Is the fabric of society unraveling? Are we losing our footing? Abandoning core values? Becoming a network of self-centered, unstable, heartless individuals who communicate via electronic devices and bullets rather than empathy and understanding?
A lot of people are asking questions like these. I don’t have answers, but I believe that they are questions worth asking.
A case can be made that humans are more civilized than ever in history, that we’ve created peaceful ways to resolve differences through better communication, economic interdependence, more justice, more freedom, and more transparent decision-making. Maybe it just feels like things are getting worse because we’re less tolerant of violence, injustice, and abuse than in the past. Or maybe we’ve made progress but are sliding back.
Either way, doing the hard work of reducing violence, improving mental health, and connecting one another is the task before us. When we fail, the result is trauma, and trauma happens every day, even here in Anne Arundel County, the best place for all.
But amidst all the division and chaos I’ve watched and met with people who are moving us forward.
A couple weeks ago I was the guest on a podcast called CIT Today. It was hosted by two of my heroes, Jen Corbin from Anne Arundel County Mental Health Agency and Lt. Steve Thomas of Anne Arundel County Police Department. Together, they run the Crisis Intervention Teams that in 2020 won the CIT International Team of the Year Award.
You can hear the interview at this link, but the dialogue made me realize just how important their work is for our moment in history.
We talk a lot about trauma-informed care and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but what our county’s teams do is appear on the scene immediately after the crisis to help people process the trauma and offer whatever support they need. It’s not the stuff that’s billable under a fee-for-service model, so not many places do it, but I’m convinced that it has a secondary impact. It puts people on the path to healing, and thereby prevents further damage to them and the people around them. By responding appropriately to trauma, we prevent more trauma.
Unfortunately, we’ll never have enough clinicians to respond professionally to all of the trauma that takes place in our county, or our world. But maybe that’s not what we need.
Last Thursday, I spoke at the17th World Congress of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation in Baltimore, and I came away inspired. The organization was co-founded by Dr. George Everly, a Severna Park psychologist whose career has been dedicated to the study and practice of recovery from disasters in countries all across the globe. With his peers at Johns Hopkins he created a thing called Psychological First Aid.
He learned early on that flying clinicians to countries after disasters was not getting the job done. What worked better was to train local people, not to diagnose and treat mental health disorders, but to listen, to guide people, and when necessary and possible to connect them to services.
That’s the idea behind what Dr. Everly and another psychologist, Dr. Caren Carney, are doing, and they’re doing it in our county. Dr. Carney has been training county staff in psychological first aid, and many of our first responders are trained in an alternative approach called Mental Health First Aid.
I believe there is demand for and potential in this kind of educational offering. In fact I know there is. During my first year in office I met with high school students who called themselves Our Minds Matter. They had mobilized after losing friends to suicide, and they wanted to pursue peer support training. I’d like them to get that training, and I’d also like everyone else who wants it to get it.
Of course there is resistance to the idea of empowering lay people to do therapy, but that’s not what this movement is about. It empowers lay people with knowledge to simply be more helpful when the people around them are in crisis. That’s something I want to see more of in Anne Arundel County, to reduce the stigma of mental health disorders, get us talking to one another, and to provide the tools to do for each other what maybe we’ve forgotten how to do in this high tech world we live in.
In fact, that’s something I want to get better at myself, so I’ll be signing up for the training and let you know how it goes.
Until next week…
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive