Liz McGowen

One of the things I’m really, really good at is keeping people focused.

I learned that I had that gift the hard way — month after month, at a huge table full of psychiatrists, in a conference room deep inside a locked mental health facility.

Thank heavens, I wasn’t a resident at the facility, but if you ever do want to shift the balance of power into your favor, host a meeting in a locked facility. Your guests will definitely be thrown off guard.

As a still-wet-behind-the-ears bureaucrat, my boss used to assign me to lots of mundane kinds of things. They were the events and activities that somebody had to do, but that nobody wanted to do.

In most cases I wore a suit, shook a few hands, and passed along anything important to my boss. Harmless.

Thus, just a couple of weeks after I settled in, I found myself assigned as our region’s liaison to the Department of Mental Health. As a social worker, I was fairly familiar with the state’s mental health programs and facilities, although I’ve always found having to actually go inside the enormous locked facilities pretty creepy.

The agency I represented ran the local offices where people actually went to sign up for things like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and cash benefits (aka, welfare). Each of our 20+ offices in the Chicago area saw thousands of people a week (sometimes thousands a day).

Outsiders saw us as paper-pushers, but I saw something different:  we were people with access to tremendous resources, on the front lines with moms, dads, and kids. If something was off and we could recognize it, connecting them to the right resource could make a huge difference.

In many cases, I have no doubt that our caseworkers’ actions to report abuse and get help for clients saved lives.

The task I’d been assigned was to figure out how, why, when, and where the mental health department and their providers fit in with the work that we did. It was the time of the Clinton-era welfare reform, and there was a huge push to get people off welfare and into the workforce.

Sometimes – fairly often, in fact – we’d run across someone who really needed other services before a job or training would even be in the realm of possibility. With no real links to our sister agency that provided mental health services, the best we could do in the beginning was to give the person a referral and hope for the best.

Our dream was to be able to get these people set up with assessments — even in our office, if that was a safe place for them — help them access the treatment they needed, and have things start to improve for them and their family.

A little example…

I think of a woman I interviewed who was having trouble holding down a job. It turned out that she couldn’t sleep very well, so she was tired and forgetful all the time, and had lost a couple of jobs for being late to work.

At one point she kind of casually told me that recently she’d been questioned by the police because one of her neighbors had been shot… then later she told me the neighbor had actually been shot while she was standing right next to her… and eventually she disclosed that this had happened several times to her since about the age of 17.

No wonder she couldn’t sleep – she was constantly worried that her life was in danger. For at least 15 years, she’d been walking around with PTSD and everyone thought it was normal.

Having a secure relationship between our “system” and the mental health “system”, we were able to set up an appointment for her and start getting her the kind of help she needed to begin to deal with this.

Back to the psychiatrists…

So, I found myself about once every month going to meetings that all these bigwig psychiatrists had to attend. We had to find a way to get their agencies into our offices to screen people and provide services. There was lots of systematic gobbledy-gook, since their providers were already overloaded. They hated the idea.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a group of psychiatrists before, but let me tell you they’re a little tricky to keep on task. As a group, they tend to be exceedingly polite to each other, but all that respect amounted to giving everybody at the table plenty of time to speak with nothing real getting done. They also tend to be extraordinarily creative as a group – meaning somebody would come up with a really cool idea and next thing you knew everybody had hopped on the creative idea train. The person who was assigned by the Governor’s office to chair the whole group was knee deep in doing other things, and he had very little help.

I soon realized our ulitmate destination:  Nowhere.

Fortunately, I realized early on that I’d be in need of psychiatric help myself if things kept going this way, so I ever so gently took over. I volunteered to keep the notes and the agendas. I made sure we got clear next steps out of the group, and that we held working committees responsible for meeting and reporting on what was happening. If needed, I even did the same thing for the working committees.

It seems like I attended thousands of meetings and sent out millions of agendas.

But the results were amazing. We found our way through the bureaucratic swamp, and established clear lines of communication. We got the services into the offices, and were able to do outreach to people who otherwise never would have gotten mental health services. We collaborated on important issues, and established relationships and programs that had never existed before.

All this laid the groundwork for community action that I’m so proud of, like the way the state mobilized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to help relocated families, and how our two divisions collaborated to play pivotal roles in that effort.

And that, my friend, is how I learned that my gift of focus could make a huge difference in the world. It could make a difference for you, too, and I’d love to hear from you if that’s something you could use my help with — be sure to leave a comment below, or send me a note via email (liz at lizmcgowen dot com) or twitter.

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