"Stopping the Revolving Door - A Civil Approach to Treating Severe Menta...

How California Can Safely Release 33,000 Prisoners

This article is long and based on Mental Health issues in California, however it's worth the read ... regarding the Supreme Court ordering to release 33,000 prisoners.

The author's (Mary Ann Bernard) solution? Return care of mentally ill prisoners to mental health system and require them to provide the care.

This is interesting, since this is one proposal that Dr. Stephen Hall recently discussed at the 1915(i) waiver meetings around the state of Kentucky.

Kentucky needs to divert funds from other systems such as the Dept. of Corrections and give back to our Community Mental Health systems. In other words, help these individuals receive care from qualified clinicians instead of jailers. This is not possible in Kentucky "without" legislative changes.

The section on page 2 could be helpful in amending the KRS 202(a).

Please share:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/268623/how-california-can-safely-release-33000-prisoners-mary-ann-bernard?page=3

"May is Mental Health Month" ... Surviving the terror mental illness inflicts on you

A great Op-Ed of recovery. Recovery is possible "with treatment" ... however, recovery may not be possible for those who lack insight without "assisted" treatment. http://www.kentucky.com/2011/05/08/1734322/surviving-the-terror-mental-illness.html

Surviving the terror mental illness inflicts on you

From http://www.kentucky.com

By Kathryn McCullough

Posted: 12:00am on May 8, 2011; Modified: 1:50am on May 8, 2011

I will forever associate spring with an up-close-and-personal encounter with crazy, with losing my mind in an over-the-top kind of way. And indeed, my March madness of 1990 ended life as I knew it.

I was teaching English at a Christian university in Oklahoma, suffering through a not-so-pleasant spring break when I began to crumble.

I began obsessing over trees and branches, still bare but budding, and the potential messages they brought — their effort to lead me to an alternate dimension, parallel to the world around me.

I wanted desperately to go there, wherever "there" was, and that longing muscled me to bring branches indoors and decorate my walls with them. I was suddenly aware, acutely aware. The sculptural quality of bare branches stunned me, spoke to me.

In my mind bringing branches inside was a sacramental action — an effort to access the bare bones of reality, the holy hollow at the center of everything.

I also felt compelled to tear up the carpet in my rental apartment's living room, to strip the floor clean and access the concrete beneath — a more solid surface on which to stand. So I stayed up all night, utility-knifed my carpet into carrying-sized strips, stood a ladder beside the dumpster, climbed rung upon rung and deposited my former floor within.

A rug literally ripped out from under me, I was hospitalized the next day at a state psychiatric facility, where I walked the halls and fingered the walls for weeks, as all around me sentences bloomed into branches. A dazzling display of crazy.

I don't remember arriving at Parkside Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Tulsa, Okla. I don't remember how my dog came to be kenneled at the vet's office, who took me to the hospital or if it's possible I even drove myself.

Indeed, it's these gaps in memory that I remember most, the fact of forgetting, the empty space where the story should be — gaps I fill in and flesh out with details recorded in the journals I kept. For example, the night I so unceremoniously removed the carpet from my living room, I described an intense sense of alienation and confusion: "I know that other people must not experience the world the way I do, because if they did, the world would be a very different place and I wouldn't feel so strange, so marginal, so near the edge and falling off ..."

The hospital had three floors and a basement — the first an intake unit and small lobby, the second a locked but moderately restricted unit and the third a locked but highly restricted one. I was admitted to the third floor. I remember a day room at one end, four dormitory-style rooms at the other and a hallway connecting the two. The hall had a nurses' station along one wall, an elevator on the other. With windows along two walls, the day room was large, filled with wooden tables and chairs, where we patients spent most of our time: played games, watched television, ate meals.

The patient rooms were bare and barracks-like, with partitions down the middle — two beds, two wardrobes and a desk on one side — the same on the other. Bathrooms, one per room, boasted a toilet and shower stall, as well as a sink with metal mirror above — no glass allowed, lest patients break it and purposefully injure themselves.

Behind the nurse's station was another hall locked and off-limits to patients. Here were a number of seclusion rooms, each with a single bed bolted to the floor in the center — each equipped with four point restraints — wide leather cuffs that strapped wrists and ankles to the bed. I spent time alone in these rooms when I was particularly distressed, but only once in those restraints.

I walked the hall between these dorms and day room, repeatedly. The anti-psychotic medication made me restless, so I paced, feeling the walls with my palms, an effort to comfort myself, to calm the cacophony of crazy that worsened every evening.

One nurse would sometimes walk with me, attempting to reassure me and lessen the aloneness, as I tried to quiet the chatter in my head, the echo of children's voices saying senseless, sing-song rhymes. But mostly I walked that hall alone, alternately fighting and forgetting a psychosis that whiplashed between extremes of nothingness and nowhere.

This whiplashing made me acutely aware of my own nothingness, the fact that at the center of myself a huge hole swallowed and, indeed, devoured all I thought I knew about myself and the world around me.

I was nothing.

The world around me a vacuum — nothing but emptiness sucking.

Suddenly my experience of myself shifted. I was not who I thought I was.

I was nobody.

I was nowhere.

I saw myself stripped of all seeming substance, of all that seemed solid and predictable in the face of free-fall. I was naked and drowning — bare to the glare of what others called crazy.

If I was indeed out of touch with reality, as the doctors told me, what did that mean? And if I couldn't trust my own mind, what could I trust?

Inevitably, this possibility that I couldn't or shouldn't trust myself terrified me. And my mind, though insane, was adaptive enough to not consciously fear itself.

Instead, I displaced this terror in all directions, becoming terrified of everything and at the same time terrified of nothing. I couldn't articulate exactly what I feared. I was only and always overcome with dread. I knew something was terribly wrong.

As I look back on it now, I imagine I wanted out, but not so much out of the hospital, as out my own mind — a mind that, if insane, was no longer an asylum.

This is the terror of mental illness.

This is the terror from which, now, more than 20 years later, I am largely recovered, my bipolar symptoms finally well-managed by medication.

Recovery from mental illness is possible, and, at the very least, new developments in psychopharmacology allow those with psychiatric illnesses to live relatively normal lives.

During the month of May, Mental Health Awareness Month, please remember the struggles faced by folks with mental illness. Please donate to NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Share stories like mine with those you love, and encourage others to talk about and write and blog about their own battles. Let those who live with mental illness, and their families, know they're not alone.

The world is still a staggeringly beautiful place, and those of us who struggle with psychiatric illness make it a richer place to live and love. We hope big hopes. We dream ever-more enduring dreams.

Recovery is possible.

About the author Kathryn McCullough is a Lexington writer and artist, Her blog is www.reinventingtheeventhorizon.wordpress.com.

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/05/08/1734322/surviving-the-terror-mental-illness.html#ixzz1Lmat7rZc

The Role of CIT in Preventing Violent Tragedies ~ NAMI

By Laura Usher
NAMI CIT Coordinator

The recent tragic shootings in Arizona have raised painful questions about what went wrong. And while we all think about how to prevent these tragedies in the future, it’s important to keep in mind the bigger picture. For many, this debate has been about guns and civil commitment laws, but the real culprit is a failing mental health system.

While media reports focus on the role of mental illness in this tragedy, incidents of violence by people living with mental illness are extremely rare, and the total contribution of people living with mental illness to violence in society is very small. This is the view of the U.S. Surgeon General and is supported by research.

Although research suggests that there are factors that may increase risks of violence – such as co-occurring substance use, or not being engaged in treatment – people living with mental illness are 10 times more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Homelessness, incarceration and poverty increase these risks.

When violence does occur and mental illness is involved, we know that it’s a sign that something has gone terribly wrong with the mental health system--a person who desperately needed treatment could not access it.

Too often, when a person living with mental illness is in crisis, law enforcement are the first responders--not necessarily because the person is dangerous, but because there are often no alternatives. Sadly, people in crisis often can get more help from police than they can from the mental health system.

Because of this Catch-22, NAMI enjoys strong partnerships with law enforcement agencies and others in the criminal justice system around the country. These are some of our most valued partnerships, because law enforcement officers share our concerns about this broken system, and through involvement with crisis intervention team (CIT) programs, put their hearts into helping people in crisis navigate a flawed system.

Although it is impossible to know, it is unlikely that a CIT program could have prevented the Arizona tragedy. But that does not leave NAMI and its many partners in criminal justice without a role moving forward. Preventing these tragedies will take all of us working together.

First and foremost, states need to stop cutting mental health services and instead support evidence-based, integrated (with substance abuse) services for people living with mental illness. Early identification and intervention strategies, as well as joint planning between law enforcement, mental health providers and schools, can link people with the services they need.

CIT is a model for communities because it is not just a one-time training to put a band-aid on the problem, rather it builds partnerships that work to improve the systems that serve, or should serve, people living with mental illness. Successful CIT programs often serve as springboards for broader efforts, including advocacy by judges, chiefs and sheriffs in support of community mental health services; the creation of mental health courts and other programs that use the power of the criminal justice system to get people treatment, not jail time; and efforts to reach out to schools and young families in the form of CIT for Youth. In all of these cases, partnerships prove to be a powerful force for systems change.

A violent tragedy, no matter how heart-breaking, does not change the course of our work, but it does give us an opportunity to evaluate how we can do more. Our criminal justice partners around the country can help us to prevent these tragedies in the future by continuing to stand with NAMI in support of stopping the cuts to mental health services.

To learn more about cuts to mental health services, read our report,State Mental Health Cuts: A National Crisis at www.nami.org/budgetcuts.

Kentucky Teen Charged With Murder in Death of His Guardians

The report states the trouble teen was frequently suspended from school. I wonder if the school ever ask to have him evaluated for a underlying mental illness and perhaps some needed supports to stay in school? If his Mother couldn't deal with his behavior and his father is in prison ... did the lack of appropriate evaluations/treatment set this young man up for a life behind bars? Will he receive a mental health evaluation in prison?

Another sad case. One that no one will ever know the real truth.
Read more here:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/23/kentucky-teen-charged-murder-death-guardians/

Pacific NW | Eleanor Owen's tireless battle for mental-health care | Seattle Times Newspaper

Pacific NW | Eleanor Owen's tireless battle for mental-health care | Seattle Times Newspaper
what an incredible journey ~

“Mental Defectives” HB 308: Taking Action on Funds - Not Guns Would be the REAL Difference Maker

By Kelly Gunning

The Kentucky House of Representatives voted 97-1 on Monday in favor of House Bill 308; a bill proposed by Representative Bob Damron. The measure would require Kentucky to report to the FBI when a person is committed, by a court, to a mental institution or if they have been declared mentally ill by a court. Federal law, in terribly offensive language, prohibits the sale of guns to individuals “adjudicated as a “mental defective or who have been committed to a mental institution” - previously; Kentucky had been one of many states that did not participate in this notification process. One can’t help but think that the recent shootings in Arizona contributed to the passage and proposal of this bill. The issues that present themselves in these high profile, mass shooting, incidents deserve our sharpened focus on preventing future tragedy but they are also complex and represent crucial, sensitive and long-standing questions that we as a society must grapple with while trying to balance individual liberty, privacy and public safety. It is impossible to eliminate all risks - even logical risks and easy to resort to reactionary policy making. The truth is; we can expect more tragedy’s like Arizona and Virginia Tech whether there is beefed up law enforcement, more lists and more reporting. More of those things will not change the course of these recurrent tragic events. The only thing that would impact this discourse in a positive way would be – MORE TREATMENT for severe and chronic mental illness. Recent reports in the last two weeks by several leading news outlets highlighted reports that incoming college freshman are coming in with higher rates of mental illness. It was reported that 63% of college freshmen self-identified as having some level of mental health issue. We also know that college age years are when many serious illnesses become apparent and require intervention and treatment for the first time yet there is little funding for early prevention diagnosis and prevention of these brain diseases – unlike the bombardment of info on STD’s , date rape and pregnancy.

We all shake our heads and claim disbelief when we observe what has become the normal deluge of reporting and commentary when a tragedy such as Arizona pulls the spotlight on to mental health issues in this country - we talk about it 24/7 - but then within a few days “the next big thing” happens, the rhetoric fades and with the exception of a few reactionary changes we move on…until it happens again and it will.
It will… because since the 1950’s there has been a 90% reduction in the number of available psychiatric hospital beds. We have gone from 1 bed for every 300 people to one bed for every 3000 people since 1950 to the present.
It will… because the criminal justice system is providing those “beds” and is overrun with and serving the psychiatric care needs of 2 million people.
It will… because we refuse to adequately fund community treatment and wrap around services like housing for folks early on in the course of their illness.
It will… because we cannot seek help for our mentally ill loved ones until they meet one very important criteria – DANGEROUSNESS.

To me, something is very wrong when the law voraciously protects my loved one’s right to be untreated and mentally ill to the point of dangerousness to himself and the community…but then doesn’t mind being quick to act on limiting other rights such as; being sure he can’t exercise his constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Guess they don’t mean THAT dangerous.


Kelly Gunning is operations director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Lexington.

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Read comments here on Kentucky.com: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/02/18/1640059/mental-health-treatment-ought.html#more#ixzz1EK9mNCHc