Earlier this week, members of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way Coalition, NAACP, and interested community partners gathered in a downtown Harrisonburg municipal building to discuss social problems involving substance abuse and mental health. WMRA’s Kara Lofton reports.
Monday’s forum, called Broken Systems, Broken People, was the third such event and was cosponsored with the local NAACP.
STAN MACLIN: This is a subject that is a serious issue in our community. Mental illness is alive and well, especially in our jails and so forth too and also in our streets. And it’s an opportunity to get the general public out here to talk about it.
That was Stan Maclin, the Harrisonburg resident who asked City Council to name a street after MLK in 2013. He was an active member in the task force assigned to complete the street-name change and is now instrumental in facilitating the Open Mind, Open Mic events.
Monday’s forum included a keynote speaker, Dr. Jonathan Anderson who is the Medical Director of Western State Hospital in Staunton. Western State partners closely with the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Community Services Board, which is the public provider of mental health and substance abuse services in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham areas. He said both locations provide excellent care, but could use more resources, particularly to support substance abuse programs.
JONATHAN ANDERSON: We need more money and more resources, but the basics are there and I can tell you that the quality of care at the community service boards and the state hospitals is top notch.
Anderson then joined four other panelists, who spoke about mental health and substance abuse from the perspective of a witness, advocate, patient and health worker.
In the end community participants were given the chance to ask questions to the panelists and Dr. Anderson.
All five speakers emphasized their desire to destigmatize mental illness and create a better environment for conversations about the subject. Anderson again,
ANDERSON: Mental illness is medical problems just like hypertension and diabetes are medical problems. And they require medical treatment.