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Henriette Kellum - A Dedicated Career
By Diane Perkins
Mrs. Smith runs a hand through her matted gray hair as she sits
in her threadbare recliner, staring at walls stained yellow with
tobacco smoke. Cooking a meal seems too much effort, as does
bathing, or changing clothes, or phoning the super to fix the
toilet. What is the use? She is old, sick and alone. Who is
there to care about her?
Our fictional Mrs. Smith is suffering from clinical depression,
the most common mental illness among the elderly. Almost 25
percent of elderly people in the United States suffer
significant symptoms of mental illness. Even so, less than 1.5
percent of mental health treatment dollars is spent on this
population, in spite of the fact that the suicide rate among the
elderly is the highest of all age groups.
Who is there to care about Mrs. Smith and countless others like
her? There is this month's Superheroine, Henriette Kellum, a
licensed clinical social worker
 who has dedicated her
professional career to men and women like our fictional Mrs.
Smith.
Through
Henriette's efforts, literally thousands have been helped.
In 1979, Henriette was hired by Arlington County, Virginia, to
provide mental health services to Arlington's elderly
population. Soon, she began to advocate for more staff and
specialized psychiatric treatment for the elderly mentally ill.
She built the Senior Adult Mental Health Program, which started
out as a small team of her, another mental health social worker
and a part-time psychiatrist. The team provided assessment,
treatment and outreach, going out into the community to find
people like Mrs. Smith who needed coaxing into treatment.
Henriette's program was so innovative and successful that nearby
Alexandria City adopted a similar program, and even more elderly
clients were served.
Through years of shrinking mental health dollars, Henriette
continued to advocate for her program and the elderly people it
served. Over and over, she demonstrated its effectiveness in
preventing far more expensive psychiatric hospitalization and
nursing home placement and in preventing suicide (No client in
treatment with the Senior Adult Mental Health Program has ever
committed suicide.). Henriette grew the program to serve more
clients, adding more staff. She added a homebound program that
brought the psychiatric nurse and psychiatrist out to those
seniors who could not make office visits. Because the model of
her program was so successful for the elderly, another
disenfranchised population was added - adult mentally ill
retarded/developmentally disabled. Henriette was also put in
charge of Arlington County's Adult Protective Services, the
workers who investigate and intervene with elderly and disabled
adults suspected of being abused, neglected or exploited.
In Henriette's years as both worker and supervisor, she visited
client homes so cluttered only a narrow path led from one room
to another, so cluttered that normal life was impossible. Amidst
piles of newspapers, Styrofoam cups and junk mail were utility
bills, lamps, cereal boxes, clothing - items of everyday life or
sometimes bizarre items like rotting food or jars of urine. This
puzzling syndrome, called extreme hoarding behavior, so
intrigued Henriette that she was determined to understand why
some people hoard and how to effectively help them. With her
counterparts in Alexandria and Fairfax County, she put on two
hoarding conferences, bringing in the country's foremost experts
on the subject. Henriette went on to become an expert herself on
the subject, speaking nationally and testifying in court as an
expert witness. In Arlington, she helped establish a Hoarding
Task Force, a multi-disciplinary team including social services,
public health, police and mental health who now work together to
provide coordinated services to hoarding clients.
Establishing an effective, state-of-the-art treatment program
and becoming a national expert should be enough to name
Henriette a Superheroine. But there is more. When new state
laws, policies and procedures proved to be unfair to mentally
ill elderly, Henriette advocated at the state level for change.
The Northern Virginia Restructuring Group included these older
adult issues in a report to the governor on restructuring the
mental health system. As a member of the geriatric subgroup of
the Northern Virginia Regional Strategic Planning Project,
Henriette has helped design yet another innovative,
multi-jurisdictional program to help improve mental health
services to older adults.
Today, if our fictional Mrs. Smith were real, she would be
visited by one of Henriette's workers. She would receive
treatment for her depression. Her apartment would be repaired.
She would begin to eat, to sleep, to bathe. She would receive
medical treatment. Rather than end her life, she would begin to
enjoy life again, to have meaningful activities, to have
friends. That's very good news for Mrs. Smith and thousands like
her.
All because of a Superheroine - Henriette Kellum.
For more information on extreme hoarding, see:
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/03/10/Tampabay/A_habit_they_can_t_gi.shtml
http://www.elderabusecenter.org/pdf/newsletter/news23.pdf
http://www.cornellaging.com/gem/hoa_art_hoa_beh.html
Statistics taken from
http://www.friendshospitalonline.org/elderlyfacts.htm
Diane Perkins left behind a career as one of Henriette's
mental health social workers to pursue her dream of writing
Regency historical romance. Visit her Web sites at
www.dianeperkins.us and
www.dianegaston.com
To read
last month's SuperHeroine article, click
here
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