Almost 200 neighbors reached out to offer suggestions, support and their own stories. Please listen to a few of them:

▪ I understand the darkness that just comes from nowhere and at anytime. I often feel that I just do not measure up to everyone else. I constantly feel that I have failed to meet up to some unrealistic expectations that I set for myself. I always seem to fall just a little short of being the “best.” … The more people are educated about this, the more understanding comes. ... It is my hope and desire that as people are more educated about this illness that it will become less of a stigma. People will think of it no differently as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer.

▪ Every word resonated. For me, it was: You are such a burden. I was four. And my mother was “sorry” she ever had me. That was because her worthless husband, my abusive father, left her. Before I was four. We can be “successful.” We can’t escape. All my life, my “success” has felt like I’m just fooling everyone.

March 11, 2016: Confessions from the ashes of depression

This column originally appeared in the news & Observer:

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BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

The question was innocent enough.

“Would you like a tour?”

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. My God, you are so stupid.

I had just spent a few anxious minutes in the lobby of WakeBrook waiting to interview the mental health facility’s director for a column I was writing. Behind thick glass, a young woman with unwashed hair had been sitting in a plastic chair, her eyes red from crying, her possessions visible in a clear bag beside her.

I had a bag like that once.

Warm socks. A pen denuded of its potentially lethal casing. A Sudoku book, minus the staples.

Did I want a tour? I stood in the hallway paralyzed you are so stupid imagining the rooms, the sounds, the smells. Certainly WakeBrook would be very much like Holly Hill Hospital, out of which I had carried that bag almost exactly five years before.

With a puzzled smile, the doctor finally just pointed me toward his office. I spent an hour trying not to look him in the eye, sure that he would see that every cell in my body yearned to take a tour, commandeer a bed and never leave it.

Clinical depression is exhausting.

Twice in the past few months, The N&O’s front page has been overtaken by the sorrow of suicide: a beautiful UNC-CH graduate and a BMX star. Twice last week, someone leapt into eternity from an overpass in Charlotte.

The healthy among us find it unfathomable. What could possibly be so bad? We of the broken brains completely, sadly understand, though just as Tolstoy said every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, undoubtedly every unwell person is unwell in his own way.

Sometimes, you just get tired of being here. You are so stupid. There is no escaping your own mind.

Feb. 11, 2016: Finding a path through North Carolina’s mental health morass

This column originally appeared in the News & Observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

With each repetition, Donna Smith’s voice softens, but her hands constrict more tightly into fists.

“It is hell. It is hell. It is hell. It is …” – she reaches for another word, but there simply isn’t a better one – “hell.”

That’s her assessment of North Carolina’s mental health care system after being trapped inside it with her 31-year-old son, diagnosed as bipolar with psychotic features.

To Rick Brajer, the secretary for the state Department of Health and Human Services, the system is scattered and disorganized.

To Brian Sheitman, medical director of the WakeBrook mental health campus in Raleigh, it’s fractured and misfocused.

“The system is obsessed with access, but you rarely hear about quality,” Sheitman said. “We don’t know what that is or how it’s really working. The data systems don’t exist.”

Finding in the mental health morass some solid ground on which to build an exemplary system feels more daunting than colonizing Mars.

Jan. 7, 2016: Frantic and fearful, one mother’s ordeal to stave off a tragedy

This column originally appeard in the news & observer:
BY BURGETTA EPLIN WHEELER

The last time Donna Smith’s son disappeared, a police officer in Oklahoma found him incoherent in his truck, unable to give his name but adamant that he was an agent sent by Israel to investigate fracking irregularities.

On the seat beside him was a collection of kitchen knives; behind him, a samurai sword; beneath him, a pellet gun.

“Don’t hurt my son. Don’t hurt my son,” Smith remembers pleading with the officer, who had gone through her son’s phone and called numbers until reaching her. “He’s mentally ill.”

This is the fear that haunts Smith unceasingly, that a law enforcement officer or a store clerk or a neighbor will encounter her 31-year-old defiant and delusional son, be confused or enraged by his bizarre behavior and harm or even kill him.

“And I’m not just thinking about my son,” she said. “What an unconscionable position to put a police officer in, having to make a split decision on whether this person is in need of medical treatment, or is dangerous, or both.”

If there’s one person in North Carolina who should be able to navigate the mental health system to get a severely ill son the help he needs to be safe, it’s Smith.

The Raleigh woman has a master’s degree in rehabilitative counseling and a master’s of divinity. She spent 12 years working on involuntary commitments with the Chapel Hill Police Department. Her husband is a lawyer.

Yet for the past seven months, Smith has careered from crisis to crisis with her son, and the unrelenting ride isn’t over. For the third time since being found in Oklahoma, he has been involuntarily committed.