Carol A. Carr-Meinecke, mental health advocate and counselor, dies

Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun
·4 min read

Carol A. Carr-Meinecke, former president of the Carroll County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness who turned her own troubled upbringing to helping others, died Jan. 23 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at her Finksburg home. She was 69.

Carol Ann Carr was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and raised in Baltimore in a home where she endured numerous types of abuse, family members said.

As a 16-year-old student at the old Southern High School in South Baltimore, Ms. Carr-Meinecke began to stockpile aspirin because of “severe, debilitating depression,” according to a 2013 article in The Carroll County Times.

Her teachers took notice and recommended that she seek counseling.

“If I hadn’t had that help,” she told The Times, “I would have killed myself.”

“This feeling was later diagnose as bipolar disorder,” The Times wrote, a lifelong condition that Ms. Carr-Meinecke learned to cope with. “On her darker days, it interrupted her livelihood. Other days, which is most often nowadays, it doesn’t affect her.”

When she was 17, she moved out of her home and settled in Carroll County, and attended what is now Baltimore County Community College Catonsville.

“She would say that she was the white sheep of her family,” a daughter, Michelle Bunty, of Westminster, said in her eulogy. “And when people would ask about her family, she would simply say she was hatched.”

After her first husband, Michael David Cole, died of a brain tumor, and having children to raise, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Towson University, and a master’s degree from McDaniel College in mental health counseling.

Ms. Carr-Meinecke spent her professional life with the Carroll County Detention Center where she counseled incarcerated people and helped them receive the mental health care “that they needed to hopefully reduce recidivism upon release,” wrote another daughter, Laurie Cole, of Finksburg, in a biographical profile.

“This included everything from teaching anger management classes, taking a recently released person to doctor’s appointments and to pick up their medication, to advocating in court where her expertise allowed her to advocate for treatment over incarceration when it was likely to be effective,” she wrote.

“When you support people and families with mental illness who knows the great things that can come with it,” Ms. Carr-Meinecke told The Times. “Sometimes just a little helping hand is all that people need.”

In addition to her full-time job at the detention center, Ms. Carr-Meinecke was president of Carroll County’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and was the coordinator for the Baltimore and Carroll counties sexual assault and domestic violence hotlines.

“I think that it’s most significant for people to get the support from others,” she told The Times. “Clinical help is important but how you learn from other families and draw on their strengths is the major thing that NAMI does.”

Ms. Carr-Meinecke led support group meetings, candlelight vigils and protests for domestic violence legislation.

“In the middle of the night when no one else was available, my mom would wake us up and pack her kids in her car to go pick up a mom and kids who were victims of domestic violence from a police station and put them up in temporary shelters,” her daughter, Laurie Cole, wrote. “She attended funerals of clients throughout the years when one of them was lost to suicide or overdose.”

After retiring from the detention center in 2020, she established a private practice aimed at those with mental illness and victims of physical and sexual abuse. She continued doing so until August 2023 when ALS robbed her of her ability to speak.

“Her private counseling was her fun hobby,” her daughter, Laurie Cole, said in a telephone interview.

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In addition to counseling, Ms. Carr-Meinecke enjoyed birdwatching, baking and spending time with her grandchildren.

“Even at the end, when her suffering was intense, she would still say her thing, ‘I love my life,'” Laurie Cole said.

She was a member of St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Westminster where services were held Feb. 4.

In addition to her two daughters, she is survived by her husband of 36 years, Patrick Michael Meinecke Sr., an IT manager; two sons, Patrick M. Meinecke Jr., of White Marsh, and Albert Meinecke, of Cheswolde; a sister, Linda Hoffman, of Hanover, Anne Arundel County; and five grandchildren.