To promote last week’s National Suicide Prevention Week, the student mental health group To Write Love On Her Arms hosted State Senator Creigh Deeds last Monday.
The senator stood in Wilson Hall with a tired but determined look and began his talk offering some advice about how to cope with mental illness and help others with depression. Interestingly, Deeds did not discuss the events surrounding his son’s suicide last year. Gone was the storytelling and emotionality of his prior interviews. He chose instead to dedicate the majority of his talk to mental health care policy in Virginia. Deeds’ talk was policy-focused, technical, and highly informative — and it reminds us that that although storytelling is critical when advocating for mental health, it is also essential to discuss meaningful policy change.
Advocacy efforts of all kinds — from K-12 education, to mental health care or LGBTQ rights — involve personal stories. Undoubtedly, storytelling can communicate and illustrate the consequences of inaction and encourage support for a cause. Mental health advocacy is particularly prone to this storytelling approach; it is a smart strategy for an issue so shrouded in stigma. With so many concerns competing for our attention, a story of personal struggle often bypasses the distracted mind and makes a direct appeal to the emotions. Moreover, such stories can be therapeutic, helping victims of mental illness and their families make sense of these experiences.
But the quest to “raise awareness” for mental health issues — typically initiated as a means to help decrease the rate of mental illness in society — too often becomes an end in itself. I’ve seen this repeatedly through my work with mental health advocacy on Grounds.
We sometimes forget that meaningful policy change should be the fundamental goal. Law and public policy formalize and proceduralize often-abstract goals; they make them uniform across a hospital, a state, or even a country. Under law, the issues gain a new legitimacy. Policy ensures that those who don’t get certain rights and treatments have the legal backing to pursue them.
To draw from a well-known example, it’s fine to advocate for a culture in which misogyny is discouraged, but policies such as non-discrimination laws in the workplace can provide women with a much more substantial tool for equal treatment within their careers.
Policy changes in health care — particularly policies that involve emergency medical situations — are especially important. Deeds knows this from personal experience. If state hospitals allocated more funding for psychiatric beds, then there might have been room in the hospital for his son. If there had been better communication between hospitals, Creigh Deeds could have taken his son to the next closest medical center with available beds. Deeds’ reforms for mental health care address these very issues. One of his major objectives, discussed this past week, is to raise and allocate $4,000,000 for extra beds within public hospitals. Another is to create a real-time database that tracks which medical centers have vacancies. This would save health professionals hours of talking on the phone — hours in which an emergency containment order issued on an unstable patient might expire. If such suggestions become law, then Virginians will have gained a valuable safety net in the public health arena.
The primacy of policy change in the realm of mental health also holds true at the local and national levels — and efforts within our own University community reflect this. For example, the student mental health organization Active Minds is currently speaking with the University’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) about methods to increase funds for mental health services. Moreover, last February saw the student group Legislators of Tomorrow write a Virginia House of Delegates-sponsored bill that would require completion of an online mental health training module for all incoming college students in Virginia.
I commend Deeds for doing this work in Virginia, particularly in the aftermath of his personal tragedy. At the national level, the prospects of policy change are less encouraging. While Virginian citizens stand to gain from these new laws, individuals in other states do not. Thus, we need to increase pressure on national lawmakers and executives. Perhaps this will come through a kind of national-level equivalent to Mr. Deeds (e.g., an elected official who has been personally touched by a mental health issue); or maybe it will arrive through increased pressure from advocacy groups and the general public. Still, improving mental health for Virginians (and the broader American public) requires an approach that pairs cutting-edge national policies with traditional storytelling.
George Knaysi is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Tuesdays.
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