Protecting Oregon’s mental health workers like Jennifer Warren – those angels unaware
Posted by admin2 on May 24th, 2012
Editorial column by Steve Duin, published in The Oregonian, May 24, 2012
In the brave new world of mental health, the Jennifer Warrens of the world confront many of the same people and phobias that confound your local police bureau.
Yet they do so without the sidearm.
Without the Kevlar vest.
Without partners or essential backup.
And without the grand jury’s permission to unholster their trusty taser the moment they feel threatened.
In the last of 10 editorials that rebuilt the Oregon State Hospital, refocused the Legislature and won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, The Oregonian’s Rick Attig and Doug Bates argued, “Oregon has started down the long road to a better, more compassionate system of mental health care.”
Individualized care — rather than warehousing the mentally ill in 19th-century squalor — is a feature of that empathetic journey. But that care, Warren’s death reminds us, is often provided by an isolated caseworker or medication tech at a small community organization who is in no position to ask for help.
Warren, 39, was stabbed to death Sunday when she delivered medication to the St. Helens apartment of Brent K. Redd Jr.
Redd was committed to the state hospital in 2007 after attempting to strangle his mother, and released by the Psychiatric Security Review Board in 2010.
Warren understood personal trauma — she survived methamphetamine addiction and losing three sons to adoption — and was drawn to assist those who were dealing with it. She probably had no idea of the potential danger she faced on her Sunday morning rounds for Columbia County Mental Health.
“When you’re in the trenches of mental health staffing, you assume the people paid to assess risk know what they’re doing,” said Lynn Davenport, even though the licensed professionals “rarely smell the clients.”
Davenport made hundreds of unaccompanied visits to clients in the corrections, mental health and child-welfare system during the course of 20 years. The most devoted caregivers, she noted, are the least likely to complain about the bite marks and the death threats.
“If I talk about the trouble I’m having, it means that I’m not good at my job,” Davenport said. “As opposed to I’ve been given an impossible job. That means you’ll work crazy shifts and hours, you’re sick and tired, when people are acting up. You won’t complain or raise concerns when you feel unsafe.”
Corina Fesler, who worked with Warren, quit Columbia Community Mental Health immediately after Warren’s death, telling The Oregonian’s Maxine Bernstein: “There’s been concerns all along that we go out and do this by ourselves. It just makes me sick, because it didn’t have to happen this way. If someone else could have been there, at least (Warren) would have had backup.”
In the brave new world of mental health, there are rarely partners or panic buttons. And too many Jennifer Warrens venture into the lion’s den, trusting that good intentions are all the body armor they need.
I don’t know that we can stop them. They are the best of Samaritans. Forgetting prisoners or neglecting strangers isn’t in them.
And that’s precisely why we need to work so much harder to protect them.
READ – Jennifer Warren’s obituary.
May 25th, 2012 at 9:30 am
NO COMMENTS: That was the first thing I looked for…..NOTHING, a women died because the state, and the mental health community failed her, and you all,said nothing in the article you wrote here.
There clearly is a chance for this situation to be so over the top, as for the potential of worse then just one murder, I can think of a grade school in SE Portland for a lot more then one.
I’m well known by many of you,and I’m so angry,I can barely contain it, this loss of life was called out 5 yrs ago, by myself, the retired sheriff of Washington county, and a Linn county commissioner, who I GURANTEE,you will hear a lot more from.
We will not be stopped on the issue of notification,to schools,to neighborhoods,to first responders who deserve to know when and where a PSRB CLIENT is living.
Notice clearly…they have rights to be there, no one is trying to remove them….but no one else dies, to get what we want and will get.
I honor your work, but your job of protecting the community has lacked, and that is about to change.
May 25th, 2012 at 8:13 pm
TYPICAL MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNITY RESPONSE….remove commonsense ideas.
In the SUNDAY O, An elected offical in Oregon, calls you out for what you are…almost as Nuts, as some of you patients/clients/consumers…or what ever the nominclature is this week.
Some of you, are going to get sued, and you damn well deserve it.
May 26th, 2012 at 11:16 am
The board says that they thought this man was ok to be in the community, well they were wrong! Flat wrong and it doesn’t take a retard to know that they dangled some of these dedicated workers like bait, to see how long their fate would hold up. Sickening and understandable in some ways in this day and age where money is simply to short. God knows if there was any objections in the start of this path to ‘treat the mentally ill better’, if there was strong objections, watch out because there is such a thing as karma! That is what makes this type of gambling just plain stupid, in more that one case.