Editor’s Note: We all make mistakes; we all make errors in our judgments. Being willing and able to admit to our mistakes and to learn from them – and not to blame others – is what I believe is important as we begin a new year.

To be a reporter and as a journalist always requires, I believe, a sense of humility, to try not to be stiff-necked. This last week has proven to be difficult for me. I had to choose to keep on the sunny side of the street, to avoid trying to do too much, for health reasons. And, not to let my anger about my own “uniquely abled” body take precedence. 

The phrase that came to me in my thoughts as I attempted (unsuccessfully) to catch the Northern lights in the nighttime sky was this: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly.

Many of the stories that I had planned to report on for this edition of ConvergenceRI fell apart. Some will re-emerge in future editions. Others I will simply have to let go.

PROVIDENCE – I did not attend the news conference held on Thursday morning, Oct. 10, announcing the belated launch of the Rhode Island Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, or CCHBC, at six initial locations across the state.

The full-scale dog-and-pony show at the headquarters of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services featured Gov. Dan McKee, EOHHS Secretary Richard Charest, State Sen. Josh Miller, and Community Care Alliance CEO Ben Lessing, among others.

The goal of the program, according to the Governor’s post on social media, is to offer "real-time mental health, substance use and crisis care – a game-changer for health access in Rhode Island.”

At a time when so much of our delivery of health care infrastructure has been disrupted and when a patient’s ability to access needed care in a timely fashion has proven to be a frustrating journey through a bureaucratic maze, the promise that CCHBCs bring to the table is important.

If my legs had been behaving better [“Oh, behave!” as the movie character Austin Powers said] and I had been able to attend, I might have asked this impertinent question: “Why did it take more than a year to get this effort launched and up and running?"

And, if I had been allowed a follow-up question in the news media scrum, I would have asked: "Is there enough money in the state budget to continue to fund the CCHBCs for more than a year?” Stay tuned.

Endocrine disruption, forever chemicals, and breast cancer research.  
Last week, I was also unable to attend the Silent Spring Institute gala celebration on Tuesday evening, Oct. 8, at the Museum of Science in Boston. The Silent Spring Institute has been a leader in conducting research to uncover the environmental causes of breast cancer. Its goal is to prevent cancer by reducing people’s exposure to harmful chemicals wherever they live, work and play.

Here in Rhode Island, the incidence of breast cancer continues to climb, according to the latest data trends put out by the R.I. Department of Health.

At the Silent Spring Institute gala, investigative journalist Sharon Lerner was presented with the 2024 Rachel Carson Advocacy Award for her work in reporting on how the research conducted by a 3M scientist about finding forever chemicals – PFAs and PFOAs – in people’s blood had been downplayed and denigrated by the company, even though such findings had been identified as early as 1975, some 50 years ago.

By attending the gala, I had hoped to conduct an interview with Lerner in order to create a context to talk about ongoing research underway in Rhode Island about endocrine disruptors and their link to breast cancer.

Connecting with the ‘connectome’    
I had been awaiting a story to come in for this week, now hopefully next week, on the amazing advances in neuroscience in mapping out what is known as the “connectome” of the adult brain of the fruit fly – and what it portends for the future of collaborative neuroscience research.

The story has been featured in both Nature and Science and on NPR, but it turns out that neuroscience researchers with strong Rhode Island roots have been involved in these developments.

The sunny side of the street    
I did have a meeting to discuss the next episode of “The Bright Side,” a monthly column published by ConvergenceRI written by Katy Linwood about living the sober life. Her next column will feature a collaborative story written together by herself and her mother, stressing the positive vibrations of sobriety.

When hope, history rhyme in Woonsocket    
Last week’s edition of ConvergenceRI had featured a story about the release of a new report written by the Woonsocket Community Partnership Task Force on Housing and Homelessness. The headline of the story was: “When hope, history rhyme in Woonsocket,” a phrase borrowed from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The report’s conclusion – to put the emphasis on investing in ‘housing first” – represented a 180-degree shift in strategy from the previous city administration. [See link to ConvergenceRI story below.] For whatever reason, the report did not garner any coverage from the state’s two leading political reporters, WPRI’s Ted Nesi and The Public Radio’s Ian Donnis.

So, I found it a bit disappointing that Woonsocket – including the contested mayoral race, the city’s ongoing financial difficulties, and the financial collapse of the city’s community health center, Thundermist – all made it into “Nesi’s Notes” this week. Also featured in the column was the newly released report by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, “Housing Policy in Rhode Island: Analyzing recent investments in affordable housing,” which attempted to spin the current housing/homelessness crisis as a matter of not enough investment and too little product [new housing starts] being built.

Translated, it seems that the narrative being spun out by folks like RIPEC and then regurgitated by Nesi in his political column missed the import of the change in strategy to put “housing first” as the best strategy to address housing and homelessness.

The impertinent question to ask when it comes to housing and homelessness: How is the financial breakdown of Thundermist’s delivery of care directly related to the dramatic increase of the number of non-fatal opioid overdoses in Woonsocket?

To be blunt about what is missing from RIPEC’s narrative on housing, author Beth Macy nails it. “When you peer into the country’s most intractable problems – homelessness, disability, domestic violence, child neglect – you see the persistence of dopesickness everywhere[emphasis added],” Macy wrote in her book,  Raising Lazarus, reporting on the role of harm reduction efforts in addressing America’s overdose crisis. 

Perverse metrics at work.  
If there was a new sign that could be posted on all the highway exits for many Rhode Island cities, it might feature an electronic backlit sign which said: “Perverse metrics at work,” detailing the number of non-fatal and fatal opioid overdoses for each city along Route 95, from the Massachusetts border to the Connecticut state line, broken down by monthly totals.

Indeed, Prevent Overdose Rhode Island has prepared a public awareness campaign based on what it calls “Facts,” such as:

•    Fact: Cocaine is a factor in 58 percent of overdose deaths.
•    Fact: Fentanyl is the cause of 78 percentof overdose deaths
•    Fact: 84 percent of overdose deaths occur in the home.

I was puzzled by the incongruent nature of the recenrt reports attempting to draw conclusions regarding incomplete data about the trends in the numbers for non-fatal opioid overdoses in Rhode Island, in New England, and in the nation. It has always struck me that the attempts to measure the fatal and non-fatal opioid overdoses is a perverse metric.

Much like the gun violence on the southern border of the U.S., there seems to be a basic misunderstanding of the problem. As Ieva Jusionyte has detailed in her brilliant book, Exit Wounds, most of the guns used in the violence associated with border criminality are smuggled into Mexico from the U.S.

A similar big misperception seems to guide the misinformation regarding the way fentanyl makes its way onto the streets of American cities and towns – the raw components are smuggled through the U.S. into Mexico and then transported back to the U.S. by the drug cartels.

Health care disinformation    
And, of course, there is the ongoing unraveling of the apparent Ponzi scheme created by Steward Health Care in partnership with Medical Properties Trust, a REIT located in Alabama. The story now being told by The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team had first been unearthed by reporter Maureen ‘Moe” Tkacik. [See link to ConvergenceRI story, published in July of 2023, 15 months ago:  “Has health care fallen under the sway of organized crime syndicates?”

Stress reduction    
It is early morning. My legs hurt. It is time to stop writing. Hopefully, next week, I will be able to be more productive in my ability to cover the news happening in Rhode Island. In the meantime, I hope that this provides a sense of hope for the future. From improving the way that traffic is managed to challenging the way that education is being funded, from speaking out about the need to change the narrative on how health care is delivered to putting the community’s voice back into comprehensive planning, from the willingness to call bullshit on the state’s Department of Transportation for calling a nine-minute meeting to garner citizen feedback on Yom Kippur eve to challenging the way that the General Assembly conducts its business, the community is pushing back, pushing  back hard, against the narrative of the status quo.

To borrow the advertising line from the Rhode Island Foundation, “Good reporting changes everything.”