High anxiety, other ills run into low-grade mental health care system in Michigan

From Nichole Kemp’s perspective, West Michigan’s mental health treatment system rates something less than a top grade.

Kemp, 37, was diagnosed 20 years ago with bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia.

In August, the Kentwood resident was hospitalized for four days at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services after she found herself unable to stop crying and overwhelmed by feelings of panic.

Since then, Kemp has been stymied in getting the help she feels she needs. She said she was denied case management service through network180, Kent County’s primary mental health agency. She said it also declined to pay for psychiatric consultation and her medications.

“I am very, very frustrated,” Kemp said. “I am very disappointed in the system. I cannot believe there is nothing available to me. I can’t believe that every door is shut to me.”

www.mlive.com/health/index.ssf/2011/10/high_anxiety_other_ills_run_in.html#incart_hbx

Poor, minorities more likely to be obese. But why?

Inside a Quaker meeting house in Lansing's Old Town, 15 or so people sit in a circle of chairs.

It's 8 a.m., and they make quiet conversation while balancing plates of bagels and fruit.

Their names are handwritten in folded cards at their feet.

Pretty soon, a speaker calls for their attention, and the questions begin — questions designed to make them squirm.

• Do people make assumptions about you based on how you look?

• Do you make assumptions about other people?

• Are you treated differently because of your gender, your class, your race?

Those aren't the kinds of questions polite strangers are supposed to discuss, says Renee Canady, newly promoted health officer for the Ingham County Health Department and an adjunct professor at Michigan State University.

But believe it or not, she says, those are precisely the kinds of questions we need to ask each other if we're going to make any breakthroughs on one of the most baffling and frustratingly difficult facts of the nation's obesity epidemic: The amount of money you make and the color of your skin can increase your chances of being fat.

"The structures of our lives — our emotional, financial and support systems — are so different," Canady says. "We're trying to help people see that the choices people make are determined by the choices people have. And some people just don't have good choices."

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