Jail no place for the mentally ill - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com

Jail no place for the mentally ill - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com

HOW MANY OF US KNOW BUT IGNORE AND TURN AWAY?

by: Deborah Fabos

How many of us have known a family like Adam Lanza’s, a James Holmes, or others that commit a preventable tragedy? How many of us have witnessed or personally experienced the lonely desperation that devours the family who try in vain to get the needed treatment and support for their afflicted loved one? How many of us know the drama and trauma that comes with an untreated severe brain disorder with anosognoia and psychosis? How the untreated disorder drains every family resource; usually leaving them broken, helpless, and wondering how this could have happened? How many of us know but ignore and turn away?

Anosognosia is a brain malfunction in the frontal lobe. It prevents an individual from having insight to their condition so they will not seek treatment on their own. It is not denial. Anosognosia allows the brain disorder to control a person’s thoughts and behavior. Anosognosia cannot be talked, prayed, or loved away it must be treated.

After reading Liza Long’s viral blog, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” now entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable,” memories of raising my own son sent my pulse racing and my blood pressure soaring. Even though it’s been over a decade since we faced our own trauma and drama. I can’t believe that families like ours still cannot secure treatment compliance and support services for the ones they love, fear, but still care for!

Is it lack of reliable information? Is it stigma? Is it the diverted funding that prevents the implementation and proper enforcement of current laws or the making of needed new ones? Is it a lack of hospital beds? Is it lack of public awareness or lack of professional accountability that allows this gross neglect of those most seriously impacted to continue? We must stop ignoring the issues!

When time is brain, the right early intervention, treatment compliance, and support services can save brain cells that are needed for a recovery. Our family is living proof! Our son has been relapse free for ten years and is enjoying a lasting recovery!

As Alexandra Petri points out in her Washington Post blog article, families desperately need assistance in providing early intervention, proper and timely treatment compliance, and sustained support for themselves and their loved ones who suffer from severe neurological brain disorders with anosognosia. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2012/12/18/after-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/ )

I believe that we must:

1: Implement, fully fund, and enforce a National Assisted Outpatient Treatment Guideline for each state to follow, creating strict psychiatric and neurological criteria for those who would qualify and to ensure compliance with prescribed treatment. http:/mentalillnesspolicyorg.blogspot.com/2012/03/samhsa-vote-assisted-outpatient.html

2: Increase the number of psychiatric beds.
http://blog.al.comspotnews2012/07psychiatric_hospital_beds_dwin.html

3: Provide sustained support services for families and those they care for. Assist families in the management of unwanted and potential criminal behavior which will help to keep their loved ones off the streets and out of the correctional system. http://www.petoskeynews.com/news/featured/pnr-mentally-ill-and-in-jail-why-incarceration-may-not-always-reduce-crime-20121227,0,6322748.story

 
Please click on the link provided and add your signature. Now is the time for action! Before it’s too late, again! https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/help-families-address-some-critical-failures-government-assistance-services/B07zl2hm

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I am so fortunate to know Deborah Fabos and even more proud of her efforts! Will you please support her White House Petition, to make a difference? GG Burns, KY Mental Health Advocate

HB78 and SB33, new bills to amend KRS 202A.081

Double victory, two bills introduced to amend Kentucky's court-ordered community-based outpatient treatment law - 2013!

On Jan. 8, 2013, HB 78 was introduced by Chairman of the House Health and Welfare Committee, Representative Tom Burch. Concurrently, on Jan 8, 2013, Senator J. Denton, Senate Health and Welfare Chair introduced SB 33

 

This act is relating to amend the current KRS 202A.081, to extend the length of an order for community-based outpatient treatment and permit re-hospitalization for failure to abide by the order. This act will lengthen the current 60 days order to 180 days and will strengthen the current law by adding that outpatient providers are require to use evidence-based practices.

Please write and call Senator Denton and Representative Tom Burch for sponsoring these important bills! While this is far from what a model AOT law would be, it is a step in the right direction to help prevent future tragedies that are unfolding across Kentucky and the US daily.

In addition, please write and call your local legislators and ask them to support these bills. We hope these bills will be discussed in committee, when the general assembly convenes on February 5, 2013 (Day 5 of 30 Days).

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Representative Tom Burch, Health and Welfare (H) [Chair] (D), Mailing Address: 4012 Lambert Ave, Louisville KY 40218. Frankfort Address(es) 702 Capitol Ave, Annex Room 332E, Frankfort KY 40601 Phone Number(s) Home: (502) 454-4002, Annex: (502) 564-8100 Ext. EMAIL: Tom.Burch@lrc.ky.gov  

Senator Julie Denton (R), Frankfort Address(es) 702 Capitol Ave, Annex Room 252. Frankfort KY 40601 Phone Number(s) Home: (502) 489-9058, Annex: (502) 564-8100 Ext. 64, Annex email: click here

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Many Kentucky leaders are hopeful that these bills are a step in the right direction! Future advocacy efforts will still be be needed to fund appropriate behavioral health services, especially for those who are trapped in the revolving door and are unable to access treatment to keep them from becoming a threat to themselves or others.


Changes are needed for a small subset of vulnerable individuals with severe and persistent mental illness, who often lack insight (anosognosia*) and don’t accept treatment voluntary. In some areas of Kentucky, these individuals are frequently defaulted to jail and more so to homelessness. Under current Kentucky law, the KRS 202A.081 is underutilized, therefore eliminating funding sources that would actually help the sickest access treatment and recover! We believe current law omits the needed framework to provide care to these individuals, who due to the symptoms become either dangerous or incapable of making informed medical decisions concerning their treatment.

These amendments would aid patients who experience repetitive psychotic episodes that cause 'irreversible', cognitive brain damage! The consequences of untreated mental illness are as apparent as they are devastating: homelessness, criminalization, suicide, violence, victimization, lost productivity, permanently decreased medication responses, and the incalculable costs of unnecessary suffering. Due to advances in recent years, treatment is now available that can eliminate or substantially alleviate the symptoms of mental illness for most who suffer from it. With treatment, people with mental illness can reclaim their lives. But first, there must be treatment!

Evidence Based Practices: Describes any treatment or service, that has been shown to be effective such as:

•   Assertive Community Treatment (ACT Teams),Read recent article in the Courier Journal about ACT program in Louisville.

•   Outpatient case management
•   Peer Support Programs

•   Jail Diversion Programs, Mental Health Courts and Re-entry Services
•   (Individual Placement Support) IPS Supported Employment and Supported Housing
•   Crisis Intervention Team (CIT)

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*Anosognosia is impaired or lack awareness of illness — a neurological syndrome is believed to be the single largest reason why individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do not take their medications. Caused by damage to the brain, it affects approximately 50% of individuals with schizophrenia and 40% of individuals with bipolar disorder.

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Please write to GG Burns at: changementalhealthlawsinky@gmail.com, to add your name to "change mental health laws in Kentucky" advocacy mailing list  – as we keep up with latest updates and monitor the progress of these bills. Thank you for your support. 

Review the HB here, the SB is the same:

click on file to print

Another Mom speaks out -- 'saturation point'!

Yet another mother has finally reached her saturation point.  I must speak up.

Karen Easter, winner of the 2012 TORREY ADVOCACY Award

Today I read yet another opinion letter on the evil, sinister, demon-filled Connecticut shooter.  The writer laments, “Let's be reasonable. Guns aren't the problem and never have been. The problem is the hearts of men.”  

To the writer, I would say this:

Second, serious mental illnesses are biologically based brain disorders, not heart problems.  

Third, it is opinions such as yours that perpetuate the stigma that human beings with serious and persistent mental illnesses are evil, sinister, demon-filled, horrible monsters. 

Now although I do believe evil exists in this world, I do not believe it is evil to be seriously mentally ill without opportunity or access to timely treatment. 

In fact, I believe the word evil better describes how our society has literally and intentionally turned our backs on the weakest of the weak and the sickest of the sick.  

It’s all in how you look at things. 

You see EVIL; I see LIVE.  

All human beings have a right to:

LIVE a life without delusions and hallucinations,

LIVE a life free of incarcerations for safety's sake,

LIVE in a real home, not under a bridge,

LIVE a life without constant hunger pangs,

LIVE a life connected to families and friends.

Read more here: http://aot4tn.blogspot.com/2012/12/its-all-in-how-you-look-at-things.html


or read TAC's review here:
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/about-us/our-blog/123-tn/2221-qyet-another-mother-has-finally-reached-her-saturation-pointq-personally-speaking

Reprinted with permission from: http://aot4tn.blogspot.com/

Mental Health Services Erode As States Slash Budgets

(Repeats story moved Dec 29 without changes to headline or text)
 

* State mental health budgets slashed since 2009
* 11 mln mentally ill report 'unmet need' for care
* 'Cycling through the system' 
 
By Sharon Begley 
 
NEW YORK, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Lori, a 39-year-old mother in New Jersey, would like to save for the usual things: college, retirement, vacations. But those goals are far down her wish list. For now, she and her husband are putting aside money for a home alarm system. They're not worried about keeping burglars out. They need to keep their son in. 
 
Mike, 7, began seeing a psychiatrist in 2009, after one pre-school kicked him out for being "difficult" and teachers at the public school he later attended were worried about his obsessive thoughts and extreme anxiety. He was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. 
 
As she keeps trying to get help for him, "I am learning firsthand how broken the system is when dealing with mental illness," said Lori. (Surnames of patients and their families have been withheld to protect their privacy.)
"We fight with doctors, our insurance company, educators, each other; the list goes on and on ... It isn't even a system. It's not like there's a call center to help you figure out what to do and how to get help."  Read more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/31/mental-health-services-erode-state-budgets_n_2387413.html

It should be against the law that family members are forced to turn to the criminal justice system, due to the failure of the mental health system, when our loved ones become too ill to know they need help. Please read the entire article for a deeper understanding of the seriousness of 'criminalizing the mentally ill' -- GG Burns, KY mental health advocate

"Did Nancy Lanza live in fear? Why many mothers of the mentally ill do."

Republished with permission from the author: Asra Q. Nomani from December 21, 2012 -- Washington Post  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-21/opinions/36017164_1_mental-illness-mothers-public-psychiatric-beds

When the doorbell rang one night in 2006, I opened my front door to find a diminutive figure standing before me, her face crestfallen.

“Mom, what happened?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to die,” she whispered, my father gently guiding her inside.

(Edel Rodriguez for The Washington Post/)

My brother, then 43, had suddenly spun into a rage, she said. She rushed to her bedroom and locked the door; my brother broke it from its hinges, chasing her. She curled into a fetal position on her bed as he pummeled her back and head before walking away as quickly as he had sprung on her.

“Why did you let this happen?” I asked. But I knew the answer. My mother, like countless other mothers on the front lines of America’s mental health battle, is in a risky position. She cares for a mentally ill child.

We don’t know whether Nancy Lanza ever thought her son Adam might hurt her — news reports say he had Asperger’s syndrome and a personality disorder and wasn’t known to be violent. But she’s part of an alarming number of parents who’ve been killed by their children.

Parricides, or the killing of parents, were 13 percent of U.S. family homicides in 2008, up from 9.7 percent in 1980, according to the FBI. About half of parricides involve children killing their mothers. The typical offenders, according to researchers, are adult sons who are ill and unemployed. Nearly half of them are 24 or younger, an age when, scientists say, the cognitive mind is still maturing; Adam Lanza was 20.

But what goes largely undocumented is the many mothers who live in fear of their children.

Kathleen Heide, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida and the author of “Understanding Parricide: When Sons and Daughters Kill Parents,” says that most often, when people kill their mothers, they are sick and untreated.

As mental health services are cut, mothers become the agents-in-charge, serving as constant reminders to these children that they’re not well. “The moms are trying to keep their children safe. In illness, the sons many times resent their mothers,” Heide says, and that becomes particularly acute without treatment.

Even in popular culture, matricide is a theme for troubled youth. Rap star Eminem wrote a song, “Kill You,” lashing out at his mother for the dysfunction in his life that he attributed to her.

Too often, mothers search desperately for beds for their sick children, fighting with insurance companies and treatment teams. According to the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, by 2010 the number of public psychiatric beds in the United States had dropped to levels last seen in the 1850s — about 14 per 100,000 people. Since 1955, the peak of psychiatric hospitalization, 95 percent of the nation’s public hospital beds for people with acute and chronic severe mental illness have been eliminated.

From Tucson to Aurora, Colo., young men suffering from mental illness have taken the lives of others.

“Those who kill are untreated most of the time. It’s not about access to weapons. . . . It’s about treatment,” says Dominique Bourget, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa who has studied parricide. With the killing of mothers, she says, those who are sick often strike out at “the people most loving to them.”

Our failure to provide sufficient mental health support was highlighted further when Liza Long’s blog post — “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” about the difficulty in caring for a mentally ill son — went viral this past week. She struck a nerve with other mothers desperately struggling in their homes with ill, untreated children. Last year, a mother who chronicles her battle to find treatment for her son wrote on her Web site, “Saving Zach”: “Living in fear became the norm in my house.”

Sometimes mothers send SOS messages to each other by e-mail, too afraid that their sons might overhear a phone conversation seeking help. In my parents’ home, my mother hid her cooking knives when my brother was very ill.

In April 2006, just before my battered mother stood at my doorstep, Amy Bruce, of the small town of Caratunk, Maine, was struggling to get her son, Will, then 24, treatment for paranoid schizophrenia. He had been discharged from a facility despite his parents’ protests.

One day two months later, after getting the mail, he walked up behind his mother and killed her with a hatchet. He is now in a forensics unit at a local hospital.

“I heard the pope telling me to kill her because she was an al-Qaeda operative,” Will told me by phone this week. He seems lucid and clear-thinking now and is receiving treatment.

He says he misses his mother. “I try to do everything to honor her memory. We had our differences, but it was petty. I miss hugging her. She used to hug me all the time.” But, he admits, “she was a little afraid of me.”

Ironically, it was only after killing his mother that Will got the right treatment.

Read more about mental health treatment laws and Asra's journey here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042702 053.html

Action Plan -- What can YOU do!

President Obama said the federal government has to do something meaningful to prevent future shootings, like the recent massacre of 26 children and adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.  Here is what the federal government can do to prevent violence related to mental illness:
 

Five-Point Action Plan for President Obama to Reduce Violence by the Mentally Ill

Here is what states should do.

States should make greater use of Assisted Outpatient Treatment, especially for

those with a history of violence or incarceration. AOT allows courts to order certain mentally ill people to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community. AOT works. New Yorkers remember Larry Hogue, the “Wild Man of 96th Street,” who kept getting hospitalized, going off meds, terrorizing neighbors, and going back into the hospital.  Connecticut does NOT have an AOT law on the books (see these facts about the Connecticut mental-health system), and we can’t say for sure if it would have helped in this case, but all states should have one to prevent similar incidents.

• 
States should make sure their civil-commitment laws include all the following, not just “danger to self or others:  (A) Is “gravely disabled”, which means that the person is substantially unable, except for reasons of indigence, to provide for any of his or her basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, health or safety, or (B) is likely to “substantially deteriorate” if not provided with timely treatment, or 
(C) lacks capacity, which means that as a result of the brain disorder, the person is unable to fully understand or lacks judgment to make an informed decision regarding his or her need for treatment, care, or supervision.


• When the “dangerousness standard” is used, it must be interpreted more broadly than “imminently” and/or “provably” dangerous.


State laws should also allow for consideration of a patient’s record in making determinations about court-ordered treatment, since history is often a reliable way to anticipate the future course of illness. (Currently, it is like criminal procedures: what you did in the past presumably has no bearing, so the court may not know past history when deciding whether to commit someone.  In fact, there are ways to know which mentally ill individuals become or are likely to become violent.) 

– D. J. Jaffe is executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org.

DJ Jaffe is the founder of Mental Illness Policy Org http://mentalillnesspolicy.org which provides the media and public officials with unbiased information about "serious" mental illness from a pro-treatment perspective. It covers issues of violence, deinstitutionalization, not guilty by reason of insanity, assisted outpatient treatment, involuntary commitment, involuntary treatment and other issues.

DJ has been advocating for better treatment for individuals with serious mental illness for over 30 years.

DJ has served multiple terms on the board of directors of the Metro-New York City Alliance on Mental Illness, New York State Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and National Alliance on Mental Illness. He is a member of the Leadership Council of the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. He was a cofounder and former board member of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, VA.