FALL 2024 | In This Issue A Mother’s Long Journey Home Q&A with the Director of our New Behavioral Health Program Our President on Giving our Whole Hearts
NEWS
Introducing our New Holiday Card for 2024 Join Us for Funny Women…Serious Business, October 15th
A Mother’s Long Journey Home
Q&A
MORRIGAN PHILLIPS, LICSW
CLINICAL DIRECTOR, BEHAVIORAL HEALTH PROGRAM
Morrigan Phillips joined Rosie’s Place in the Spring of 2024. A mental health clinician trained in trauma-informed care and curriculum design, Morrigan has developed numerous programs for individuals with persistent mental illness, substance use and recovery needs. With over a decade of experience providing direct clinical care in urban community-based settings, she leads our new, comprehensive Behavioral Health Program, which will support women like Nai who you read about in our cover story. What mental and behavioral health challenges do our guests face? Unfortunately, a great many of the women we serve have suffered repeated trauma. This can include experiencing violence and loss as well as living in the chronic chaos of homelessness and poverty. This means someone is also living in a prolonged state of “survival stress,” a condition in which one is unable to focus on more than the crisis and emergency needs in front of them. As a result, they may struggle with untreated and severe depression, anxiety and dissociative and substance abuse disorders. These struggles can manifest in behaviors that make accessing and maintaining connection to this critical help, extremely difficult for our guests. How will our new Behavioral Health Program address these challenges with our guests and staff? As part of Rosie’s Place’s strategic plan, we are building a team to address the spectrum of our guests’ needs with expertise and compassion. We’ll bring on two more licensed social workers and a certified alcohol and drug counselor to provide drop-in services, individual counseling sessions and specialized support groups for our guests and training for our staff. While our work will be guest-centered—asking women how they are experiencing their mental illness, what circumstances they want to change for themselves and how we can help them—we will also be asking very similar questions of our direct service staff. Questions like: How are you interacting with our guests struggling with mental illness and challenging behaviors? And how can we support you in creating the best practices and outcomes for both them and you? We know that addressing mental illness is difficult work for both our guests and our staff who care so deeply about the women we serve. What makes our program unique? A core value of Rosie’s Place is unconditional love. It infuses everything we do from how we provide shelter and serve our meals to our public policy work. Unconditional love requires acceptance, commitment, trust and transparency. It can truly be a transformative act to say, “I will love you as you are and where you are and will help you go exactly where you want to go.” And that’s exactly what Rosie’s Place says and does— for hundreds of different women, in hundreds of different ways—every day.
Sandy, Nai and Jane at Logan Airport
Nai grew up in an affluent family in Egypt. In school she mastered English, Spanish and French as well as her native Arabic. She came to Boston on a student visa at age 18 and went on to earn a nursing degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from Yale. While working as a nurse, she met her husband, an American citizen. They soon had a baby girl, Cotti. But they were not a healthy or happy family. Nai’s husband was abusive, and when Cotti was three years old, Nai left her husband. Receiving no support from him, Nai worked hard to make a stable life for her daughter.
At this point, Nai’s life began to truly unravel. She struggled with bouts of severe depression, paranoia and post-traumatic stress.
Nai’s mental illness posed many challenges to her ability to access help. But we never let them hamper our commitment to working with her.
She eventually lost her job and, not long after, she became homeless. For decades, she bounced between having housing and living in shelters or more often, on the street.
Over the years, Nai became more comfortable with Rosie’s Place, and she felt safe in sharing with us her dream: to return to her home in Cairo. With her sister’s help, we acquired all of the documentation needed for Nai’s passport and sent information to the Egyptian consulate explaining her situation. After months of effort, the consulate issued Nai’s traveling papers. She was excited but also
“Nai revealed her story to me very gradually over the 15 years we knew each other,” says Chief Program Officer Sandy Mariano. “She was wary of me at first, but I persisted, stopping
Nai’s mental illness posed many challenges to her ability to access help. But we never let them hamper our commitment to working with her. It was just a few years later that Nai, having already seen her share of heartache, experienced the devastating loss of her daughter. Walking to school one day with her mother, Cotti dropped her hand and ran into the street where she was struck by a motorist and later passed away from her injuries. Nai’s family rallied around her and wanted her to return to Egypt, but Nai insisted on remaining in the United States so she could participate in the trial of the man who hit Cotti. Upon her wishes, Nai’s daughter was laid to rest in the family’s tomb in Egypt. The trial went on for a very long time and ended in an acquittal.
to say ‘hi’ or to have a conversation. She wouldn’t sleep in our shelter but instead would sleep outside Rosie’s Place and spend her days inside with us. Over time, we started to meet regularly. But because she refused to provide any real information regarding her identity, it was impossible for us to help her secure the benefits she was eligible for and the comprehensive help she needed.” It wasn’t only her mental health that was suffering, Nai’s physical health was at risk too. She survived two massive heart attacks and was able to get housing after the first incident but lost it because of hoarding behavior. After the second heart attack, she agreed to enter Department of Mental Healthsupported transitional housing.
deeply anxious to fly alone. Rosie’s Place staffer Jane Adler agreed to accompany her on the first leg of her trip to New York. A day later, Nai called Rosie’s Place. Her exact words were “I made it to Cairo and I didn’t drop dead of a heart attack on the plane!” Sandy says it was the best call she ever received. Epilogue: Nai spent the last years of her life with her family, happy to be home at last. She passed away peacefully at 84 and as she requested, was buried alongside her daughter.