Andrew Sawyer, Director
TW: Suicide Attempt
Thirty. Without pulling public records to verify, that’s the unofficial count my wife and I have of the number of 911 calls to locations across Fuquay-Varina before my sons entered residential care. For a while, it seemed like an initiation ritual for officers to respond to psychiatric crises at the Sawyer home, or restaurant, or parking lot, or wherever it chose to happen.
Introducing Our Story
No parent ever asks to raise a child with mental illness. No child ever asks to have it. When our adoption from foster care was nearing completion, we were told in passing they had some predispositions to mental illness in their birth family history. It didn’t become our reality until a Spring Day in 2019 when my son left home with a bag full of knives intending to find a solitary place to end his life. Why? “The Voice” in his mind told him to kill yourself.
Thankfully an officer found him a few miles from home very quickly and had him safely transported for evaluation. Doubt and worry flooded our minds, not only about his health, but about our entire family. Would child services come and take our kids? Would we be in trouble? Will he be ok? The drive to Raleigh was excruciatingly long. That afternoon was a four-chair-turn to a whole new life, which included his two brothers destabilizing over the following months, as mental illness usually wakes up in puberty.
Hope Is Here
While we didn’t have a treatment facility close by, families in southern Wake County now have a valuable and rare resource right here in town. The Hope Center, a partnership between Medicaid management entity Alliance Health and Kidspeace opened on June 5.
It provides a safe place for children and adolescents in mental health crises to receive evaluation and treatment. Also, it houses a regional mobile crisis program that responds to homes during a crises, reducing the likelihood that a child will need to visit a hospital or crisis facility for treatment.
The Hope Center is a game-changer for parents like us, that for so long operated in survival mode and had to navigate a very complicated and disrupted system of care. Our experiences over the past 10 years led us to create SHHIP to support other families experiencing crisis and advocate for improvements to the system.
I believe that centers like this should exist in every county and every metro area. Just as emergency rooms are invaluable for saving lives for physical ailments, crisis stabilization centers also save lives. They provide a place for emergency mental health care without overburdening hospitals that were never equipped to deal with physical and mental health.
Wild Wild West
But while this should be regarded as a jewel in our region’s medical crown, just like the world-renowned medical facilities at WakeMed, Duke and UNC Health, I fear that for many government leaders and decision-makers, places like this are a thorn in their prioritization lists because they don’t have first-hand experience with the impact these facilities have in families like ours.
If the mental health landscape today were compared to the American West of the 1800s, then The Hope Center is truly an outpost. There are a few stagecoach trails, narrow, bumpy and unreliable connecting paths to loosely connected treatment options. There is no real rail network or major even cities, like the major integrated systems of care that resemble our current physical health systems. These don’t even appear on the horizon yet.
It seems the impetus for doing something in our country about childhood mental health/mental illness crises has developed only recently. Parents who have been navigating this space for years can tell you, we’ll believe it when we see it.
Many of the programs that we rely on for care are subject to the ups and downs of the economy, with grants and nonprofit organizations bearing the heavy lift for services.
As anyone who has ever played The Oregon Trail can tell you, longevity in the Wild Wild West wasn’t a sure thing. With the political winds as blustery as ever, there’s not much confidence in even things that seem like a slam dunk. Take UNC Wakebrook, the county’s only other alternate crisis stabilization facility as an example. What was once touted as a model of care faced an uncertain future this Spring until a funding increase was passed by the Board of Commissioners.
Let’s Show Support
In comparison to other locations, we in Wake County have been spoiled. Families that SHHIP supports in other regions must solely rely on the overburdened local hospitals. Many don’t have a have a mental health clinician on site leaving parents of children in crisis to wait hours if not days in the triage area to receive care, missing vital health observations that can be gathered while a child is in crisis.
In terms of bringing mental health care to equity with physical healthcare, we as a society are just scratching the surface. Let’s celebrate what will hopefully be a pillar of Fuquay-Varina’s infrastructure for many years to come. It’s a place of treatment, care and of course, hope. But we must also know that to flourish, we must all rally and support it.
If you are a parent who has a child or adolescent with severe mental health concerns, please know that you don’t have to walk this journey alone. We are here to support you and advocate for you. Reach out today and let us have the privilege of walking alongside you and your family.
shhip.net 