Photo ops in hard hats can’t be stopped during a behavioral health crisis.

Psychological stress can transfer and implant itself into our physical bodies, and for me, stress feels like a punch that can take the life out of me—or at least a well-ordered and logical one I put together. It destroys plans to leave home on time, narrowing the time for his anxious breath.

I’m learning new ways to manage it, but it’s a problem on the morning of an event to celebrate a long-promised build milestone on September 21st. Behavioral Health Crisis Center. The additional tax was funded by people who voted in 2014, after Albuquerque police killed James Boyd, an unsheltered man, in the Sandias Foothills.

The event was held in It has been named a major milestone for the center, which is slated to open in 2024 on the University of New Mexico’s main hospital campus. Officials from the state, Bernalillo County and UNMH gathered around the PA system, iced drinks and folding chairs under two tents, with construction hardhats and shovels ready for photo opportunities.

I planned to wake up in time to independently change into professional clothes, but it was difficult with little rest the night before. I threw on my sneakers and ran out the door in the last thing I stumbled upon: shorts and a t-shirt with block letters. Horror movie referenceWho will be saved and what will be left of them? Hasty dressing at least made a valid request.

When I later described the facility’s strategic plan to a close friend—one of many with first-hand experience of the behavioral suffering in this place—she said the psychiatric center looked good. “We need it,” she said.

She felt tired. “And we’re pushing a little pedal bike up a big rock?”

In March, she started texting me from a dark parking lot outside of our local hospital where she was trying to work out a problem with a friend and colleague (I’ll call her Michael here). Absences for urgent behavioral health care. They were trying to get him evaluated for rehab — something with a co-occurring psychiatric diagnosis and enough follow-up to rule out substance abuse relapse.

They tried to see him at a medical center in Bernalillo County to save him from tox services, but were turned away at the front desk. Someone decided that an “ambulance wasn’t enough” to treat Michael, who by then was weak, depressed and chemically imbalanced.

So they went back to the first private hospital in the middle of the night to get help. They come across a nurse who takes the time to check Michael’s medical history and advocate for him, eventually allowing him to administer the appropriate poison.

My friend talked about pedaling a bike on the rocks, but this time the behavioral health crises in New Mexico reminded me of the sludge of rage that accumulated under New York City in “Ghostbusters II.” Here in recent years, historical sorrows have boiled over with more deprivation. Displacement And political polarization, as everyone watches our drained watersheds run empty, our distressed forests die and burn around us.

We are all more frustrated and at least in need of emotional shelter. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham spoke of impatience — her own and others.

“I spent an hour with a father whose own daughter presented to the emergency room with a behavioral health problem. She left after 20 hours, and we don’t know where she is. They are happening in our communities and across the country. There isn’t a single person who hasn’t been touched by a family member… or a neighbor or a friend or a church member or a co-worker.

Although you know that there is this painful part of “below the health of the character” in New Mexico, it is more desperate than impatience, and then the hopeless and terrible first stage of despair, a severe resignation. The celebration of the event was a major distortion of reality, hard hat or not.

We need to be more honest with ourselves about how dire human conditions are here to stay, whether we feel the closeness of it or not. Many of us were swimming in loss and trauma before the coronavirus added more disruptions, more sorrows, new mass deaths.

We are already very accustomed to widespread family and community separation, to both communal and personal violence.

Nobody I know these days is emotionally good. People in crisis have better protective layers, defense mechanisms, or are emotionally and materially separated from more severe sources of suffering. Most of them know that they are among the lucky ones, a type of residual guilt that brings its own dislocation and moral trauma.

We know that this place we live in, at this time, is full of stress Dangerous conditions to accumulate even more lasting damage. One of our local, New Mexico firsts; He spoke openly at the beginning of this year:

Gov. Lujan Grisham offered compliments before putting shovels in the trash along with other policymakers in front of a crowd of cameras, including one for state senator and retired Albuquerque social worker Jerry Ortiz y Pino.

When he and I spoke on the phone after the event, he told me that the most urgent task facing New Mexicans is about the basics: We need to increase the number of professionals who can provide effective treatments. And this is not a drill. It is an ongoing emergency.

In May, Ortiz Pino spoke to the director of Turquoise Lodge in Albuquerque, where the city’s one inpatient substance abuse treatment facility was operating at about half its patient capacity because it was short-staffed. The state psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas, which was beset by the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history, said earlier this year it had a full wing due to insufficient staffing. And a rehab center in Roswell is licensed to clean and rehab for substance abuse but has not yet accepted patients for staffing reasons.

Meanwhile, wages are relatively and woefully low for most jobs in the poorest states in this country, including jobs that provide behavioral health services.

Thousands of nurses and hundreds of doctors are needed in the state.

We need more behavioral health professionals statewide, Ortiz Pino said, and while the state has encouraged funding to train more local people in the field, out-of-state providers moving to New Mexico face serious bureaucratic hurdles.

“We need to streamline licensing and certification processes,” Ortiz Pino said, especially since many New Mexicans rely on Medicaid for health insurance. That federal system provides its own laboratory system for providers to work with. “It’s asking someone to make a big financial sacrifice.”

“She doesn’t want to have another hour-long conversation with a worried parent,” the governor said during her speech. But making that a reality will take more than a new crisis call center. Helping someone once they’re in crisis isn’t a response – it’s not a solution.

When I asked my friend last week how Michael was doing now, she had the same story as the parent who talked to the buyer: He’s gone. My friend doesn’t know if he’s okay yet and he’s starting to worry.

We already know what it takes to be okay. He wants what we all need. Safe housing. A stable way to support himself. Safe, secure transportation. Clean food and water. Access to quality and comprehensive health care. Healthy, supportive relationships with family and community. To carry a noble value and purpose that can be shared with others.

That list of basics seems too difficult or unreasonable for most jurisdictions. And that itself is a call for mass anti-celebration. It is not a call to dig more holes, but a proper burial. And crying The wounded, the lost, and the gone, before we go into constant and effective mourning.