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Congratulations! You’re Well, But Can’t Be Discharged!

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How would you feel if you checked into a hospital for emergency surgery and after the operation was successfully completed, you were told that you couldn’t go home?

“But how long do I have to stay in the hospital?”  you might ask.

“Maybe weeks, maybe months, or even longer.”

For patients with severe mental illnesses in Virginia’s state mental hospitals this is not a theoretical  question. It’s what is happening every day across the state.  It also appears to be happening in other states, as well.

A new investigative report by Douglas Bevelacqua,  the Inspector General for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Development Services, found that 70 patients in state mental hospitals were ready to be discharged.  But they couldn’t be released because there was no where safe for them to go!

The primary problem was a lack of affordable supportive housing. The next roadblock was a lack of community based treatment services, especially for elderly patients, those with co-occurring disorders, or those with such severe mental disorders that they require specialized care.

This bottleneck wastes tax dollars.  The average cost of keeping a patient in a state mental hospital is about $590 per day or $215,000 per year, according to the Virginia IG. The average cost of supporting that same patient in a community setting is about $120 per day or about $44,000 per year.  It doesn’t take a math wizard to see the savings. Taxpayers are shelling out $15 million for services that could be obtained for $3.3 million. That’s a staggering savings of nearly $12 million!

Bevelacqua also notes that keeping patients, who are ready to be discharged, in state hospitals takes up beds that are desperately needed by sick patients waiting to get help.

“It doesn’t make any difference which door is closed,” Bevelacqua said. “…If the hospital’s full, people can’t get in the front door. And if the community’s full, you can’t get out the back door.”

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CRISIS INTERVENTION TRAINING, NOT ONLY FOR OFFICERS, BUT JUDGES TOO!

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Christina Clarkson, Garrett Bombard, Kevin Mike Earley, Sgt Eliseo Pilco, Andrew Flowers

Since the publication of my book, CRAZY, Patti and I have underwritten the cost of giving a CRISIS INTERVENTION TEAM  AWARD each year to worthy law enforcement officers in Fairfax or Arlington Counties, both Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.. The National Alliance on Mental Illness  -Northern Virginia Chapter selects the recipient. In addition to a plaque, the department gets $500 for its CIT trainers to use as they wish.

We began this award because we both believe CIT training is needed in every community. I’ve heard it said that the police will deal with more persons with mental disorders than psychiatrists will during an average day. CIT training teaches law enforcement officers about mental illnesses and how to best handle potentially deadly encounters.

This year, our son “Mike” was our representative at the NAMI awards banquet.  I asked him to present the award because I believe it is important for persons with mental disorders and the police to work together for the benefit of all of us. Several years ago, Mike was shot twice with a taser by Fairfax County police officers when he was in the midst of a breakdown. None of those police officers had CIT training. If they had, I do not believe my son would have been shot. He would have been treated respectfully and gone peaceably to a mental health facility. Mike now speaks regularly at CIT training sessions.

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Traveling Spy Show Offers Unique Gadgets & My E-Books About U.S. Traitors

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Have you ever wondered if those amazing spy gadgets that you’ve seen in James Bond movies are real? Do operatives working for the Brit’s  MI-6, the CIA, and the Russian SVR (formerly known as the KGB) really have access to sleek sports cars with ejecting passenger seats and wristwatches with hidden laser beam torches? 

My friend, H. Keith Melton, owns the largest collection of spy artifacts in the world – more than ten thousand items. Many of the 007 inspired spy gizmos on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. are on loan from his personal collection. 

Melton recently decided to show off some of his most prized items in a traveling exhibit called “Spy: The Secret World of Espionage”  which opened in mid-May in Discovery Times Square in Manhattan.

Featured in his traveling show is the trick umbrella that Bulgarian intelligence operatives used to shoot a pellet that contained ricin into the leg of Georgi Ivanov Markov,  a dissident writer, while he was waiting for a bus in London. The so-called “deadliest poison” known to man was sealed by wax in a tiny pellet and was released when Markov’s body temperature melted the seal.

The traveling collection also contains a CIA manufactured robotic dragonfly, the smallest operational submarine used in World War II, a robot catfish and pigeon made for spying and a pick axe that Soviet Ramon Mercader drove into the skull of Leon Trotsky  in Coyoacan, a borough of Mexico City, in 1940.

When he was preparing the exhibit, which will tour 10 cities during the next several years, Keith asked me if I would share some of the artifacts that I collected while doing research for my books, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring; Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames; and Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War.

 

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My Son Tells His Side of Crazy

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For the first time, my son and I both gave speeches recently about mental illness and our journey together to recovery. I couldn’t have been prouder of his talk. There was a time — when he was repeatedly hospitalized, arrested and even shot twice with a taser by the police — when I wasn’t sure that we would ever reach this day.  I wondered if he would survive or join the ranks of the nearly 600,000 persons with severe mental illnesses in our jails and prisons, the thousands of homeless wandering our streets or the departed who fell victim to suicide.

Thankfully, my friends in the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other mental health advocates offered me hope. My wife, Patti, became my rock and we were blessed because my son got help from a dedicated case manager who finally got him the meaningful treatment that he needed.

But the real hero in our story is my son, who many of you know as “Mike” from my book.  He calls his speech RESILIENT, which is a fitting title.  Unfortunately, our actual presentation did not get filmed because of a snafu with the camera. Luckily,  Mike made his own tape. The T-Shirt that he is wearing is in honor of a friend who recently died.

If you take the time to watch this two part video, you will not be disappointed.

No one should be defined by an illness. Recovery is not only possible –we should demand it.

What Makes A Place A Home?

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A recent speaking engagement in Denver reminded me of three things.

The first is how we define home.  I spent most of my childhood in Colorado and my sister is buried there. Because of that, I feel a strong attachment to the state even though I haven’t lived in  Colorado  since 1970. For nearly forty years, I’ve been a resident of  Northern Virginia. This is where I’ve worked and reared my family. Just the same, I don’t think of myself as being an “Easterner” or, for that matter, a “Virginian.” I remember hearing Vance Packard speak once about our mobile society and how difficult it was to chose a burial plot for a family member.  The idea of a family plot in a local cemetery was out-dated because generations no longer spent their lives in one location.  During his speech, he asked: “How do we define home?”

The second thought that came to me during my trip was about the importance of jobs in helping persons with severe mental disorders recover. This seems so obvious that writing about it shouldn’t be necessary. But during the past several years that I have spent traveling across our country, I’ve  noticed that securing employment for persons who have been diagnosed with mental disorders is rarely a priority.

This is a huge MISTAKE!

It is especially wrong to tell family members or persons with disorders that mental illnesses make it  impossible for a person to work. Click to continue…

Father and Son: Telling Our Stories Together for the First Time

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I am excited this week because my son, known to most of you as Mike, and I will speak for the first time together about his mental illness, our family’s struggle, and his recovery.

We will be appearing this Thursday, May 24th,  at the Loudon County Public Library’s Cascades branch at 7 p.m.

I will offer my perspective as a father,  discuss how his breakdown impacted my relationship with him, and how his illness led to me writing my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness. I’ve also been asked to describe successful recovery programs that I have seen as a journalist who has visited and spoken in every state except Hawaii, Mississippi and Arkansas, and has visited mental health services in Brazil, Portugal and Iceland.

Mike will speak about what it is like to have the symptoms of a mental illness, the many challenges that he faced and  how he eventually came to grips with his disorder.  He will talk about what did and didn’t help him — including things that I did that backfired!

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