Rallying for better housing: as personal care homes close in Philadelphia, advocates scramble to find housing for people with mental illness.

Meanwhile, another personal care home has announced that it is closing by May 28, and 15 more people are being relocated. "The dominoes are falling fast," said Rogers. "Cambridge residents are now competing for the few local beds with these other residents. You do not have the right to play musical chairs with the lives of human beings."

Fran Hazam, an MHASP advocate who has helped in the Cambridge relocation effort, said that the city's and state's elected officials "need to look into the eyes of these persons who have lived in South Philadelphia from birth and tell them that they need to move to Reading or Allentown because there is no room for them in Philadelphia. We have had to do it."

Editor's note: Behavioral Healthcare attempted to contact organizations representing personal care homes in Pennsylvania to find out their perspective, but none responded by press time.

Susan Rogers (srogers@mhasp.org) is Director of Special Projects for the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

RELATED ARTICLE: 'Loony bin rally'

When a Philadelphia Daily News reporter received a press release about our January 15 event titled "loony bin rally," he did a double take and called me. (Given the degree of prejudice associated with mental illnesses, I was not entirely surprised by his call.) The reporter then called PR Newswire, the wire service my agency had been using for decades to disseminate its releases. The news service quickly discovered that the stigmatizing "slug" (a short phrase indicating the content of a release) was the work of a feckless employee, who had expected her "joke" to be caught before the release hit the wire. It wasn't.

The company fired the employee and began to make amends. Referring to the slug, the apology read in part, "PR Newswire understands that such terminology feeds the prejudice and discrimination associated with mental illnesses and will take steps to ensure that nothing like this occurs in the future." PR Newswire also reran the press release and did not charge us for the original release. Company representatives said they would consider our recommendation that they develop policies spelling out acceptable language and possibly institute staff sensitivity training.

The incident was covered in the Philadelphia Daily News as well as online on the Philadelphia Inquirer's Web site, the media gossip site Gawker, and hundreds of other Web sites. In fact, the foul-up received a lot more publicity than the rally did.

--Susan Rogers