MDCH promotes its plan for CMH agencies

Last night, March 25th, 2009, the Michigan Department of Community Health held a meeting in Lansing for consumers, families, and advocates about the “Application for Renewal and Recommitment to Quality and Community”. This is not a religious manifesto, but a bureaucratic nightmare being visited on local Community Mental Health agencies under the guise of giving more control to people using mental health services.

This judgment may seem harsh, considering the amount of time, energy, and expense that went into writing the A.R.R., as it is called, but the document reveals little, while hiding much about the pickle we are in as a state in economic free-fall. It is like presenting a plan to improve life in Detroit without acknowledging that the unemployment rate is over 22%.

Community Mental Health agencies are being asked to expand services, to expand the numbers of consumers served, and to improve the quality of services without sufficient support from the state other than the admonition to local agencies that they should achieve more administrative efficiencies. Long-standing inequities in per-capita funding among Community Mental Health Agencies are not addressed.

CMH’s are given their marching orders, however:

“It is expected that, as one of the highest priorities, public mental health agencies will actively assist adults served to obtain competitive work in integrated settings and provide the supports and accommodations that are necessary.”

No, this is not a cruel joke. This is your state at work, oblivious to the extraordinarily high unemployment rates among disabled and mentally ill citizens, even in good times and even for those who are willing and able to work. The MDCH might as well be scattering pixie dust on Community Mental Health agencies to wish the problems away.

Families of people with severe developmental disabilities should store up some reserves for the battles ahead. The government-funded advocacy groups that have had the ear of our elected officials and our state agencies for far too long, are ready to help the state dismantle and eliminate all so-called “disability-only” programs. Programs designed specifically to help and support severely disabled people in their communities conflict with the advocates philosophy that everyone can and will be fully integrated into the community no matter how severe the disability or how high the risk to life and limb. Group homes and other residential facilities, center-based school programs, social and recreational activities, respite care, sheltered workshops – all are targets.

With the cover and support the advocacy groups give to the state, the state will be in the enviable position of slashing necessary programs in the name of “doing the right thing” for people with disabilities.