Joshua's journey

Joshua Stewart, 13 and with an IQ of 36, didn't really understand what he was doing that day, Jan. 18, when he pulled his mother's hair and punched her in the head and then threw his little brother across the room. Joshua is severely autistic, and in the days before he grew some and got stronger, his mother, Salima Mabry, could control him. But no more.

And that's why, desperate for help, she took Joshua to the Wake County Crisis Assessment unit for folks with mental illness. There they stayed for days, in a room with no bed, no television and one window. Clothes were kept on plastic bags on the floor. Mabry would clean up her son by sponging him off.

She has in abundance that quality every mother knows about but can't put into words, beyond calling it a mother's love. Outsiders might look at her situation and wonder why she wouldn't want to institutionalize her son. But mothers know. Their love is protective and unconditional and unending.

So Mabry waited, an ordeal described in a front-page article yesterday by The News & Observer's Michael Biesecker. And to their credit, the folks at the county didn't give up on trying to find help for Joshua in a facility. They made 67 calls. No option was found at the new Central Regional Hospital in Butner, a place that's had all sorts of problems in opening and still does. A children's ward had physical room for Joshua, but not enough staff members. Other facilities, private ones, didn't want a patient with a recent history of aggression.

Much has been said about the chaos in the failed reform of the state's mental health care system, reform put in place about 10 years ago that was to shift many services to local, private contractors. As The N&O reported, reform failed miserably. And now the state is trying to fix things in the midst of a budget crisis that recently saw the mental health care system lose $155 million and 354 jobs at state hospitals.

So there are gaps in care. And what happens when that's the case? People fall through them. Not bureaucrats' words. Not reports from consultants. People. Joshua is one.

For days, the mother and son waited and waited some more. They have no health insurance, but Joshua is covered by Medicaid because of his disabilities. The N&O's Biesecker called to ask the state Department of Health and Human Services for a comment on his situation. Less than an hour after the call, a state official responded to say a bed had been found for Joshua in Morganton, at Broughton Hospital, which is 200 miles from Raleigh.

That's good, but the problem is that if Joshua and his mother are in a small room waiting for help that doesn't seem to come, there likely are others in similar situations. Others ... mothers and children, suffering, whose stories are not told by newspapers. Others ... who have little hope, and little reason for it. Others ... suffering because the great reform plan hatched by idea people in state government failed.

North Carolina should not tolerate this. Officials need to stop making excuses (not that some excuses aren't valid because of money problems) and start facing up to the fact that people with disabilities or mental illness in this state need help they cannot get. They need to bring the same determination to making the system work that Salima Mabry brought to her quest for Joshua.

She was relieved when help was found. But it wasn't that she would get a break from all the pressure of taking care of a child with problems. The relief came because at last her son was going to get assistance. Still, she cried as she packed his belongings because "it is so hard to know he won't be coming home with me." Mothers, you see, never lose hope.

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