Over a million Georgians live with a mental health condition, and in the past year, over a thousand Georgians have died by suicide. The emergency mental health care system in Georgia is designed to help those in crisis. WUGA’s Emma Auer set out to discover how well this system works—and how advocates say it can be reformed.
Lauren McNeese is a native of Tennessee, where she lives with several mental health diagnoses. She’ll be the first to tell you, however, that her mental health conditions do not define her.
“I am 21 years old, I am currently working in Chattanooga at a senior living facility, where I have discovered my passion for working with the elderly
population. And I just changed my major today from English to nursing,” she says.
While receiving residential mental health treatment in the Atlanta-area last year, she was transferred to a behavioral health hospital in Northeast Georgia, where she became familiar with the state’s emergency mental health care system.
“I’m going to be honest with you, I think I left with more trauma than I came in with, and at the end of the day that facility kept me alive,” she explains.
Several months later, she’s now “in recovery” from her diagnoses. But what does recovery mean to her?
“Recovery is nonlinear, and recovery is hard. Recovery is a path to hope and healing and it is only achieved through hard work and perseverance,” Mcneese says.
According to McNeese, then, recovery is a winding path. A kind of path that for many Georgians can be bewildering and inaccessible:
“Part of the problem that we have here in Georgia is that there isn’t a very clear path.”
That’s Kim Jones, the Executive Director of the Georgia branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. She states that the path to recovery for many Georgians begins in emergency rooms, which are often not equipped to handle those in psychiatric distress. That’s important, because…
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