Jill Biden Tours Riverbend In Concord; Talks Grief, Mental Health

CONCORD, NH — Joe Biden's wife, Jill Biden, was in Concord Thursday to speaking about her husband's presidential campaign and mental health care with a roundtable of practitioners, officials, and advocates in the capital region at Riverbend Community Health Care on West Street. The roundtable was the eighth event sponsored by the New Hampshire Medical Society. Biden toured Riverbend's new facility — located in the previous New Hampshire Works building off South Main Street — and met with clients and employees at the center.

Peter Evers, the CEO of Riverbend, spoke about mental health issues in the capital region, a bit of history about the New Hampshire State Hospital — and how it went from around 2,000 people in the facility in the 1980s to around 168 people currently — and what doctors and others were doing to expand mental health awareness in the state. He said a lot of the problem currently is "not living in silos" and making sure people are treated as a whole person rather than each individual disease.

"It really is an important issue in this country, mental health," Biden said, adding, as an educator, she was hearing a lot about many mental health issues with children in schools and families across the country. "I really appreciate that you're focused on this and that you're bringing attention to it through the presidential candidates. It's critical."

The roundtable featured a number of clinicians and advocates requesting increased resources and better funding to tackle some of the problems around the mental health issue, including the opioid crisis, in the Granite State.

One participant, Dr. Bob Friedlander, a retired oncologist, during introductions, asked Biden about how she and her husband were able to balance the mourning their son, Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III, in 2015, while also serving the country. She said they didn't received counseling and kept his brain cancer diagnosis relatively private.

"Nobody really knew what we were going through," she said. "We had to keep it quiet. So we never received any sort of counseling ourselves or any help for our family to go through that … and Beau, our son, wanted it that way. He didn't want the world to know … and nor did we. It's a very personal thing to go through, as you well know, and a tough thing to go through."

The Bidens bracketed late nights and early evenings to ensure that the eldest Biden son wasn't alone during treatment and his final days in the hospital. After making the comment, Biden wondered out loud if that was a mistake to have not gotten counseling while adding it probably wasn't practical to have received mental health services at the time, despite the potential need.

Biden said focusing on improvement and awareness concerning mental health, grief and loss, and other issues was important but leadership also had to come from the top of the political spectrum. The issue was about how American families were going to be cared for and how resources were going to be distributed to ensure residents received the help they needed, she said. Military personnel also needed to be helped.

Many of the attendees spoke about the need to implement full funding of mental health care and not just based on the ability for one organization or another program to receive federal grants.

"What are our priorities and where are we going to put our resources?" she asked. "I see it, Joe sees it. It's really important."

Stigma issues, too, were problems in the past but not now, she said. Biden mentioned her time working in a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s and often, when she would see people after they were released, they were ashamed. Today, she added, everyone speaks openly about their therapy or counseling. Biden also said she didn't think it was appropriate to only rely on drugs for patients.

Dr. Marie-Elizabeth Ramas of Nashua raised the issue of working with mostly immigrants and people of color in the Gate City. She said the mission driven work she performed led to a lot of burnout with her colleagues. Ramas added that there was a need to focus not just on the health but the socioeconomic, emotional, and psychiatric standards of patients. The system, she said, was too top heavy.

"We really to change our concept of what health is," she said. "Health is not mental, psychiatric, emotional … the health of a person is really the wellness of a person. If we don't understand this, the whole system will fall."

Ramas called for the ease or limiting of the administration burden to make sure those on the front lines can work to provide the care that family needs. She said it should be as easy as asking Siri for restaurant listings or having Google already know what you were wanting, to giggles in the room.

Others promoted the idea of facilitating medicated assisted therapy to assist drug addicts in getting treatment before they enter the endless cycle of the criminal justice system. Evers was also commended by others for expanding substance abuse programs at Riverbend.

Michael Padmore, the director of advocacy for the New Hampshire Medial Society, said this was the first roundtable to feature the spouse of a candidate. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former U.S. Rep. John Delaney, Tom Steyer, and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, as well as former candidates U.S. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, Vice Admiral Joe Sestak, and U.S. Rep Seth Moulton, all participated in the roundtables previously.

Previous #FITN2020 Coverage

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