Newsmaker
Monday, May 25, 1998
Name: Joanne Lundstrom
Age: "Closer to 60 than 50"
Position: CEO, Mental Help Hawaii
Education: San Diego State College, UCLA, UH
Pastimes: Running
Joanne Lundstrom says she has seen a lot of progress in the treatment of mentally ill persons since coming here in 1962 after graduate school at UCLA. Giving the lost a home
But one thing hasn't changed. "Over and over and over" she has to explain that there is no reason to fear people with mental illness, she says, adding:
"Persons with mental illness usually are more frightened of community members than community members need to be of them."
Mentally ill people need to feel someone cares about them, Lundstrom says. "It makes a tremendous difference in someone's life."
The Hawaii chapter of the National Association of Social Workers recently recognized Lundstrom for making a difference in many lives through her caring and leadership in the mental-health field.
She was honored as Hawaii's "Social Worker of the Year in Mental Health."
Lundstrom's first job was as a teen model for a department store while in high school in San Diego. But she focused on a career as a psychiatric social worker.
Serving undergraduate and graduate internships in mental institutions, she "just felt a lot of compassion, a lot of concern about people who have mental illness."
She passed up offers from San Francisco and Denver to take a job at Hawaii State Hospital after UCLA. The era of inhumane "snake-pit" institutional care "was gone, but not too far removed," she says. A progressive staff began deinstitutionalizing and reorganizing the hospital while she was there, Lundstrom said.
In 1965, she shifted to the Community Mental Center at Diamond Head. She later worked at the Waipahu Mental Health Center (now Leeward Community Mental Health Center) and the Quick Kokua Project for adolescents, in the governor's office.
Lundstrom returned to college for a public health degree, then did some consulting and was a group home director for Child and Family Service. In 1979 she became director of "The House," now Mental Help Hawaii.
Working at least 10-hour days, Lundstrom has advocated and led development of community-based mental health services on Oahu and the Big Island. Services began in Hilo in 1991 and have gradually expanded. Two residential projects are being planned for West Hawaii.
She has established programs such as Safe Haven in downtown Honolulu to help care for homeless mentally ill people. Other projects include transitional housing on State Hospital grounds, supportive housing in Kaneohe, Honolulu and Pearl City, respite services for clients and families statewide, and day activity centers.
The advent of medications to treat psychiatric disorders "has made a tremendous impact," Lundstrom says.
When she started in the field, people sent to Hawaii State Hospital either never left or were there many years, she said. "I feel really good about offering alternatives so they do not have to go to the hospital and can be treated in the community."
And though it's a constant struggle for money, she says, "There's more to come."
Helen Altonn, Star-Bulletin
