"A doctor's responsibility is to look at the entire picture of a person's life, not just a set of systems," she says. "Disease is not just biological. If a doctor does not see that, then he is treating half of the patient."

A Client's Story

After conducting initial interviews Onie set to work on behalf of client Ruth M. Crosby.

Over the summer, on a grant from a Harvard Club, Onie stayed in Boston and advocated for Crosby, researching welfare regulations, obtaining evidence, drafting letters and preparing to speak on Crosby's behalf at a welfare office hearing.

Crosby, who is paralyzed, receives $350 per month in federal aid to raise her teenage son. Combined with her $600 monthly support from Social Security and disability, her income places her just above the poverty line.

To this single, unemployed mother the government assistance means she can afford to travel 100 miles every few weeks to visit her son in a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed youths.

In June, when the 13-year-old moved into the Baird Center in Plymouth, the state welfare office told Crosby she was no longer eligible for Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) because she did not have a dependent child living at home.

Crosby, 35, had already been separated from her son for the past six years. She was undergoing physical rehabilitation for a bullet wound to her head inflicted by her abusive second husband seven years ago.

After Crosby was shot her son lived in various foster homes in New York, where the family resided when the attack occurred.

When the hospital in New York transferred Crosby to a facility in Boston that was better equipped to care for her, she tried to find a nearby foster placement for her son.

She rented a one-bedroom apartment in a dangerous part of Dorchester, but her son was suffering emotionally after years of being physically and psychologically abused by Crosby's second husband and then shuffled between foster homes.

Crosby's son spent time in three temporary psychiatric placements and endured a year of tantrums in a Boston public school before a social-worker placed him in the Baird Center.

This fall, Crosby was able to rent a clean, safe, handicapped-accessible, two-bedroom apartment in South Dorchester, where her son can visit her every weekend. He sleeps in his own room, on a bed he built out of salvaged wood.

The federal aid Crosby receives provides just enough for her to put a home together and to rent a car to travel to Plymouth, according to Richard M. Schultz, a friend whom Crosby met in a support group for manic depressives.

Without the AFDC payment, Crosby says, she would not be able to see her son or participate in his care--taxis are too expensive and trains and buses are often not wheelchair-accessible. Buses with broken wheelchair lifts have stranded her in the street many times, she says.