My name is Chaela Manning and I'm a case manager / mentor for people with co-occurring disorders, duel diagnosis. It means mental health and possible substance addiction problems, possibly combined with physical health problems. É a typical client of mine would have schizophrenia, HIV and be a heroine addict and be homeless, jobless. I don't have any actual educational background. I was one of those people that are my clients now. Sometimes it seems that the best way to get through to someone is if they know that you know what you're talking about. Yes. I don't want people to have to go through what I went through, so if I can help them stop. . . No, I don't feel that we have adequate resources to support our work at all because I feel like we're constantly scraping for resources for the clients' food, shelter. Especially shelter. Housing is just ridiculous. Medical, dental -- even down to foot care, because if you're homeless for quite a while you're feet are in serious need of attention. There's no funding. It's split down the middle. We're either really, obviously, put down by it and discouraged because we've called the sixteenth person and they've said "no." Or, it makes us work harder. Personally, I take it as a challenge. I don't like the word "no" so I'll keep going until I get the right answer. But we can't always be like that and not all of us always are. So we try to keep each other going, but it's hard. We see the clients going without and it's hard. The quality of care had been affected by budget cuts, primarily when we saw OHP leave we saw a lot of clients that were denied their substance abuse benefits, mental health benefitsÉThey restricted all those benefits and they were left with very skeletal physical health benefits. That has cost the system a huge amount of money because people went from going to the doctor's office to going to the ER because there's nowhere else to go. Our program was actually set up to combat that Ð to address the high hospitalization rate of people because there was no money to treat them in clinics. Oh my god, what my program could do with ten million dollars! Um, housing. We could build more housing. We could renovate older buildings into housing. We could put money into the Old Town clinic where it used to be free to go in and it's not any longer. They keep it as minimal as possible, but we need a good free clinic. A good proper free clinic for clients who have nothing so they don't expect a $500 bill to show up on their door. Some people deserve raises, I'm sure, but for the most part, it should go back to the clients Ð to open services, open it. Give them what they need: food, shelter, respect. Basic needs. And you know, a lot of my clients have serious needs for psychiatric medication and they don't get it. There's nothing we can do to get it for them. We've tried the scholarships and we've tried the samples, but we run into dead ends every time. As a result of not having a medication that they need, generally they continue to relapse or Ð we've had a couple of suicides. That's just devastating Ð knowing that something could have been done. We know it's not a personal thing. It's not that we've failed, but the system is failing. If you're hearing voices and they're telling you to jump off the bridge, then that's what you're gonna do. And if it's a matter of having a heavy dose of Seraquil every day then, give it to them. It's not that hard. No it's not. Some of the pharmaceutical companies are really good about giving scholarships, but some of the medications they need aren't on the formulary. And so they can't have Haldol, injectable Haldol, which is a medication a lot of psychotic clients need. They can't have it. It's highly expensive and so they can't have it on scholarship. And they'll try to give them something to balance it out, but it's not what they need. Public money could be best spent on Ð well I could always go back to opening up services to people Ð for people, for the betterment of people. I see a lot of public money being wasted. There are things happening in science that are just repetitive and I don't understand why we have to test drugs on animals when we already know what they do to people. There is a lot of money spent on statistics that we already know about. We know cocaine is addictive. We know that heroin is addictive. We know alcohol is addictive. We know all this stuff already. Well how long do you have? (laughs) I do pay attention to some of the drug and alcohol studies specifically because of my work and also because of my past. I did pretty much every drug out there and I know they're all addictive and I know what they do so why are we still spending, I don't know how much, but I know it is tons and tons of money on studies where they're proving that dogs are addicted to heroin, or that monkeys will continually press a button to get cocaine. Duh. Everybody knows that. So why? It's hard to comprehend and it's one of those things that bothers me the most -- that if I think about the amount of federal funding that goes into certain things and I don't know numbers, like I said, but it just astounds me that that money is being placed in a sort of box and locked up when is could be feeding people, housing people, getting them off the streets out of the bridges. It doesn't make sense to me. If you already know something, move on. Find a better solution. We're about the solution. I go to work every day and it's all about the solution. I feel sometimes like we're fighting a huge machine that's not about the solution. Part of it is the money that's not going where it's supposed to go. It's true. They say that their research is to help humanity and when I look at their results compared to our results, we win. We're the ones doing it. I'm out on the streets every day. On the streets. We're the ones doing it. I don't have a PhD. I don't make a salary and I sure don't get their grants, but we're the ones doing it. No. They're different species. Come on. No monkey ever stuck a needle in his arm by choice. None of these animals act like we do. So why study behaviors in a species that doesn't smoke pot, doesn't drink martini is, doesn't drive cars. . . It's a totally different thing altogether. We're the ones who need to be studied. I would've gladly done studies when I was using. I loved trying to find solution because I wanted to stop. Had I had the opportunity to partake in a study, I would've freely done that. She's doing that? Judy Cameron's studying. . . oh my god. Who doesn't know that? Ask any DHS worker. They'll tell you. I wonder how much money she's taking away from my clients for that. That's astounding. That won't translate into my work at all -- except if I talk to my coworkers. They'll get a little more angry, a little more frustrated, a little more militant about the whole thing. Because at this point we have to be militant about getting services otherwise we get nothing and our clients get nothing. The money that goes into these studies is criminal. I work in the war zone and I see people come out from under the bridges every day and they need help.