News: A Carter Comes to Town

Soft-spoken but equipped with a strong message, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter told an audience at Columbia University today that the way Americans treat the mentally ill remains a “moral issue”—and not nearly enough is being done.
After about four decades of advocating for better care for the mentally ill, Carter has a new book just published. In “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis,” coauthored with Susan K. Goland and Kathryn E. Cade, Carter is cheered by the medical breakthroughs in study of the human brain. Indeed, she told a Columbia crowd yesterday at Miller Theatre that she is “really optimistic” about what can be done for the one in four Americans who will be touched by mental illness.
But she sounded the alarm, too, stressing that the recommendations she helped spark from a presidential commission during the Carter Administration have never really all been instituted. A later commission, ordered up by President George W. Bush, hit many of the same recommendations decades later, Carter said.
“I am frustrated and even angry,” she admitted. “We know what to do and don’t do it. And millions are suffering.”Carter became interested in mental illness during her husband’s first campaign for governor, she said. Handing out leaflets for her husband at 4:30 a.m., she encountered a woman at a cotton mill leaving her shift. She had lint in her hair and clothes. She told Carter about being on her way home to a mentally ill daughter. “It haunted me all day long,” said Carter, who later approached her husband about the importance of the issue. Gov. Jimmy Carter wound up appointing his wife to be among those to address the issue.
Carter remembered how the anthropologist Margaret Mead, visiting the White House, once said that a society can be measured by how it treats the most vulnerable, including the mentally ill. “We are failing to measure up to Margaret Mead’s standard,” Carter said.
The 82-year-old former First Lady gave an address and then was joined in a panel discussion at Columbia, where she said the stigma surrounding mental illness remains the biggest barrier to progress. While some still think of the mentally ill as potentially violent, Carter stressed that they are more likely to be victims of violence than act out themselves. And people who are mentally ill are far more likely than other Americans to be victims themselves, she said. “And that’s inexcusable,” she said.
Pointing to the bright side, Carter said the recent health care reform law signed by President Obama had some good things in it for mental health advocates.
“Look at all the good things that are happening,” she said. “We have treatments now. We know so much about the brain.”