Hazel Wilson’s career with the Saginaw County Community Mental Health Authority reached its peak during the 1980s and ’90s, a time when public awareness began to expand beyond illnesses like schizophrenia or psychosis.
She is not surprised that today’s agenda also contains common maladies that include depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Mental disorders have moved from institutions into neighborhoods. This had led Saginaw’s county and city leaders to devote millions in federal dollars toward a new regional “behavioral center,” as mental health joins long-time concerns for housing, schools and safety.
Care advocates say surveys show 90 percent of us believe a “mental health crisis” exists, and half of families report personal hardships with one or more members across all age groups.
“People are under so much pressure these days,” Wilson says by telephone from Collinsville, a rural Mississippi small town where she returned home 20 years ago, after four decades in Saginaw.
Hardship and stress are nothing new for families and individuals, she continues, “but nowadays the conditions have been magnified by (COVID-19) and by a number of other factors.”
She adds, “Mental health has become part of, ‘It takes a village,’ ” referring to the often-quoted African proverb.
By the time Hazel began, the transformation to community residential treatment was well underway. The “village” she helped organize, the Houghton-Jones Neighborhood Task Force, is marking its 31st anniversary.
In Saginaw’s example of the increased national focus on mental health, the City Council has approved an investment of up to $5 million from ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act, a pandemic-era windfall of federal funding that is intended as a stimulus to help in local recovery. This action, combined with another $5 million from the County Board, helps to pave the way for a proposed new countywide “behavioral treatment” center in the downtown area.
There has been some controversy that relates to existing third-party agencies, where feelings have grown that they are being overlooked and excluded.
Mrs. Wilson has been away for two decades at this point, no longer a follower of any Saginaw scenario or involved in any local back-and-forth. Rather, she offers insights from a time before a “behavioral center” joined the local big-picture improvement agenda.
Mental health will continue to enter an emerging spotlight, no matter how the current local matters are resolved. Regardless, the multi-million dollar city and county contributions from ARPA far exceed previous priorities on mental health through the years.
In 1966, with her diploma from Jackson State University, Hazel’s young-adult idealism featured a desire to help people in poverty to cope and move out of hardship. She carried her sociology degree to Saginaw to begin as a caseworker for the county’s Department of Social Services. Her path was similar to many teachers and other professionals who came north during that time for work opportunities.
She soon found herself limited by all the DSS rules and regs, and so she resigned state employment during the early 1970s to help establish a branch of Detroit’s Mother Waddles Mission, soon in Saginaw renamed Good Neighbors Mission.
She also enhanced her credentials by attaining a master’s degree from Central Michigan University, which required three weekly 50-mile commutes to Mount Pleasant during an era before online college options.
When she took note of an opening at the Mental Health Authority, she felt she finally had found her niche.
“I was not involved as an individual caseworker or as a clinician, who are the ones who can explain what happens inside the brain and all of that,” she notes. “My role was in prevention, an effort to maintain mental health and to reduce the instances of mental illness. Neighborhood people can change their own lives and circumstances by taking a stand.”
Her quest to involve residents was centered on the residential area that connects Houghton and Jones elementary schools, both now closed, south of I-675 and extending to Perkins Street.
She began with a great deal of door-knocking, enlisting residents to take part. On one memorable occasion, she joined a flower-planting effort with a trio who would emerge as leaders — Joyce Seals, future mayor and school board leader; Sister Lois Ann Sheaffer, an educator and Habitat for Humanity housing counselor; and Christina Jones, who would become the first Houghton-Jones chairwoman.
When rain interrupted, the threesome stayed on task by cutting holes in garbage bags for makeshift ponchos. Wilson happily followed suit. This reflected the passion that she knew existed amid any rundown conditions, passion that simply needed to be unearthed.
“Everyone is traumatized, to some degree, and you never know what someone else may be going through. In mental health outreach, that’s why it’s so important to bring people together,” Hazel explains, returning again to the “village” theme. “People get to know each other, and neighbors who are less traumatized can support those who are more traumatized.”
She adds, “We know and understand that some people are more apt to develop heart conditions or cancer, and it can be similar with mental illness. It’s not simply a matter of choice.”
Nearly 20 years ago, Wilson was called to return home to rural Collinsville, Miss., to help meet family care needs. She is helping to raise four great-grandchildren.
Her great-grandfather was a slave who assembled 600 acres of farmland, which he purchased upon emancipation and shared to help family members and close friends establish their own homesteads.
Even in bondage, she says, “He was resourceful and he found a way to bring people together.”
In that spirit, she is aiming to bring community action to Collinsville in a similar manner that Houghton-Jones has maintained in Saginaw for more than three decades.
“Stress and mental health are concerns,” Hazel notes, with her personal family example of caring for babies and children during her own senior years. “Most of us are out here, and at the same time we have something going on in our lives, always something, something or other.”
She is there with a personal shoulder to lean on or a listening ear, but also she sees beyond individual treatment and counseling in her professional, tactical approach toward mental health.
“It can be a picnic or a festival, or a workshop, or maybe a cleanup project,” she asserts. “These are examples of activities that bring people together and lead to healthier communities.”
Hazel Wilson’s time in Saginaw included six years of service on the Board of Education during the 1980s, followed by a return to fill a short-term vacancy after Ruben Daniels died in 1993. Good Neighbors Mission still opens its doors, on a limited basis, at the former Sacred Heart School on Sixth and Cherry.
