Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified attendee (former NAMI board vice chair; UVM Medical Center staff)]: Recently went off the NAMI board. I was the vice chair. Oh, wow. Terrific. Yeah, and I work at UVA Medical Center.

[Carrie Kelly (Parent advocate; NAMI volunteer, Grand Isle)]: Lindsay Hunt. I work at NCSS at the Parent Child Center. Wonderful. Hi, Dani Roberts with NCSS. I'm our Director of Community Relations. And you can introduce yourself again for the record. Amy Irish. I work for NCSS and I oversee our school based behavioral and social services. So, the committee is health and welfare committee. Senator Morley stepped out for a minute but we'll introduce ourselves briefly.

[Sen. John Benson (Member)]: John Benson, you put me orange. That's the people. Ginny Lyons, Chittenden, Southeast. Right. In La Brocchi, Chittenden, So thank you for being here.

[Sen. Martine Larocque Gulick (Vice Chair)]: Of course. Of course. You want me to start? Go right ahead. Okay.

[Carrie Kelly (Parent advocate; NAMI volunteer, Grand Isle)]: Gonna put, how much? Five, seven minutes? Yeah, would be good. That would be good. All right, because I have to, well, I'm kind of close. Okay. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me today, and thank you for your commitment to mental health, substance abuse, and addiction. I come to you today through life experience with my twins and the challenges we have faced. One was met with a healthcare system that worked and one was not. Mental healthcare is certainly healthcare. My name's Carrie Kelly and I live in Grand Isle. My longtime partner Greg and I have been there for many, many years. We have a blended family of five children, three 27 year olds, 25 year olds, and 22 year olds. I want to talk a little bit around my passion for mental health and what brought me to NAMI. I have been in the nonprofit sector for thirty five years, volunteered for many organizations. About to be terming off the State Rehabilitation Council, I served as the Chair of the Advocacy Outreach and Education Committee and the Chair of the Council. And I'm also a Mental Health First Aid instructor. I'm also an instructor for a program called QPR, which is Question, Persuade, Refer, which is a suicide prevention program, and mental health literacy. So I come to it at many, many different angles. If you're certified in mental health first aid, good for you. If you're not and want to find out more, feel free to reach out us. We've had folks simply talk with us about that. Excellent. We put some money into a grant, so we Nice. Can see That's great. Well, I'm sure I know who you've been working with. She and I work closely together. So my twins are going to be 28 years old a week from today. Calvin and Jackie were born in 1998, right at the time of the ice storm. As they started to crawl and walk, noticed a physical challenge for Jackie. In January 2000, she was diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy called spinal muscular atrophy. Working through the mental community was so easy with her because it was a formal diagnosis and something that they could actually see. In 2020, she graduated from Providence College in 2022 from the University of Leeds in England with her master's degree in disability studies. She currently works with the Vermont Department of Health as the emergency preparedness specialist for Franklin And Grand Isle County. All in all, PathCare's system did it with what it was designed to do. Calvin is the longer story where mental health challenges early in his life moved towards addiction in his teenage years. They went to daycare together, they went to Grand Isle Elementary School, and that's where problems started to arise. As they hit the doors for kindergarten, we noticed that there was some mental health challenges that were starting to appear for him, and by the middle of first grade, the school had decided they could not teach him, and they sent him to the Barrett School through the housing. He stayed at the Barrett School for four years before Grand Island Elementary was able to bring him back in fifth grade. During that time, as you can imagine, he lost a lot academically. He learned some strategies, however, lot was lost academically. A lot of meetings with the school, the principal refusing to bring him back until he could stay in the classroom for 80% of the time. The problem was that the challenge was that the activities going on in the hallway would create any child to want to know what was going on. So he physically could not stay in the classroom. The same pattern repeated through elementary and high school. It was crisis, short term response, and then returning to an environment that really wasn't built to support him. When he was nine, he was admitted to the Gardelboro Retreat for having a suicide plan in place. I drove him to the retreat on Friday, 04/13/2007, in a driving rainstorm and a scared child in the backseat. He returned home that Monday after I was told that he needed intense counseling, but the safest place for him to be was physically with me. I was so happy to go pick him up, as you can well imagine, and at the same time frustrated and heartbroken. As a sophomore in high school, he threatened to quit school. We worked with the school to quickly design an apprenticeship model that kept him attending school and working at the local auto repair shop. It was because of this shift that I was able to watch him walk across the stage in June 2016 to receive his diploma. Shortly after graduation, he obtained Class A CDL driver's license and was trying to figure things out. Because of his mental health challenges and not receiving the support from the medical community that he needed, he bounced when he got off the job for a while. Drinking increased and the fact that he was on was leading to self medicating with alcohol, to addiction, to run ins with law enforcement, turning himself in twice for DUI, which was a big cry for help, and spending a night at Northwest Correctional Facility in St. Helens. I'm sure you've all heard the stories about the families sitting in the emergency room with family members in crisis for days, waiting for help, resources, and connections. I have been that parent a number of times. And as helpful as the staff at the hour trying to be, it's an object specialty. We have met peer recovery coaches from Training Point Center, and the work that they do is incredibly helpful, as is a recently opened mental health urgent care. These programs work, but they are crisis response tools, not long term recovery solutions. So when I picked him up from the correctional facility, he looked at me and said, I'm done. I need to find something that's gonna work for me, or I'm gonna end up in jail or worse. So he started the work. He's the one who did the research on all programs throughout the country. We soon found out at the time that there were four programs in the state of Vermont, none of them taking care of people for more than two weeks. He needed longer help than that. Two weeks is really detox, it's not recovery. So he found Mountain Valley Recovery based in Holden, Utah. It took him, took us about three months before he finally got on the plane and headed towards Utah. And here's kind of where the sticking point is. I worked with Medicaid, which he was on at the time because he was 27. He'd just gone off our health insurance at the age of twenty six, six weeks prior to all of this. Medigene actually approved this program, which they had never done an out of state program with your law. Problem was, is that they said to me, We will provide $23,000 in coverage. I was elated. At least it was something. The program was a $7,500 a month program. What we found out later was that they said, This payment in full. The program either has to accept the $23,000 as payment in full, or you need to pay for it out of pocket. The program couldn't accept $23,000 This is a $100,000 program. Needless to say, we had to let the Medicaid offer go. I had to clean up my four zero one ks. I took out a second mortgage. I lean on a little bit more community resources. In toll, his dad is absent, by the way, living in Panama. All told, I spent about $110,000 to get him to insure study. I didn't have that money handy at all. Like I said, I worked in the nonprofit sector for thirty five years. My last employer was the United Way of Northwest Vermont for eight and a half years. I worked at the chamber where I saw many of your faces at legislative breakfast during the exciting days. So my message to you really is, we need to come up with strategies in Vermont for longer term care. Calvin's program was supposed to be a nine month program. Because he relapsed in month three, he ended up staying twelve months. Dollars 7,500 a month plus all the other stuff that I had to pay for is how I came up to $110,000 It's really, really critical. I feel if we wanna keep our young people in Vermont, we need to have the resources available to them to get the help that they need. Colin, he was just here over the weekend. He's doing awesome. He's living in the state of Wisconsin. He's a tow truck driver. He's been sober for eighteen months. It worked. When working with the Congressional delegation, my question to them was, if it's costing us 100,000 plus a year to incarcerate somebody in the state of Vermont, and a lot of those people incarcerated have mental health challenges, Why can't we work with people to use that funding to help maybe support a program that they would flourish in and become contributing members of society? The delegation was awesome to work with. Of course, we ran into a big wall and Calvin needed to get into treatment. My message really is, if we wanna keep them here, we need to develop longer support. I thank you so much for your time. Happy to connect on anything. You wanna learn more. This is a very high level synopsis of my story, but we need to unite really to make real change. I appreciate all the work that you are doing. Thank you. Thank you. For what you've been through, it sounds whole time ago. Well, he's a, you know, he was worth saving and he served as a volunteer firefighter in Grand Isle Of South Hero for years. He's a really good person who wants to become a peer advocate. Sounds great. Yeah.

[Sen. Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: I don't think he's coming. We are working on recovery residents for substitute disorder this year, trying to get that system in place. But we're also, the mental health system is the other part of it. We also have to work on, so you just brought us another load of work that we look forward to. Yes, thank you. I appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Of course. As a mother of a mental health counselor, I appreciate why you folks are all doing this. Yeah, thanks.