Props to Caramore

A New York Times op-ed piece written by Lee Smith mentions Caramore, David's company. I'm really proud of David and the work he and the others do there.

From the Times:
April 6, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
In North Carolina, Really Outsider Art
By LEE SMITH
Hillsborough, N.C.

“WE mentally ill can be a shy bunch — aside from bipolar mania, we generally keep to ourselves,” the filmmaker Philip Brubaker says to a big laugh as he introduces his latest documentary, “Brushes With Life: The Journey of Art,” to a packed house.
We are at the Brushes With Life Gallery, which is housed in the University of North Carolina’s neurosciences hospital and has one requirement for the artists it showcases: each has a mental illness (something that, as Mr. Brubaker notes, “is seldom an asset”).
He continues: “Art springs from the heart, but more importantly, the mind. A mind that is heavy with anxiety and pain can get a release from art like nothing else. Their journey through art is a way to relieve pain.” The lights dim.

“I’m sick of that phrase ‘mental illness,’ ” one of the artists, Rhonda, announces to the camera in the film. “Many of us may have started this process out of anger, but ultimately, it’s healing.” Figures hide within figures in her intricate, elegant black-and-white drawings.
Todd, talking as he draws his humorous animal cartoons, points out that “the gallery focuses on dealing with the whole person; we’re not dealing with mental illness here.”

A young man named Kwami is filmed leaning up against a chain-link fence, watching some boys shoot baskets. “I wanted to play basketball,” he says. “But my mom’s boyfriend burned my hands while she was at the store.” The camera focuses on his large, nubby hands; the audience gasps. But Kwami says, “People can see my hands, and they don’t mind it — but having a mental illness, now that’s way more of a problem than my hands.”

Some of Kwami’s wildly colorful paintings also hang on the walls of Caramore, a residential treatment program in Chapel Hill where my own schizophrenic son, Josh, spent some productive time before he died in 2003.

Humor and openness abound here — both in the film and in everyone’s comments afterward. A far cry, I can’t help thinking, from the reactions of hush-hush horror our family faced when Josh became ill back in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, “Brushes With Life” is a splash of color and hope in a dark picture: North Carolina’s entire mental health system is in jeopardy. According to a recent investigative series by The News & Observer of Raleigh, a 2001 reform effort has failed, wasting more than $400 million and putting the 350,000 seriously ill people in the state system at risk of losing community care.

Local mental health services used to be provided by federal, state and local governments. The reform plan put the counties out of business and forced them to hire for-profit “providers” that offered sometimes specious “community support” services for exorbitant prices. Costs more than doubled, to $1.5 billion a year. Only 5 percent of the money went to intensive outpatient therapy. As a result, our mental hospitals are overwhelmed, while prisons and homeless shelters are filling up with people who have persistent mental disorders.

Peter Kramer, a local social worker, has served Hillsborough’s mental health program for 20 years. The day his program switched from state support to private contractors in July 2006, he says, “A mother called up and said her son was hearing voices, but there was no doctor there to refer her to.” His clinic is due to close entirely. “People are calling us in tears saying things like, ‘What’s going to happen to me? I’ve had my doctor for 17 years, what can I do without him?’
“The people in this film have been supported by good doctors and programs — by local clubhouse programs, by outpatient therapy, medication and case management,” Mr. Kramer points out to me at the reception. “The art is good, and they are getting validated here. Instead of seeing them as people with deficits, we see them as people with strengths.”

Mike Dunn, another of the artists in the film, tells me: “People are people, you can’t just draw lines. I’m trying to be a good ambassador for people with my illness. We have hurts, and we have hearts, and we have hopes, too.”

I just wish Josh could be here to see it.

Lee Smith is the author, most recently, of the novel “On Agate Hill.”