Community Mental Health

 I floundered on what topic interested me enough to create a discussion thread for my class in Human Health Services; a requisite for my degree program.  I was prodded to act by a reference while reading a chapter that discussed the creation of the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963.  I wanted to test how well Atlanta was doing with that mandate.  Relying heavily as I do on Google, I launched my search and was greeted by an impressive 3,170,000 references in less than two seconds. 

   I pondered just how daunting a task it would be for a timid soul who was in sincere need for some affirmation and encouragement to sort through all of that.  I mean, really three million sites are a lot; never mind most of those references have nothing to do with Atlanta.  It remains a common occurrence that the retrieval of so many options can, at the onset, be intimidating at the very least, and frighteningly disconcerting at the worst.

    But I was interested in just Atlanta; along with the fact that I was a student on a quest. I could ignore my initial emotional hesitations over the possibility that this just might be too much information for my needs.  I could empathize with someone who would share similar reaction when conducting a search in earnest  for help. Now I will admit I was ill prepared for this venture, because I went to the first site on the list and the page had an impressive list of links to every conceivable service I never even knew were available.  So I thought I’d site the page in my sources, also a requisite for the class.  As I tried to backtrack to my initial goggle search page, I couldn’t find my way.  After several minutes of trying, I could never find my way back to the first page I had found.  Mildly amused, I started the whole process over again with a general topic search in Google for Community Mental Health in Atlanta.  

There I saw in tagged in the color purple, glory be! A trace to where I had been.  I had visited Metropolitan Atlanta Mental Health Resources and congratulated myself on finding my way back.  That’s when it dawned on me that perhaps the real topic of discussion was not so much on how well our local governments are complying with the 1963 act, but rather, how accessible is it to the confused and confounded person who is seeking that very mandated help?

    The webpage was really impressive in scope.  It possessed a massive collection of links, ninety-two in fact, from Overeating to Suicidology; therein rested the subtle warning.   The header conveyed, “Many useful community resources are available free or at reduced charge based upon ability to pay- if one knows where to look for them.”

“Eureka!” (I have found it) as Archimedes exclaimed when he discovered the principle of density. 

   What is of difficulty, may not be obtaining help but in finding where to look for it.  I pondered on the premise of what may be of interest in serving the needs of all mental illness is not a lack of addressing a specific affliction, but the confusion created by the dearth of options for all afflictions conceivable. 

   Clearly there are many agencies posed to assist someone seeking help, but I wondered if seeking generic help was out of the question within this avalanche of identified specialized services in community helping endeavor?  I would conjecture the webpage was designed under the assumption that the person seeking help already knew what their affliction was.  Yet, if that were true then wouldn’t whoever identified a difficulty by naming it, would, in due course, also inform the afflicted (by named condition) to a source for help? The point I am alluding to is this.

If any agency is to be helpful shouldn’t they make finding help simple? 

   I could well imagine an individual with any identified illness being possessed with concerns over social stigma and being labeled, ‘flawed’; couple that with a general insecurity wrought by symptoms that accompanies mental illness, and it’d be easy to see that a case of seeking help on the Internet could push one to fleeing the search and be driven into hiding in their home; it’s just too confusing.

   Now I may or may not be suffer heightened moments of failing self efficacy.  I may dwell in the world of contingent high self esteem; but I can extrapolate to the point of empathy for a person who suspects they’ve got a problem and then have to sort out where help resides.  Along with being perplexed, as the Metropolitan Atlanta Mental Health Resources page mentions, ‘…where to look for them [helping agencies]”.  Perhaps lost in the desire to offer help to the masses is the aspect of an individual seeking a simple path.  Where too many choices drives them away; there’s help, and then there’s overwhelming.