Christmas At The Mental Hospital

Have you ever had an idea to volunteer for a small charitable cause and have it snowball into a huge endeavor such that halfway through you wanted to give up the whole thing?

Actually, while I felt those feelings several times during this adventure, I really wanted to figure out how to post about this without tooting my own horn*.

Warning: this is going to be a pretty long post so if you’re just drifting through, go read "Gigglewood Indeed" or "Red Hat Society = Women Gone Wild"

After attending a 40hr Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) academy in September, which trained me to more efficiently, effectively, and compassionately provide services for mental health consumers, I was all fired up to use my new techniques.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I’d be talking on the phone to runaway juveniles and find out they were on a certain mental health drug and ask them how it was working for them, etc. It gave me a whole new bag of tricks and it’s amazing how a little actual knowledge, a little genuine sympathy, and some newfound compassion enabled me to connect with callers in a whole new positive way.

One in four people will either suffer themselves with a mental illness or will have a family member suffer from a mental illness. People don’t like to talk about it. Most people will not “out” themselves. It’s a situation full of fear and shame. (I will point out that bloggers are not normal people and that many of my favorite bloggers and visitors to my own little section of the bloggosphere know a lot about mental illness from many different vantage points, so this is probably not new information to anyone).

But it shocks and amazes consumers and families of consumers who call the police for help when I can pronounce "schizoaffective disorder," let alone know what it is. It opens so many doors. For this reason I have found that my CIT training and membership in the Crisis Intervention Team has greatly increased my ability to serve the public.

So then I had this idea in October: Dispatch usually “adopts” a Salvation Army family or two for the holidays. Why couldn’t the CIT Dispatchers sponsor a mental health consumer and their family?

In this effort I contacted the president of the local chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, who paid for a lot of our CIT training and is basically the AA of mental health – raising awareness, hosting support group meetings for consumers and parents of consumers, etc. She told me that she didn’t know of any specific families that needed Christmas gifts and that those families might very well fall under the Salvation Army’s program too.

She countered with another idea: Why don’t we together (NAMI and CIT) adopt the long-term unit of the local state mental hospital? Most of these folks have few or no family members who visit them and therefore get no gifts. The trick was that it meant providing gifts for 22 people.

Great! Fantastic! Super (thanks for asking)!

And then the work started. I began by shaking down my coworkers for donations. Unfortunately several competing charities were also doing shakedowns: One coworker was working hard to Adopt A Soldier; another was collecting donations for a police officer and his family in Metlakatla, Alaska, who had a woodstove blow up, injuring the officer and burning down their house. These were all very worthy causes. Shakedown number one drummed up $80.

This was not the response I wanted but was about as much as I should have expected. I was on the verge of just giving up and handing back the money to the donors. Then my contact at NAMI threw me a curve and came up with corporate sponsorship: a local mall had $250 worth of gift certificates waiting for us. Oh crap. Now I'm committed.

(Adopting a mental hospital. Committed. Get it? Oh I crack myself up sometimes.)

Then a very dear coworker completely reinvigorated me. It could be done, it should be done, and we could do it. Yay Team!

Then another dear coworker went shopping with me at Wal-Mart. She was a killer Wal-Mart shopper. It was amazing to find out how much really inexpensive but fairly good quality stuff there is out there for sale. Say what you will about how Wal-Mart has destroyed mom and pop businesses and how really inexpensive but fairly good quality stuff is probably made by near-slave labor overseas, but I can only handle on charitable cause at a time here folks.

Then I sent one more shakedown letter to my dispatch coworkers explaining what we had purchased and how much I had spent of my own money (about $180 at that point). I stated clearly that my family would not go hungry but if anyone had been sitting on the fence about donating, the time was at hand to make a decision.

My coworkers came through with an additional $225. Yay Team again!

So on December 23^rd (Seinfeldian Festivus Observed) the reinvigorating coworker and I representing CIT** and two NAMI representatives delivered 23 gift bags (without the string handles) and got to present them personally to everyone in the long-term unit. We even had enough left over to give everyone in the "forensic unit" a gift bag. "Forensic Patient" means "criminally insane." These wouldn’t be my first choice of patients to support but, hey, they probably get even less gifts and visitors and it's Christmas darn it!

Each gift bag contained:

A winter hat
A pair of comfy socks with the gripper bumps on the bottom
A happy little calendar
A tube of chapstick
A deck of playing cards
A pack of washable felt tip markers
A pad of paper (glue bound, not spiral bound)
A small chocolate marshmallow santa
A larger hollow chocolate santa

Ladies also got: a cute sock coin purse
a Christmas beanie baby bear
a pair of stretchy knitted gloves

Men also got: a small LCD game
a puzzle
a pair of Old Navy winter gloves

Things I learned:

Santa does not drive a Hyundai. Cramming all that stuff in the PanicMobile proved that point.

Hats are a big thing in the mental hospital. Everyone immediately put their hat on.

While there was a wide range of levels of communication, everyone there was so pleased. There were hugs and tears and thumbs up signs all around. The staff was excited too.

This state mental hospital is prohibited by law from soliciting donations, yet they always need things like clothes for the patients (especially patients due to be discharged, often right onto the street). That's what makes NAMI so cool – they can, and do, solicit funds as a non-profit organization. Woo-hoo.

The fourth thing I learned was actually just a reminder: if we all do a little, we can accomplish a lot.

And that's worth remembering.

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* and especially not tooting my own horn in a creepy way

** the expert Wal-Mart shopper wanted to be there but had to wait for a shipment of dog semen to arrive by UPS (United Pile of Shit with regard to delivering on time) and had to bail.

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