AUGUSTA – Lewiston residents Jenney Ruffin and Dot Treadwell were among hundreds – some in wheelchairs – who crowded into the State House on Tuesday to rally against proposed social service cuts.
Advocates who organized the Maine Can Do Better rally said Gov. John Baldacci’s budget plan means $87.7 million worth of cuts to community mental health services, foster families, children’s mental health services and health care to low-income working adults.
Surrounded by a sea of signs, red balloons and people in red, Ruffin, 40, wore a Maine Can Do Better sticker. She said she has five mental illness diagnoses, and several years ago became homeless.
“I was on the street,” Ruffin said, tearing up. “I just walked around. I was a vegetable.”
Treadwell, 52, had a place to live six years ago but had little going on. She was too ill to leave her apartment, she said.
“I was isolated, home all the time,” Treadwell said. “When you stay home you get depressed and suicidal. … Six years ago I wouldn’t be able to talk to you.”
Through support from Tri-County Mental Health, Treadwell improved. Today she’s a member of the Downtown Neighborhood Association and teaches arts and crafts at Common Ties, a day center for the mentally ill.
Ruffin, through help from her caseworker, said she is “now a functioning part of the community. I have a job at Common Ties. I’m a member and an associate.”
Both women fear budget cuts will eliminate their case managers and their day center, two kinds of support they insist keep them well and out of a hospital.
Joel Packer of Pathways Inc. in Auburn, which serves children and adults with disabilities, wore a red scarf on his arm. The scarf represented “bleeding” social agencies, he said. “The budget cuts are going to hurt a lot of people,” he said – the disabled who need services and the professionals who will lose jobs. Many of the cuts would result in bigger losses, he said, since much of the state money is matched 2-to-1 by the federal government.
Packer noted: “This is not a welfare program. These are people the government should take care of.”
David McDaniel of Androscoggin Home Care in Lewiston said his nurses make sure that about 185 seriously mentally ill people – those with difficult cases such as bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia – take their medication.
The home visits could end if the proposed budget passes, McDaniel said. “These nurses are the eyes and ears of psychiatrists. If the nurses aren’t there, the patients go off their medication and become psychotic. They’ll end up hurting people, hurting themselves, having to be re-institutionalized.”
Chris Copeland of Tri-County Mental Health in Lewiston said the proposed cuts would mean his agency, which treats about 1,000 mentally ill people, would have to cut services.
What the state is doing, Copeland complained, “is redesigning the whole mental health system by budget cuts” rather than working with providers.
As the Appropriations Committee began reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services budget at Tuesday’s afternoon hearing, committee Co-chairman Peggy Rotundo, a Democratic senator from Lewiston, stressed that the cuts are far from final.
The budget process is just beginning, Rotundo said, adding that her committee will work to recommend a budget that is balanced but does not hurt the most vulnerable.
Appearances from the mentally ill and those in wheelchairs put a human face on her work, Rotundo said.
“We’re looking at figures. But those figures represent human lives,” Rotundo said. “It is very important for legislators to understand how those proposed cuts will play out.”
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