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."

www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20111030/NEWS01/110300491/Poor-minorities-more-likely-obese-why-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The Box Factory for the Arts
presents
Linda LaRocque’s

Ain’t Tina Turner
Classical Music

November 19 at 4:30 p.m. & 8:00 p.m.

November 20 at 4:30 p.m.

WHERE:

Box Factory for the Arts
1101 Broad Street, St. Joseph, MI

All Proceeds Benefit Benton Harbor Soup Kitchen
Tickets: $10 per person

Please reserve seats at 269-983-3688

or by PayPal at

www.boxfactoryforthearts.org

Background:

The Box Factory would like to share with you West Michigan native Linda LaRocque’s story
of three people who live on the street, exploring their abilities and inabilities to cope with daily life.

Imagine finding yourself having no choice but to live on the streets. What would you do without the simple necessities in life: food and shelter?

In today’s tough times, we felt it was important to tell this story and to do it as a benefit for the Benton Harbor Soup Kitchen which faces its own struggles in these economic times.

Rev David Beckmann on Hunger and Poverty and Our Government Budgets

David Beckmann of Bread for the World, a national, religious advocacy organization for the poor, talks about reducing hunger and poverty in the world and in this country. He provides some examples of hope and improvement in places like Bangla Desh.

He talks about how in the United States we have made progress when we tried to do so. "But we haven't made the sustained progress against poverty that other countries have made. Because we haven't made the sustained effort."

"All the food that people in need get from all of the food charities across the country amounts to 6% of the amount of food they receive from federal food programs. "

So, basically all of the churches, food pantries, and soup kitchens in the country would have to increase their giving by more than 15 times to make up for the loss if all federal aid in programs like SNAP were eliminated.

In the middle/latter part of the interview is a plug for donations to the organization Bread for the World. However, I do not feel it diminishes from the overall message of the video which discusses from a religious perspective the need for governmental aid for the poor.

Heating aid cuts could impact many in state

Michigan's winter is expected to be harsh.

And, if the state's allotment of federal funds to help low-income residents pay heating bills is cut as much as 50 percent as expected, things could be much worse for the nearly 41,000 Ingham County households and about 15,000 others in Eaton and Clinton counties who have needed assistance.

"We certainly think people who've been helped in the past are threatened with receiving no help this year and it's supposed to be a cold winter and our economy hasn't improved. It's a huge problem," said Judy Putnam, spokeswoman for the Michigan League for Human Services.

Federal funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, was cut from $5 billion to $4.5 billion for the fiscal year that ended in September. And advocates believe Congress will approve $3.5 billion for fiscal 2012.

The cuts come as Congress focuses more on other areas deemed higher priorities, such as education, reductions in health care fraud and lowering the national debt.

The state's Department of Human Services, which helps administer the LIHEAP funds through the Home Heating Credit, could see its federal heating assistance funds slashed by anywhere from one-third to one-half. Last year the state received $276.5 million in LIHEAP funds.

www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20111024/NEWS01/110240318/Heating-aid-cuts-could-impact-many-region?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Empty houses? Needy families? Time to mix

There are certain sounds that are pure childhood joy. One is the clomping of little feet up the stairs. Another is the squeal of delight.

This past week, in a freshly renovated house in Detroit, those two sounds came together. Seven children. Running up the stairs. Running into bedrooms.

Cue the squeals.

"I call this one!" ... "This one!" ... "I got the top one!" They were laying claim to something every child ought to have -- a bed -- but they were giddy because they had been sleeping three to a mattress in a dingy house infested with mold.

Now this?

"I got top bed!" ... "I got bottom bed!"

Their mother, Kristy Wilson, followed in behind them. Her eyes were wider than a moving truck, and she kept turning left and right, putting her hand on her heart or her cheek.

"Whose room is this?" she asked, entering a bedroom with a queen-size mattress on a new frame.

"Yours and your husband's," she was told.

She fell to her knees, laid her head on the bed and began to cry.

www.freep.com/article/20111023/COL01/110230441/Mitch-Albom-Empty-houses-Needy-families-Time-to-mix?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p

Racial Disparities in School Discipline Feeding the ‘School-to-Prison’ Pipeline, Report Finds

Public schools are suspending Blacks and Latinos and students with disabilities at much higher rates than others, according to recent findings by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC).

In a newly released report, "Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice,” NEPC documents that suspension rates for non-Whites have more than doubled since the 1970s, while the Black-White gap has more than tripled.

Civil rights advocates are concerned that such racial disparities in the educational system perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline, i.e. the funneling of students — primarily children of color — out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.



www.unfinishedbusiness.org/20111021-racial-disparities-in-school-discipline-feeding-the-school-to-prison%e2%80%99-pipeline-report-finds/

11,000 Michigan families confront the unknown

The roles Sharon Matthews has fielded so far are hardly the stuff of cakewalks: high school dropout; single mom; gunshot victim.

But her toughest role yet begins next month: Guinea pig.

The 41-year-old Detroit resident and her 15-year-old daughter are among the 11,000 Michigan families banned from welfare, as the state of Michigan begins to enforce a 48-month lifetime cap on cash assistance.

Matthews knows her benefits likely will disappear forever in November. What she and others, from the office of Gov. Rick Snyder down to local soup kitchens, don’t know is what will happen after that.

The changes wrought to Michigan’s welfare system by Snyder and the Michigan Legislature are unprecedented nationally. No other state has kicked so many people off assistance in such a short amount of time, with such little notice. The result is a volatile social experiment that could help transform the state’s economy, or fill the beds of homeless shelters and prisons.

bridgemi.com/2011/10/11000-michigan-families-confront-the-unknown/

Employers challenged to help victims of domestic violence

When there's violence at home, it typically happens behind closed doors -- but has profound effects in many other places, including the workplace.

That's the conviction of Jennifer Fopma, executive director of SAFE Place in Battle Creek.

"It's a true dollars-and-cents issue," Fopma said. "An employee distracted by troubles at home is unlikely to be fully productive."

Statistics distributed by the shelter during Domestic Violence Awareness Month support her view that domestic violence has a negative impact on local, state and national economic sectors:

» One in four women experience physical violence from an intimate partner at some point, and 85 percent of domestic-violence victims are women.

» Three-quarters of women killed in non-robbery situations while working were murdered by a former intimate partner.

» Nationally, homicide is the second leading cause of death for women on the job, with 20 percent of those having been murdered by their partner.

» Businesses nationwide lose an estimated $727.8 million in productivity, with more than 7.9 million paid workdays lost annually because of intimate-partner violence.

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20111017/NEWS01/110170302/Employers-challenged-help-victims-domestic-violence

Immigration expert tries to dispel 'myths' about Hispanics in U.S.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco flashed a slide showing the 5.5 million surge in under-18 Hispanic population in the United States during the last decade, which, to the noted professor and immigration expert, underscored a stark reality of the future.

“These are the teachers, the firefighters, the cops, the scientists — this is the future of the United States. These are your new citizens,” he told a crowd of Seidman Business College students at Grand Valley State University’s Loosemore Auditorium on Thursday.

“For those of you in business, these are your new customers.”

Suárez-Orozco is co-founder of the Harvard Immigration Project and professor of globalization and education at New York University. His latest book, “Latinos: Remaking America,” is a comprehensive study of the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group.

www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2011/10/immigration_expert_tries_to_di.html