Does it occur to no one that we are creating more problems than we are supposed to be solving?
She was broke and about to lose her home after her father died. Although she had a doctorate in literature and had once taught at a college in California, she had been fired from the only job she could get — as a clerk at a local drugstore.
The job was gone. So was her will to go on. But a friend persuaded her to give the Beverly center a chance. “They treated you like you were a human being, like you were normal,” Sullivan said.
She continued to go back, but even after six years of therapy she kept “suicide as a backup plan,” she said. Eventually, her therapist convinced her that she could not get well “if I always had an exit strategy.”
The city’s plan to close Beverly-Morgan Park Center and five others — Auburn Gresham Mental Health Center, Chicago Woodlawn Mental Health, Northwest Mental Health Center, Back of the Yards Mental Health Center and Northtown Mental Health Center — literally puts lives at risk, Sullivan said.
“I wouldn’t be here without my clinic,” she said.
A.