Peggy Bailey’s remarkable career at Connecticut Mental Health Center has spanned numerous changes and various roles, from inpatient psychiatric aide in the late 1970’s to her current position, Director of Clinical Services, which she has held since 2005. A licensed clinical social worker, she retires on June 30, 2020 after 40 years at the agency.
Known for her strong work ethic, wealth of clinical and administrative knowledge, concern for staff, and commitment to patients, Peggy Bailey has touched thousands of lives at CMHC. “The Lord of the Rings had Gandalf,” wrote one staff member at the CMHC Hispanic Clinic, “We topped that with Peggy, and then some.”
I talked with Ms. Bailey recently over Zoom about her long career and its unexpected culmination in a global pandemic.
In 1978, after graduating from college, Peggy Bailey packed an interview suit in her suitcase and drove off to the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor for several years. One more camp season was fine, but now she was ready for a “real” job.
So, on her days off, she changed into that suit and left camp for interviews—including one at Connecticut Mental Health Center, where she’d applied for a position as a Psychiatric Aide on the fourth floor inpatient unit.
“I got the job, very much to my surprise,” she laughed. “I thought I had blown it, honestly.”
Bailey had known for a while that she wanted to enter a helping profession, but she wasn’t sure exactly how, where, or what. While in college, she’d interned at a child guidance agency in Durham, North Carolina, where she worked with children on the wait list and participated in group supervision. She grew to admire her supervisor, a social worker who became an early role model.
“She was very kind and knowledgeable,” Bailey recalled. “The group supervision she led was a really good way of learning the ‘so what’ of what we were doing.”
The supervisor gave Bailey opportunities to learn about the agency, how it was funded, and the different services it provided. It proved a solid beginning, one that would eventually lead her to graduate school at Simmons College, Boston and into her long social work career. But first: her trial-by-fire at CMHC.
In the late 1970’s the fourth floor inpatient unit was open and voluntary, the length of stay averaged only two weeks, and psychiatric aides received intensive clinical training. (Today, these aides are known as “mental health assistants” or MHA’s; the fourth floor unit is closed, its patient population far more acute.)
“It was a phenomenal learning experience,” Bailey recalled of her early years on the inpatient unit. “A patient would get admitted; we’d come in the morning and we’d be assigned to do the clinical assessment.” The pressure was on: she interviewed the patient, spoke with collaborative people including family members, wrote up the case, and presented it at 1:00 PM the same day.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but we were presenting to world-famous psychiatrists,” she said. “It was a really excellent, excellent learning experience.”
After two years she left CMHC to pursue her master’s degree. Upon graduation from Simmons College, she worked at a crisis clinic in Boston before returning to New Haven to work on the CMHC fourth floor again, this time as a social worker. With the exception of two years at the old Meriden-Wallingford Hospital in the late 1980s, she’s been at CMHC ever since.
Most of Bailey’s career has centered on outpatient services. She was chief of the former psycho-social rehabilitation service (she oversaw the original church-based social groups—"they were wonderful,” she said); director of the ACT Team (Assertive Community Treatment); director of the co-occurring disorders team; deputy clinical director; and finally, clinical director.
“For me, it’s been an amazing work opportunity,” she said. In addition to having a variety of professional experiences, she noted, “I was able to contribute to writing about some of the work we were doing,” in collaboration with faculty members in the Yale Department of Psychiatry where Bailey holds an appointment as Clinical Instructor.
She said the mental health system has changed “enormously” over time, with shifts in emphasis and understanding. Throughout, she has learned much from the people who receive services at CMHC. “There are patients who have been here since I started,” she noted. “They know me, and I know them.”
There are patients who have been here since I started. They know me, and I know them.
Peggy Bailey, LCSW
She remembered one such patient, recently deceased due to COVID-19 complications, who taught many people at CMHC a great deal about the devastation of psychiatric illness and the deep wells of human resilience and strength.
“I have known a number of people who had such incredible struggles,” she recalled, “and yet were so feisty and did everything they could to improve their lives and carry on their lives, despite enormous difficulties.”
Working with those people is the core mission of CMHC, a center for public mental health serving individuals living in poverty with various combinations of serious mental illness, addictions, medical problems, and histories of homelessness, incarceration, trauma. It is the ultimate community safety net—and, said Bailey, “a great place.”
“We’re fortunate to be able to work here,” she reflected. “It’s a pretty dynamic place, and it does a lot to respond to the world around us. The system isn’t perfect by any stretch, but I do think a lot of effort is made to make improvements where we can, and to sustain the things that have promise for our clients. People who work here deserve to feel proud of what they do.”
She has always loved the stories that emerge in clinical work and is impressed by the wealth of knowledge staff members carry regarding the people and communities they serve. “When you’re able to be a fly on the wall in a team meeting, or a meeting that’s been pulled together to talk about a client who’s been particularly challenging, and you hear what the staff know about the clients, the families, the places where people spend time…it’s really quite remarkable,” she said.
Of course, Bailey didn’t know that a global pandemic would coincide with her retirement. She feels some pangs of regret about leaving in the midst of a crisis. She said she’s very proud of the agency’s response to the pandemic. All services have remained open, and the staff have been “champs,” she said, in the midst of a very scary time. To date, CMHC has had no inpatient cases; only 29 outpatient clients (out of about 4,000) are known to have contracted the virus.
On the current move toward tele-mental health, she sounded a cautionary note.
“I don’t know if I see telehealth having a big impact on service delivery right now,” she said. “Our clients don’t have access to technology to make that fully operational. I worry about our folks who don’t have phones and who may not have had much contact with people here over the last 12 weeks.”
“I also think there must be a tremendous amount of resilience in many of our clients,” she continued, “because we haven’t had the number of crises I might have expected.”
Going forward, in the near term, she said she’ll be “de-stressing and figuring out what’s next for me,” helping her daughter with wedding plans, and thinking about community volunteer opportunities.
“I have a lot of feelings about leaving in general,” she said, “and about leaving at this point in time. I imagine I’ll keep in touch with my old friends…This has been a second family to me. There are a lot of people I’ve had the good fortune of working with over time,” she said, including longtime mentors and colleagues with whom she has shared the intense experience of supporting and supervising staff, running programs and services, and ultimately, caring for clients.
Perhaps it will come as no surprise to her longtime colleagues and friends that, as she was reflecting on the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—and anticipating the gradual reopening of the building—Peggy Bailey let slip, “I’m looking forward to figuring out how to see people (patients) again.”
I reminded her that she’s retiring. She laughed.
“I’ll be watching from the sidelines,” she said.