My View: Understanding needed

By M. LORI SCHNEIDER-WENDT

A letter by Nancy Dos Santos, President of the Tusten Volunteer Ambulance Corps, inviting people to attend a town board meeting to “do something” about the residents of the Narrowsburg Home for Adults, has been circulating through Narrowsburg and was printed in this paper last week.

Ms. Dos Santos’ letter questions why people who “need to be on both medical and psychiatric medications” are allowed to “roam our town without any supervision.” These people are not prisoners, nor are they even inpatients in a hospital. Why shouldn’t they be free to roam around their town? How many people who live in their own homes are on medication—look up the statistics some time of how many people take antidepressants. Should someone monitor their comings and goings? Psychiatric illnesses (such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) are medical illnesses, as real as any other physical illness. They are flaws in chemistry, not character.

Without substantiation, Ms. Dos Santos makes it sound like everyone living at the adult home is a thief, a degenerate, or both, and implies that they are a danger to our children. The question is: are inappropriate behaviors going on in isolated incidents, or are there individuals out in the community engaging in these inappropriate behaviors on a continual basis, with no recourse? If so, something definitely needs to be done—for the good of the town and the reputation of all people recovering from mental illness.

As an EMT myself for the past 20-plus years, I question Dos Santos’ complaint about the Tusten Volunteer Ambulance Corps responding to the adult home for what she calls “non-emergency reasons.” I happen to know of some calls to which the ambulance responded for suicide attempts. Are these not legitimate emergency calls?

Every year, suicide claims approximately 30,000 American lives. Every 42 seconds someone attempts suicide. Any literature you see on suicide describes it as a true emergency and says that a person who is suicidal should never be left alone—but that you should accompany them to an emergency room, or call 911 and stay with the person until help arrives. In Sullivan County, volunteer ambulance personnel are often that help. Should they not be as professional and compassionate for this type of emergency as they are for a cardiac call or a motor vehicle crash? And yet, recent responses to “Kelly’s” have taken two to three times as long as average response times, and some personnel have apparently been surly and inappropriate, complaining that the call is a waste of their time. I was recently asked by the head of the Mobile Mental Health Team in Sullivan County (operated by Rockland Psychiatric Center) to do an in-service training on psychiatric emergencies for the Tusten Volunteer Ambulance Corps, after concerns were expressed by leaders within the corps. The training is set up for late May.

I am distressed to see this letter being circulated now, when many of the issues it brings up will, I trust, be addressed in this training. I hope to educate and sensitize ambulance personnel and anyone else interested to what psychiatric emergencies truly are and how best to deal with them.

You can bet I will be re-arranging my schedule in order to be at the town meeting on May 14.

(M. Lori Schneider-Wendt is the Executive Director of the Sullivan County Mental Health Association/NAMI.)