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Compassion Embodied
By Adrian Walker
November 22, 2010
Carlene Jean-Baptiste grew up in Brooklyn, dreaming of Haiti. She moved here to attend Boston University and eventually pursued a career as a psychologist.
While she was a graduate student, she landed an internship with the Haitian Mental Health Team at the Cambridge Health Alliance. That title may be long and bureaucratic-sounding, but behind it is a dedicated group of mental health providers - Jean-Baptiste among them - who have just been through 10 months many of their peers could not imagine.
They have served a community battered by the emotional ripple effects of the earthquake that shattered the country in January, and then by the cholera epidemic that followed.
And they have done so with passion and commitment. "I've always really appreciated that I am able to serve the Haitian community in this way," Jean-Baptiste says.
The task of her five-person team is to provide mental health services to the Haitian community in Cambridge, Somerville, Revere, Malden, Everett, and Winthrop. But their work far exceeds just seeing patients in a quiet clinical setting. They hold community meetings. They follow up and chase down patients.
They have, since their founding in the 1980s, done this work with a community that is often wary of ideas like mental health treatment.
The program was recently chosen from among 100 worthy applicants to be honored by the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center for Compassionate Care. They received their award last week at a dinner with more than 1,000 attendees.
"Even before the earthquake they were dealing with challenges many of us can't imagine - dire poverty, despotic government, torture," said Julie Rosen, executive director of the Schwartz Center. "In the Haiti culture, mental illness bears a terrible stigma, and they have really been able to break through."
The team is led by Mel Schmid, as social worker who cofounded the group in 1985. He grew up in Haiti as the child of missionaries and was working at Cambridge Hospital when officials there began searching for ways to reach immigrant communities. Its members include Astrid Desrosiers, the Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist who survived and attack by a patient there in 2009.
The late Kenneth Schwartz was a 40-year-old health care attorney when he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in 1994. The news, of course, came as a shock; he didn't even smoke. He was an expert on health care policy, but he came to appreciate the human element of health care. He chronicled his evolution in a first-person story in the Boston Globe Magazine in 1995.
"It has been a harrowing experience for me and for my family," he wrote. "And yet, the ordeal has been punctuated by moments of exquisite compassion. I have been the recipient of an extraordinary array of human and humane responses to my plight. These acts of kindness - the simple human touch from my caregivers - have made the unbearable bearable."
The center bearing his name has made a mission of encouraging the kind of contact he found to be so invaluable.
One of the huge issues facing people who treat the traumatized is taking care of themselves. Jean-Baptist and Schmid acknowledged that team members have made and extra effort to support one another as the tragedies have mounted.
"Our team is pretty close-knit, so we support each other in all of this," Schmid said.
Jean-Baptiste seconded that. "We identify with what people are saying while still maintaining our professional stance. But it's still very hard to hear from people who have had multiple losses and aren't sure how they're going to start over again. It's very moving."
Rosen said their empathy - as expressed in letters of recommendation from patients - made a deep impression on the Schwartz Center board.
"Their patients," Rosen said, "really love them."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
