Briggs, the chief executive of the Carolina Behavioral Health Alliance in Winston-Salem, was told as an eighth-grader to monitor the hospital intravenous unit attached to her mother, who had severe asthma. Briggs remembers counting each drop of fluid that drained into the IV bag.
"I thought I was doing something to help my mother," said Briggs, who eventually went on to nursing school. "That's when I decided that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I never changed my mind. I remember that moment, very distinctly."
That introduction was the first step in a long career in health care for Briggs. From stops as a registered nurse and teacher to her current role as an administrator, Briggs has learned to use her passion for health care to help others, she said.
"It's a huge problem. It's the thing that probably disturbs me the most, is how we do stigmatize mental illness, in that we don't recognize it as truly an illness."
Briggs' employer, Carolina Behavioral Health Alliance, provides mental health services for health-insurance plans in North Carolina. It is owned by three medical schools: East Carolina University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University Health Services, which oversees the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
In 1996, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center created Wake Forest Behavioral Health Services, an organization that managed mental-health services for QualChoice, the managed-care company that the medical center had opened two years earlier.
The combination of the three medical schools allows the alliance, a limited-liability company, to provide much-needed services without worrying about financial issues that could hamper for-profit companies, Briggs said.
The schools "didn't get into this business to make money off of health care," she said. "They got into this business to make sure health-care dollars are spent on health care and not Wall Street. It's the best of both worlds."
Briggs said that she primarily spends her day helping clients develop mental health-care programs, including programs that emphasize prevention and wellness services. One of her biggest challenges is convincing employers that proper mental-health services can improve a company's financial bottom line.
Workers suffering from depression or other mental-health problems can experience drops in productivity and increased absences - factors that can weaken a company's financial strength, Briggs said.
"I call it the elephant in the living room," Briggs said. "It impacts not only employers hugely, but it impacts our society hugely. We're paying for it in many ways in our society."
Briggs did not fall into the mental-health care industry by accident. The suicide of a close, teenage nephew and the death of a cousin motivated her to move into the field years ago, she said.
"Knowing the effects that it has on the family, and on people who love people that have mental illness, I finally realized that this is where I need to be," Briggs said. "This is what I need to be doing."
Briggs said that she plans to continue helping workers and their employers combat mental-health problems. More prevention and wellness programs can help people identify and treat mental-health problems earlier, she said.
Many people with mental-health problems are simply not receiving adequate care, she said. "What I would love to see in my lifetime, is parity in mental illness," Briggs said.
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