Help More, Judge Less
Kerri Rhodes LPC, LMFT
You see a sex worker who overdosed, bright purple bruises on her face, track marks down her arm, we see a 4-year-old little girl who was sexually abused by her older cousin until she was 14 years old, whose mother regularly beat her and whose father was in jail most of her life. You see a gang member with distribution charges and tattoos covering most of his body, we see a little boy whose parents were 15 and 16 years old when they had him and who was raised in the streets. He watched his father deal drugs and the one thing he said to himself is, “I will never be like my daddy”. You see addicts and criminals and we see people with trauma who the system failed to help long before they got to jail or prison.
America’s Mental Health Crisis
To say we have a mental health crisis in this country is an understatement. Suicide, overdoses, school shootings, mass shootings, relapses, and crime.
Unfortunately, it is every week. It takes a lot to catch our attention because it’s just too much. We are numb and the systems and people who are charged with managing all of it are stretched thin, understaffed, and ill-prepared for what we are facing. Provisional data from the CDC for 2023 shows we are losing 304 people to overdose and 136 to suicide every day. If 440 chipmunks died every day in this country people would be picketing in front of the White House and raising hell. People dying as a result of the mental health crisis is the ‘new normal’. We are numb and the infrastructures designed to treat the problems are overwhelmed and failing us.
I was recently asked in a meeting with a government official, “What is the answer? What is the one thing we can do to fix this?” See that question is
part of the problem, there is no one thing that will fix a complicated public health epidemic. The social stigma and scarce availability of services further complicate an already complicated problem. Add to that the cost of criminalizing and incarcerating those with mental health issues and it feels like shoveling snow in an avalanche.
The system that is meant to help is stretched too thin and people are dying in the holes and gaps. How did things get so bad? Sheriff Karl Leonard, of Chesterfield County, Virginia, is outspoken about our jails being asked to do more and becoming the de facto mental health institutions, or psychiatric hospitals, which were in such a rush to close back in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, the argument for closing psychiatric hospitals was that it was not right to treat those who were mentally ill like criminals. So, we closed those facilities and called for adequate, accessible, community-based treatment facilities instead.
Unfortunately, that never came to fruition—not at the level that was needed. As a result, we started sending mentally ill individuals, who we argued should not have their illnesses criminalized, to jail instead.
H.A.R.P.
In 2016, Sheriff Leonard saw the tenth overdose death in Chesterfield County and decided to do something to help. Eight years later, what started by putting people who wanted recovery on the same pod is now a multi-faceted holistic treatment program that uses any means possible to help people recover from addiction, trauma and mental health issues that are underneath their addiction. Addiction is a problem, but it is not “the problem,” just people’s solution to the problem. I support and understand the need for there to be consequences when someone breaks the law, but I also know that when people fall into the river of addiction we need to go upstream and start to look for answers and prevent people from ever falling in in the first place.
As the Director, Behavioral and Mental Health in the Chesterfield County Jail, I have a front row seat to the cost of incarcerating rather than treating those with mental health issues. Jails should not be where people come to find treatment for mental health issues. But in truth, if we are going to make a dent in this epidemic, we are all going to have to do our part. Sheriff Leonard saw the gaps in the community and created what is now known as the H.A.R.P. (Helping Addicts Recover Progressively) program as his attempt to fill those gaps and save lives. H.A.R.P. is an internationally renowned, holistic treatment program that helps those who struggle with addiction and mental illness recover. Every one of those lives matters and I sadly know the cost of people dying in those gaps. As a mother who lost her son, Taylor, to an overdose in 2019, there aren’t words to describe the depth and pain of such a loss. To think this only happens to those people is naïve and misguided because the truth is we are all those people.
De Facto Mental Health Institutions
Our mental health system—staffed by many wonderful people—is fundamentally broken. That’s not a reflection on the people delivering care, it’s a rebuke on the infrastructure itself. This is no way to treat vulnerable people in crisis. They need help and they should not have to wait days for it.
One issue that greatly contributes is the shortage of competent licensed mental health practitioners. We can throw money at the problem, but unless we have qualified practitioners delivering evidence-based treatments that address the core issues that drive the behaviors we are wasting our time and money. Many current graduates of counseling programs are entering the workforce with very few of the clinical skills they need. We need graduate programs that use the
latest tools for evidence-based treatment for trauma and emotional regulation. What I know from my own trauma, you cannot think your way out of trauma. We need top-down, bottom-up and side-door resources and tools to help people get out of survival mode. Our jails are full of people that have been in survival mode so long that it has become their normal. We see it in the H.A.R.P. Program every day and like many other programs we don’t have the staff to adequately address it but at least we are using tools that protect the body where trauma is stored.
We use cognitive and behavioral tools as resources, but also bring tools like trauma tapping, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing), havening, vagus nerve exercises, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), meditation (M.O.R.E-Mindfulness Oriented Recovery Enhancement), and other somatic tools to the table. There is not just one tool for healing. Everyone’s path is different and they need a tool box full of tools.
As I continue to reflect on the question, “what more do we need to be doing to fix the mental health crisis?,” I ask, how do we fix this in a system that is fragmented, siloed, full of gaps, and stretched beyond its limits? What more do we need to be doing? More is being demanded from our leaders, law enforcement, mental health clinicians, teachers, churches, clergy, etc.
We MUST Do Better, Not More
As someone who has spent the better part of 30 years in the mental health system in private practice, schools, community mental health and corrections, I have a few thoughts and observations about this concept of doing more.
We MUST Do Better, More More long time, because like many others I was marinating in a culture of “never enough” and “do more” and I bought it lock, stock, and barrel. I got on the treadmill and was pretty good at staying on it, until I wasn’t. I marinated my own kids in that marinade. We are seeing an alarming number of people, young and old who are just not okay. We say it’s okay to not be okay, but then don’t teach people what to do when they are not okay. We fail them when they are not okay. We are taught in many of our jobs (first responders, teachers, clinicians, helpers from all walks of life) how to be on high alert or to be “on”. What we are not taught is how to turn that switch off. Why do we need to turn that switch off? Because none of us are meant to be in a state of survival or hyperarousal for very long. If you are in the military or law-enforcement having your head on a swivel and preparing for the worse makes you very good at your job but makes is tough to be a good spouse, parent, or friend if you don’t know how to turn it off. Real connection requires that we aren’t in survival mode. What fires together wires together and for many of us being in a relaxed nervous system is a foreign concept. Not knowing how to turn that off is what makes law enforcement officers more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. It underpins the mental health crisis.
The definition of mental health is the ability to live in a flexible nervous system and calm and connect to our body, mind, and spirit. It doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen that require survival mode or struggle but that we ultimately have the ability to bounce back and find calm. When we are in survival mode we are not connected to our best selves. That is a function of safety, not survival. As children we either do connection or protection. Many of us learn protection early on. The way we define recovery in the H.A.R.P. program has little to do with drug use but is about recovering your true self and the parts of you that you had to give up to survive, like your emotions and the feelings in your body. Addiction is a solution to a problem, as are gambling, pornography, overachievement, shopping, risk-taking, video games, working all the time, over-eating, etc. They are the other faces of addiction that ultimately don’t give us any lasting relief or provide calm for our nervous system.
There is no one fix for the mental health crisis but a part of the solution we should consider is distancing ourselves from the ‘never enough’ marinade our children and our society are soaking in. It is not about more. I think it is about less. Less technology and more nature, less achievement and more connections, less extra-curricular activities, more stillness, less work, more family, less busy-itis, more rest,
less people-pleasing, and more self-care. We need to realize that the answer lies in less. We see the results daily in our schools, neighborhoods, jails, and communities of pushing ourselves and our children to the brink of more, more, more. More is costing us too much.
When I have the honor to sit in rooms where our elected officials and decision makers are looking at this crisis, I hear a great deal of talk about statistics and the monetary cost of the solutions to fill the gaps where people are dying. In 2023, 161,000 people died from overdose and suicide. Every one of those deaths was preventable and they are more than just numbers. They are the people lost to this crisis and they are somebody’s everything. They are the real cost of mental health crisis in this country, and we have got to stop prioritizing politics and profit over people and instead of asking people to do more let’s all find ways to do better because it is going to take all of us working together to fix this. Each one of us needs to ask what we can do to fill the gap like Sheriff Karl Leonard did in 2016. What will be your H.A.R.P.? We are all responsible for being part of the solution. Help more, judge less.
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Kerri Rhodes, LPC, LMFT, is a licensed mental health clinician in Virginia with 30 years of experience, personally touched by the opioid epidemic and fueled by the loss of her son, Taylor. With a powerful message and rapidly growing platform, Kerri is challenging and changing how America treats and addresses mental health, trauma, substance use disorder, and how pain is managed. Her platform has reached schools, prisons, healthcare, and national leaders. Kerri is currently the Director, Behavioral and Mental Health Division in the Chesterfield County Jail and works with the H.A.R.P program, which helps to heal those incarcerated with substance use and mental health issues. For more information, she can be contacted at RhodesK@chesterfield.gov.
References
Overdose deaths continue to rise in the US, reaching another record level, provisional data shows. (2023, September 13). cnn.com. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/health/overdose-deaths-record-april-2023/index.html
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (2023, May 19). Suicide Statistics. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/