Appleton Kids in Crisis Town Hall
It started with people passing out Gideon bibles to attendees that were green like all of the Kids in Crisis materials available. So people were accepting them in confusion. Also the audience input involved putting a question on a note card, there was no real community engagement of the audience.
And maybe part of my annoyance of this townhall is my almost automatic response to turn into a passive aggressive kid at these types of things. But that’s trauma and we know trauma-informed care is a hot button issue that everyone likes to reference but virtually no one uses correctly.
Anyways, on the panel was a parent from a parent advocacy organization based in Madison (Wisconsin Family Ties). Mr. Davis brought up a good point that Chapter 51 was created over 40 years ago.
Next on the panel was a clinical psychologist from Catalpa. Ms. Hanson’s short bio said that she specialized in Autism Spectrum Disorder and OCD. She supports universal screenings and mental health literacy in schools. When an attendee’s note card question brought up the fact that schools call police officers to handle crisis, she must have been grossly uninformed about the issue. Ms. Hanson said that when police are called to respond to a crisis in schools, they ask that an officer trained in de-escalation techniques be sent. She said that there hasn’t been an issue with an officer not having de-escalation training. Except that the Kids in Crisis reporters covered a story in their series about police officers lacking the sufficient crisis intervention training to intervene in mental health crises. This also ignores the report that Disability Rights Wisconsin released about kids in school being restrained and isolated at an alarming rate.
Ms. Hanson from Catalpa also spoke about how Catalpa had 21 mental health professionals embedded in area schools. To which I would like to point out that this is a service that has existed before Catalpa was created. It’s called the PATH program and it is run by Family Services and United Way. I heard about it initially when I interviewed for a NAMI internship and then after graduate school I interviewed for a position that would have been part-time in Hortonville High School and part-time at Family Services’ Menasha Counseling Center.
Next on the panel was a psychology professor at Lawrence University. She didn’t say much which was part of the problem. I saw that one of her research areas was non-suicidal self injury, something I have a fair amount of knowledge about to one day create a theatre piece that can be performed in schools. An audience question brought up the fact that LGBT youth commit suicide at an almost doubled rate of peers. What services are available to them in the area? Lawrence University professor Ms. Hilt pointed to GSAs in schools without actually calling them GSAs. She made a quick remark about the multiple initials used in the LGBT community and not knowing all of them, which is an issue for a college professor where people often begin to experience an independence in their queer identity. To say nothing of other available resources in the community started and funded through Goodwill. Forgetting to mention the fact that the city of Appleton employs it’s own diversity coordinator.
The last panelist was the head of Wisconsin’s Office of Children’s Mental Health. There was an audience question about discharge planning for hospital stays and Ms. Hudson said that on average, clients receive 3 therapy sessions following a hospital stay. Panelists tried to argue that discharge planners couldn’t find services because of a lack of services available. Lack of services is not the issue, it is lack of Medicaid-enrolled services; something that appears to be changing.
In conclusion, I’m tired of awareness campaigns. I’m tired of wasteful spending of time and resources to appeal to people that already understand the issues either through occupation or personal experience. I’m tired of professionals sitting on panels that don’t have a firm grasp on the unique available resources of the community whose residents they serve. I’m tired of being a listener and spectator at all of these events. My father used to travel the country delivering speeches about kids with disabilities and the parents that dared to love them.
