Category: History and Thoughts

SB 344

We got a bill, but there was little time to schedule a hearing for it. Sometimes these things take a while, and we will continue with the mission through next session. In the meantime, I’ve been applying for ARPA dollars to benefit our unsheltered, homeless persons as they lost resources due to COVID restrictions. They need sleeping bags, heavy coats, boots, hand and body warmers.

12 Steps Mental Health Recovery, Wally Wilson

We admit that our old ways of being had failed us and that our lives had become unmanageable without skills, strategies, treatments, changes in our thinking.

We came to believe that with faith in ourselves we could learn how to manage our various states and their symptoms.

We made a decision to believe in ourselves and turn our lives around.

We made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves.

We admitted to ourselves and everyone else the exact nature of what we found in ourselves.

We were entirely ready to put forth the work to manage our states and any defects we found.

We grant ourselves the grace to be human and learn new ways to be.

We made a list of everyone who had been harmed by our symptoms and became willing to understand their experiences with us and to do better in the future.

We take responsibility for the consequences of our symptoms in our lives and work to make amends where we are able.

We continue to look into and inventory our lives for issues where our symptoms go against our internal integrity.

Through meditation, tools, medications, therapies, and other means we seek to improve our relationship with ourselves and our integrity and with others.

Having experienced these things in our lives that brought us here, we reach out to others to give them hope and even help and support.

A Rural Mental Health Crisis

Rural Kansans Need Help

From the High Plains Public Radio I learned that we’re seeing an increase in suicide deaths in rural Kansas. In reaching out to community mental health centers, I learned that area hospitals shuttered adult and child psychiatric units to reassign staff to COVID patients. This means that if you lived in Garden City and your child needed crisis services, after screening, your child would have to endure a 3-4 hour drive to Wichita for admission. This is unacceptable, but we’re in a pandemic where nursing staff are overrun with COVID patients. I’m working on getting ARPA dollars out to these community mental health centers to help cover the costs for transport, whether it be with ambulance, or secured transport. I wish I could do more for my rural peers with mental illness.