Eli Saslow’s Nov. 20 front-page article on the plight of psychiatric nurse Naomi Morris, tasked with the impossible job of helping to “fix” the “broken lovelies,” “ ‘I’m part of what’s broken,’ ” was devastating.
We need an army of people like this psychiatric nurse
If this article is not a poster child for what ails much of our mental health system, then I don’t know what is.
Our country needs an army of Naomis, so at least she and others can have a partner by their side, plus thousands more social workers, psychiatrists, hospitals and residential facilities, and funding or future solutions so that we can become a nation of healing and hope, not continued devastation.
Or do only billionaires such as Elon Musk enjoy the continued public attention?
Pamela Michaels, Smithsburg, Md.
I appreciated the reporting on the work of a psychiatric nurse in Seattle. The article gave readers an idea of the system for caring for mentally ill and homeless people in that city.
I recently read Dorothea Dix’s 1843 report on her investigation into the care of mentally ill people in poorhouses and prisons in Massachusetts. Seattle does not put mentally ill people in sheds, closets or cages, does not chain them to the floor, or starve them or beat them, so that’s an improvement over 1843. But allowing the mentally ill people and drug addicts to live without direction and constant supervision is not a good solution.
It is hard enough for mentally ill people to achieve self-control. How can they do it while also using heroin and methamphetamine? Clearly another strategy for their care is needed.
Sara E. Wermiel, Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Source: WP
