Pat Rice has devoted the last five years of her life to working practically around-the-clock at a residential home for mentally ill patients in Ringgold, Ga.
The 52-year-old former EMS worker says the job is more a calling than a profession.
Rice said she understands her 12 patients, who range in age from 25 to 68. Most have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. She knows their quirks and can recognize their footsteps on the stairs before she sees them, she said.
Without residential services, “these people would wind up in [an institution] or in jail,” she said. “Most of them, if they take their medication, that’s all they need. They just need to be loved and know that they’re loved.”
But the future of the home, called Mapleway, is uncertain. The building’s owner has let the property go into foreclosure and told patients’ families they must find alternative housing before the end of the year, said Rice, the sole staff member.
Rice is trying desperately to get all her patients moved into a new building she rented in East Brainerd. But with just a couple of beds, no other furniture and very limited resources, she’s struggling to get up and running.
“We need everything. We have no couches. Who knows if we’re even going to have transportation [to get patients to doctor appointments]?” she said.
There’s little money in providing homes for those with mental illness, said Jane Elmore, of the National Alliance for Mental Illness in Chattanooga. The for-profit sector has little interest in it, and the nonprofit sector barely can afford to keep such facilities open, she said.
“It is a problem all over Tennessee,” she said. “It continues to be an issue that only gets worse.”
Residential care costs far less than institutions and improves patients’ quality of life, Elmore said. But there’s little public funding for those efforts, she said.
Della Williams, of Flat Rock, Ala., said Rice has been a stabilizing force for her nephew Gary Culpepper, 56, who has schizophrenia.
Williams said she cared for Culpepper for years after his mother passed away. Now she hopes to keep her nephew with Rice at a new facility.
“He’s just so attached to her,” she said. “She tries to keep them on the same routine, the same pattern. I would be afraid to take him from her unless it was absolutely necessary.”
Rice got involved in the mental health field after her 19-year-old son died in 2005. He had been prescribed two medications, the pain reliever methadone and an anti-anxiety medicine, she said, and the interaction was fatal.
She’s hoping to raise money to support moving Mapleway’s patients and has opened an account to accept donations at Wells Fargo Bank.
“I have all these [patients], and they’re looking at me like, ‘What are we going to do?'” she said.
“I don’t know what to do, other than pray the good Lord’s going to look out for us. I still walk in and look at them and smile.”