Mental illnesses don’t pay attention to anyone’s race, sex or nationality but those factors  often do play a role in whether or not an individual receives meaningful treatment. Today our nation is honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so I asked Keris Jän Myrick to write a guest blog for me and she graciously agreed.

Myrick is President and CEO of Project Return Peer Support Network and the current Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Thank you Keris for your willingness to share your personal story,  thoughts, insights and for your leadership.

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr -Dare to Dream

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”

For those of us diagnosed with mental illnesses and our families and loved ones, we know all to well the effects of these inequalities from personal and first hand experiences. For those of us like me, we also know of the extreme health and mental health disparities that exist within our communities of color. Within communities of color, the first introduction to mental health care is usually involuntary commitment to hospitals and/or incarceration in jails both resulting in trauma, humiliation and reducing the likelihood of voluntarily seeking services when needed.

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This is the final segment of my interview with Mary Giliberti, the new executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. As explained in parts one and two, I submitted my questions in writing and she replied in emails because of a personal scheduling problem that prevented me from meeting with her during her first week in office. I want to publicly thank Director Giliberti for taking time to answer  my questions and I want to wish her the best, as a NAMI member, as she leads our organization forward.

Question: What do you see as the most important issue facing NAMI today?

Giliberti: We currently have systems that fail people with mental illness in healthcare, mental healthcare, education, housing, employment and criminal justice. We have too many people that are experiencing terrible outcomes and no one is held accountable. In fact, the incentives are often completely the opposite of what they should be.  

Within our community, we have to come together to make progress towards our broader, shared mission. We must work together to fight the real battle—a society that by-and-large does not understand mental illness and has neglected to identify it as the priority it should be. We have to be strong to be able to change this and make mental illness a priority. There is much more that unites us than divides us.

In the short run, I will strive to help NAMI move forward with a clearly articulated vision and a strategic plan with specific goals to guide our work. As part of that process, I will engage with NAMI members, our state and local NAMI Affiliate leaders, our national staff, thought leaders in the area of serious mental illness, major supporters and others touched by mental illness with the goal of introducing myself, learning from them and developing a common understanding of the path ahead.

In the longer term, I will know that we have been successful when NAMI becomes identified not just as an organization, but also as a movement.

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This is the second installment of my interview with Mary Giliberti, the newly hired executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. These questions were submitted in writing and answered through emails because of schedule problems on my part.

Question: NAMI was started by parents who believed they were being either blamed for their children’s mental disorders or ignored when it came to having  psychiatrists, politicians and others listen to their concerns. In recent years, NAMI’s membership has grown to include a wide number of consumers. Mental Health America has always offered a strong voice for consumers and often has taken stands that are different and opposed to NAMI’s positions. It is easy to say that NAMI should represent all points of view, but there are serious differences between how parents and consumers often view HIPAA, AOT, and forced medication. How do you plan to reconcile these differences within NAMI’s membership between traditional NAMI parents and consumers who often favor self-determination versus paternalism?  

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Mary Giliberti, the new executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, graciously agreed to be  interviewed during the first week of January when she took charge of the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization.  My mother’s funeral prevented me from scheduling a face-to-face conversation.  Knowing that many of you wanted to learn more about Ms. Giliberti and her views, I submitted written questions which she answered through emails. I am dividing our exchange into three blogs, with number two scheduled for Wednesday and the final segment for Friday.

I want to thank Director Giliberti for answering  my questions. She answered every question posed to her exactly as it was asked and did not set any pre-conditions. Ms. Giliberti was hired by the board after an extensive search that began early last year after Michael Fitzpatrick announced his retirement. Prior to accepting the board’s offer, she served as a section chief in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Earlier, she was director of public policy and advocacy for federal and state issues at NAMI.

Ms. Giliberti has spent more than twenty years working in the mental health field. She served as a disability counsel for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and as a senior attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. She earned her B.A. at Harvard College and her J.D. at Yale Law School. She is a native of North Bellmore, N.Y.

Question: What interested you in applying for this position?

Giliberti: I wanted this job for three reasons.

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Bearing the scars from his son’s attack, Sen. Deeds returns to Legislature.

Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds has spoken out bravely about his son’s mental illness. Sadly, his story and attempts to help his son, Gus, will sound familiar to many of us.

The senator returned to the legislature this week for the first time since being stabbed last November by his son who then killed himself. The attack made national headlines after a local mental health official acknowledged that Gus had been deemed dangerous but not treated because there were no local hospital beds available. The next day, three hospitals said they had empty psychiatric beds but each was more than two hours away. This raised questions about whether local mental health officials had put sufficient effort into finding beds or whether Gus could have been taken to one of those facilities in time before the six hour mental health hold on him expired. Regardless, this family tragedy exposed weaknesses in Virginia’s system. (I’ll write more about the Deeds case in a future blog.)

Senator Deeds told his family’s story this week to a reporter at The Recorder, his hometown newspaper in rural Virginia. I salute Sen. Deeds’ bravery in speaking out and admire his determination to honor his son’s life by using his considerable political clout to help improve out system.

The Recorder Newspaper 

Bath County Virginia 

Senator Deeds Explains how system failed his son, Gus

By Anne Adams, Staff Writer

HOT SPRINGS — The loss is crushing.

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Let’s begin the new year by celebrating success stories and I can’t think of a better model for other communities to follow when it comes to stopping the criminalization of persons with mental illnesses than what I have personally observed in Bexar County, Texas, home of San Antonio.

Thanks largely to the leadership of Leon Evans, the CEO and President of the Center for Health Care Services, Bexar County has become an example of what can happen when a community joins together to improve its mental health services.

* The Bexas County jail — once so overcrowded that the county was considering building a new one — now has a surplus of roughly one thousand empty beds!

*Bexar County saved an estimated $9 million annually in jail costs and inappropriate emergency room admissions — close to $50 million alone in savings to the community since 2008.

How did Bexar County achieve these successes? Duh!  By focusing on diverting non-violent individuals with serious mental illnesses from incarceration into treatment and crisis services outside the criminal justice system.

And that is something every community and state should be doing!

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