A tale of the sausage factory--prelude

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Someone once said that laws are like sausages. If you like them, you don't want to know how they're made. The same could be said about the workings of the public mental health system in Southern Arizona. There are many dedicated, caring people working in this system, doing a lot behind the scenes to serve the clients of the system and make the whole thing work. There are also a lot of money problems, and problems with how the system itself is set up and how it works. You usually see only the front end presented to the clients and the public, and do not see the workings of the sausage factory that the system often turns into.

At some point, someone having a bad time may need to get help from this system, and find out that the way the system is set up can lead to frustration getting needs taken care of. This is usually not the fault of the hard-working people on the front lines of the system-- the crisis workers, the case managers, the peer support staff, the therapists, the nurses, medical assistants, the psychiatrists. The very set-up of the system seems to make it so that getting help is an unneeded hassle. Sometimes a blame game ensues, giving fault to a case manager or other staff when the fault is how the system runs.

A discussion needs to start. There appear to be no online spaces set up to start or have this discussion. There seem to be no blogs or message boards for the workers or the clients. The closest may be some Facebook discussion groups, but there may be barriers to this really helping. Workers may not feel like they can freely speak on Facebook, because their agency may monitor Facebook and find their comments (at least one agency does this). Over the next few weeks, I hope to be able to give this discussion a push, here.

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