What taxes can and can’t do is up to you

(5/2022) Children are gifts from God. A girl was born in 1918, the third child and first girl of a well-to-do family. The birth was difficult, a medical error caused oxygen deprivation. She had developmental delays that were soon obvious by her late crawling, standing, walking, and speaking. She grew up wanting to please her parents, and have fun with her eight brothers and sisters. She did not develop intellectually beyond the elementary grades. As a young woman, her parents feared for her safety, as she attracted many unsavory suitors, and did not have the social awareness to fend them off. She was given an experimental lobotomy, which left her at the developmental level of a toddler. Devastated by the harm to their child, and also living in time of no acceptance for anyone "different" her parents sent her, at age 23, to live in a psychiatric hospital. Her brothers and sisters did not know of her lobotomy or institutionalization for over a decade, until 1958.

Her name was Rosemary Kennedy. As a Senator and prospective candidate for President of the United States, John F. Kennedy learned of his sister’s fate. The public did not learn of this until 1987. As President, Kennedy took what he learned from family tragedy, overcame social conditioning that taught us, as a country, to hide children and adults who don’t fit the norm, and built a Federal system of mental health support.

"I am proposing a new approach to mental illness and to mental retardation. This approach is designed, in large measure, to use Federal resources to stimulate State, local and private action. When carried out, reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability. Emphasis on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation will be substituted for a desultory interest in confining patients in an institution to wither away."                          - John F. Kennedy

Special Message to the Congress on Mental Illness and Mental Retardation, February 5, 1963

The Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 (Public Law 88–164) was signed just a few weeks before President Kennedy's assassination.

The vocabulary has changed, and the range of diagnoses has been greatly expanded. But the most important thing about mental health care is acceptance so it can be addressed. Kennedy gave us a start on acceptance of mental health needs.

Jimmy Carter signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act (P.L. 96-398), which aimed to update and continue funding for the CMHC program. A national approach to mental health was underway.

Until the Reagan Administration. With less than a year into his first term in August 1981 President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (P.L. 97-35), which largely repealed the Mental Health Systems Act, replacing the CMHC grant program with more flexible block grants to states.

More flexible for whom?

Federal funding was diverted to the 50 states for each state legislature to make separate decisions on use of funds, and brought varying amounts of success in support for mental health care. Ask any parent of a child with a mental health issue how they managed to find support if they had to move their family across State lines. There are some things that a federal government is better at organizing on a large scale for the equal access and benefit of each citizen. The advantage of a Federal system of mental health care is that when moving from one state to another, the services you have spent days, weeks, months, to get into place for your child, sibling, friend, parent, can stay in place. In simple terms a Federal system requires only a change of address, and can support a centralized database of resources.

Government has a basic job that requires keeping citizens safe from enemies foreign and domestic, and maintaining policies for a healthy economy. Government also has a huge array of powers for using our United assets to build tools for any of us to create solutions to challenges too big for one person or family to handle alone. Two ways our federal government supports our ongoing quality of life are (1) national policies for resources anyone can access, and (2) tools anyone can use to create local support systems, such as the 501c3 nonprofit designation.

In national policy for mental healthcare, the federal government, through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (samhsa.gov), is rolling out 988, a suicide and crisis hotline that "goes live on all devices on July 16, 2022." Congress designated the new 988 dialing code to be operated through the existing National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

The nonprofit system is available for anyone to apply for. My husband and I raised a child with developmental disabilities. We are painfully aware of the term "falling off the cliff". In Maryland any child with a disability can receive support through the public school system. Once they are an adult and out of the public school system, a person with a measurable IQ of over 69 points gets little to no services—they fall off the cliff. Knowing that we won’t be around forever, we and a group of friends founded a 501c3 nonprofit, Kitsune, Inc (kitsuneinc.org) to find "creative solutions for independent living for adults with developmental disabilities, but without an intellectual disability".

Self sufficiency, independence, I don’t need no stinkin’ charity—some words of the mantra in our collective perspective on our United States of America. We are united against handouts. Great. So what are we United for? A gift from John F. Kennedy, brother of Rosemary, was raising the bar on national acknowledgment of individual needs.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a great time to raise the bar on citizen expectations—for our elected officials and ourselves.

Read other Good Day Good Neighbor's by Dorothea Mordan