A glimmer of hope for mental health
Foundation raises millions as much more remains to be done
The psychiatric emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital is licensed for 18 beds, but on Monday morning there were 26 patients crammed in just about every corner of the small, drab facility.
Three men sat in the tiny waiting area in their stocking feet. All patients must remove their shoes because laces can be used as nooses and shoes can be hurled as weapons, a nurse explained.
A man in bare feet and hospital scrubs spoke in animated gibberish and twirled like a ballerina in the reception area. Another man, clutching his belongings and looking frightened, whispered to a nurse that he was being followed. A few patients moaned from their gurneys in the hallway, and one hid under a blanket, a human form in light blue.
“If it looks tight, it’s because it is,” shrugged Kathryn Ballou, the nursing supervisor. “If it looks messy, it is.”
The facility dates to 1976, and it seems a world away from the new, shiny wing of the hospital emblazoned with the name of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But finally, the hospital’s psychiatric emergency services division is getting some love — and desperately needed money.
Wednesday night is the annual Hearts in SF shindig, when a new set of those huge, colorful hearts that dot the city will be auctioned off. But this year there’s a twist. For the first time, the money raised from the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation’s event will go to a new fund dedicated solely to mental health care.
As of Monday, the foundation had raised $3.8 million, including $1 million from Bank of America, which is nearly double the amount raised last year. The sold-out event
is the latest sign that San Francisco is finally getting serious about dealing with the mental health crisis that plagues our sidewalks.
Mayor London Breed has announced that she’ll name a mental health director and has created a task force to study the city’s methamphetamine epidemic. State Sen. Scott Wiener successfully pushed for legislation to expand who qualifies for conservatorship.
They’re good steps, but a short visit to the psychiatric emergency room at S.F. General demonstrates that far more needs to be done.
Unlike the city’s homeless shelters — which had 1,098 people on the waiting list Monday afternoon — the psychiatric emergency room doesn’t turn anyone away. Sometimes people arrive in the middle of the night seeking shelter. Other people arrive — brought by ambulance, police officers, family or of their own volition — suffering from mood disorders, schizophrenia or drug and alcohol addictions.
Some will be released quickly, often back to the streets because there are so few longterm care facilities. Others will be moved to the one of the 44 acute care beds upstairs in the hospital. At just about every level, from the emergency room to the acute care area to long-term care facilities, there are too few beds to adequately address the city’s massive mental health crisis.
While the emergency staff seems incredibly caring and competent, the emergency facility itself is bland, cramped and off-putting.
“I don’t know how hopeful you felt walking through those doors, but it doesn’t create hope immediately,” said Dr. Anton Bland, medical director of the hospital’s psychiatric emergency services division.
That’s an understatement. City voters passed a bond in 2016 that will help pay to move a wall between the psychiatric emergency room and an enormous lobby next door, giving the emergency room more space. (Whoever designed the old part of the hospital certainly had a thing for hulking lobbies and empty space.)
Bland said one of his priorities for the new mental health care fund is to purchase new furniture and decor to make the psychiatric emergency room more calm and therapeutic. He also wants the fund to help patients afford private detox programs. Other plans include adding more social services to the facility and bringing the hospital’s new electronic health record-keeping system to the psychiatric emergency services division more quickly.
Schuyler Hudak, a member of the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation’s board of directors, showed me around the hospital — the old and the new wings — on Monday.
We’d walked through the new, immaculate building on our way to the psychiatric emergency room. The new building features murals, stained glass windows and a rooftop garden with sweeping views of the city. It’s bright, airy, spacious and doesn’t smell.
“These patients here deserve the kind of space we were just in,” Hudak said once we were in the psychiatric E.R.
“It’s pretty unconscionable that the wealthiest society in modern history is letting people live like this,” Hudak said of the hordes of mentally ill homeless people who cycle between the hospital and the streets.
Pam Baer hopes to get the city talking about mental health. She’s the co-chair of the annual Hearts in SF event and is married to Giants president Larry Baer. She was ready to quit the time-intensive role of chair until the purpose shifted toward mental health.
“We’ve honored trauma, we’ve honored orthopedics,” she explained. “The only way I would co-chair it this year is if the focus was on mental health. It’s dear to my heart.”
That’s because she lost her nephew — her sister’s son — to suicide last year. His name was Noah, and he was 28. He was a photographer living in Baltimore who struggled with mental health issues. His death crushed the entire family.
“I do feel that every one of us is touched in some way, whether it’s friends or family with anxiety or addictions or schizophrenia,” she said. “It humbles all of us. My goal is enabling a platform where we can talk about it and try to destigmatize it.”
Several of the artists who designed this year’s hearts have ties to the mental health world, including Clint Imboden, who lives in Oakland and worked in mental health for more than 30 years before becoming a full-time artist. He did mental health screenings in a jail, worked in a psychiatric hospital and worked at suicide crisis centers, among other jobs.
His heart features the names of hundreds of San Francisco streets — from the iconic like Lombard and Haight to tiny, little-known ones like Pink Alley in the Castro and Dolphin Court in Hunters Point.
He said he likes painting because there’s a conclusion, a time at which his piece is finished. That was rarely the case with mental health patients.
“I’d never know what ever happened with them,” he said. “They’d just cycle in and out. I could spend 12 hours with someone and never see them again. I would just assume that I’d put in my good work and done what I’d needed to do.”