By Rubén Rosario Updated: 04/03/2010 08:44:16 PM CDT
Cecile Watters Tebo was battling her own torments when she ‘rolled up’ — as she is fond of saying— at the scene of a suicidal man about to jump from a bridge.
With her flooded, mold-plagued home lost to Hurricane Katrina and facing homelessness in a few days, the 50-year-old mother of three knew she was in the midst of a “dark, deep, paralyzing” depression. Now, as the civilian head of the New Orleans Police Department’s mobile crisis unit, the only one of its kind in the nation, she was facing a man who had lost all hope.
“He was holding an umbrella, and he looked at me with earnest eyes that said: ‘Please, just let me go,’ ” recalled Tebo, a former social worker, ex-debutante and member of a well-heeled and well-established New Orleans family.
“I wondered if I was being hypocritical at taking his hand, because at the time, I was thinking, how in the world do I do my job when my own world is falling apart, while I’m trying to uplift other people who are feeling hopeless and helpless?”
There was a fleeting second where Tebo thought about perhaps joining the man and taking the plunge. But she reached out to comfort and provide refuge.
“Baby, we’re going to make this day better and brighter. Take my hand,” she said before the man grabbed it that winter day in 2005.
Tebo plans to share her experiences responding to the needs of the mentally ill before and after Katrina at a one-day conference Wednesday at the Minneapolis campus of the University of St. Thomas.
Co-sponsored by the Barbara Schneider Foundation — named after a mentally ill woman fatally shot by Minneapolis cops during a disturbance — the conference focuses on how to provide better mental health services to underserved communities.
Some look upon Tebo as the Big Easy’s Florence Nightingale when it comes to the way she has dealt with mentally ill people whom police and her unit encounter daily.
“Tebo is on fire with her passion for treating those with mental illness and those in crisis with the greatest dignity,” said Mark Anderson, the foundation’s executive director. “She is undaunted by the enormous challenges that postKatrina New Orleans presents to the 911 responders and the whole community there.”
Katrina claimed far more than 1,800 lives while laying waste to brick and mortar. The area’s suicide rate tripled after Katrina. Half the city’s adult population struggled with “clinically significant psychological distress” seven weeks after the storm, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Another study found that the percentage of Gulf Coast residents with mental health problems had shot up to 31.2 percent a year after the hurricane struck the region.
If that wasn’t bad enough, New Orleans had just 10 public and private hospitals with only 400 psychiatric beds. As of last year, the number of beds reportedly dipped below 170 while demand was steady.
Tebo’s unit, which dropped from 40 volunteers to single digits during the storm, faced resistance and hostility from already-swamped emergency rooms that wanted little to do with psychotic and mentally ill patients.
“By federal law, ERs cannot refuse treatment to anyone who walks in,” Tebo said. “But at times, some of them, knowing we were coming with these people, actually met us on the ramp so that they would not have to take them in. I had to fight at every place just so they could be seen and treated.”
The situation, worsened by the recession and municipal budget cuts, “still remains pretty bad,” Tebo said.
In fact, her anguish at the bridge that day five years ago stemmed from two realizations: Even if they saved the man, where would they take him? And if they found a facility, would he receive proper treatment?
Throw in the then-recent death of her three sons’ beloved pediatrician and close family friend. The middle-age physician’s practice was wiped out by the storm while he was also dealing with physical ailments. He hanged himself in his home.
“He was a beautiful, precious man,” Tebo said.
The burden proved too much. Tebo, curled up in bed, was knocked out of service for some five days.
Then, not unlike the reeling and wounded city of her birth, she slowly began to tap into her faith and resilience and pull herself back up. As bad as things were, other people were in more pain, she thought. She sought help and eventually returned to the streets.
The granddaughter of a 1940s New Orleans police chief, Tebo wanted to be a cop since childhood. But that aspiration was detoured after she cared for disabled children at a hospital in her teens and pledged to help the less fortunate.
She entered social work and worked in the adoption field until the police bug bit again. She enlisted as a volunteer at the age of 40 with the city’s police reserves program. It was there she learned about the mobile crisis unit, formed in the 1970s and still unique among the nation’s police departments. She had no problem trading a service handgun for the brown leather and Velcro restraints she and unit members use on the job.
The unit responds to nearly 250 emergency calls monthly, and its volunteer membership consists of people “from all walks of life,” Tebo said. Volunteers cannot respond unless police officers are at the scene.
Tebo strongly believes mental illness remains very much a stigma and a low priority.
“It has been very clear to me that it is not even on the radar in the medical field, and it’s going to get the last attention in a major emergency,” Tebo said. “It should be just the opposite.”
Although she has been punched and kicked and injured during encounters with those in crisis, Tebo considers what she has done the past decade the “coolest job in the whole wide world.”
“When I roll up on people in a psychotic state and they are covered in urine or feces and no one wants to touch them, I can’t wait to get my arms around them because I truly believe they are God’s angels,” she said. “Their life has meaning. They remind us of what we have and should appreciate and why we should be willing to give them our hand.”
This report includes information from the Washington Times.
Rubén Rosario can be reached at 651-228-5454. or rrosario@pioneerpress.com.
