Features and News

Personally Speaking: Altered Course  

By Renee Smith 

I spent 12 months in 2003 as a member of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), a form of community-based mental health care for individuals experiencing serious mental illness, team in suburban Detroit. Working on that team shattered every preconception I had about mental health services and people with severe mental illness – stigma, violence and symptomology. 

I cannot honestly say that I was called to do this difficult work. I spent the previous four years running youth programs in Washington, D.C. My logic behind becoming an ACT team member was threefold: 1) mental health work would provide me new insight into working directly with this vulnerable population; 2) social work school had fully prepared me for this experience; and 3) I needed a job until I started my MSW program. 

I found out very quickly that I was correct in gaining new insight and very wrong in that I was prepared in any way for this heartbreakingly challenging work. 

My first week was relatively uneventful; I rotated riding along with the other three members of my team – all men and all at least 10 years my senior with extensive experience in the field. They kindly explained the paperwork associated with each client visit and gave me much needed background on the people who would become my caseload. 

After five days of ride-alongs, I was out on my own to provide intensive outpatient mental health services to about five people with severe mental illness per day. These services covered everything from transportation to doctor’s appointments to medication checks to talking over coffee. 

The clients and I would talk about symptom management, but more important, we would talk about their lives and how they were navigating living with their mental illness. Over the course of time, they grew to trust me and I grew to care for them. 

During my 12 months with ACT, I found myself getting to know and care about the 60 people to whom my team provided services. I was in their homes. I met their families. I was with them in crisis. I sat with them while paperwork was processed for yet another hospitalization. I cried when three of them died because of drug overdose, old age and complications related to years of medication side effects. I witnessed their pain and anger over a disease that they had no control over. 

What I had thought would be brief stop on my career path ended up impacting me so personally that I changed my entire career plan. 

I entered ACT as a young woman determined to help disadvantaged youth. I was planning to continue this focus during graduate school and return to youth programming to work directly with those kids again. I left ACT feeling broken by a system not designed to help those most in need. 

I channeled that experience into a new path of organizational management and fundraising. Since then, I have taken my commitment to service, social justice and community development and applied that to fundraising for nonprofit organizations. 

I have found that fundraising allows me to stay engaged in important missions. At the Treatment Advocacy Center, I am able to view our fundraising efforts through the lens of my personal experiences in mental health work, and I believe that makes me a more effective ambassador for our work. 

Every day, through writing grant applications to fund our research projects to creating fundraising campaigns to support our IMD work, I strive to share our mission with our supporters and explain why we need their financial support to continue the fight.   

Renee Smith the director of development at Treatment Advocacy Center.