D.C. Film Festival Spotlights Solitary Confinement At Virginia Prison: I’ll Talk About Mental Illness and Thomas Silverstein Who Has Been In Solitary 33 Years And Counting

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Solitary film follows inmates and officers at Virginia's Red Onion prison

Solitary film follows inmates and officers at Virginia’s Red Onion prison

(10-6-16) I’m excited to be participating tomorrow (Friday) in a panel discussion about solitary confinement in America’s jails and prisons.

Entitled: “Unlocking Prison: A Case Study,” the discussion will happen at the   National Press Club (13th Floor) from 11:15 AM – 12:45 PM, as part of Double Exposure, the Investigative Film Festival and Symposium being held in Washington D.C.

This is the second year for the three day festival that begins today (Thursday) and ends Saturday, October 8, 2016. 

The Double Exposure festival is unique because it combines investigative journalism with the visual arts by featuring the work of investigative journalists who work on films and in other visual forms. The line up of films this year is truly first-rate. They range from an investigation of elephant hunting for ivory to a profile of the banker who leaked documents to WikiLeaks exposing secret bank accounts and tax havens to Wall Street shenanigans involving pyramid schemes,

Our panel discussion is being held in conjunction with the showing of a dramatic documentary called SOLITARY, a film made by Kristi Jacobson who spent a year filming the lives of guards and inmates at Red Onion State Prison in southern Virginia. Here is a snippet about the film from a Nick Schager review in Variety.

There’s little hope, but considerable insight, found in “Solitary,” Kristi Jacobson’s documentary about Wise County, Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility where convicts are holed up for 23 hours a day in separate 8′-by-10′ cells. Shot over the course of a year, the film presents an unfiltered insider’s view of their colorless day-to-days, which are largely spent trying to stave off madness…

“Solitary” concentrates on a handful of Red Onion’s inhabitants, all of them locked away for serious crimes and resigned to spending the rest of their lives behind bars. They are, by and large, well-spoken and introspective, the latter born from the fact that their time is mostly spent by themselves, with only minimal contact with guards — and chats with other inmates through cells’ air vents — to mitigate their crushing seclusion.Click to continue…

National Campaign To Expose Bed Shortage Launched This Week: Hopes To End Psychiatric Boarding

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(10-5-16) Everywhere I travel to give speeches, I hear the same complaint: there are no treatment beds readily available for persons who are in a mental health crisis.

Psychiatric “boarding” in emergency rooms has become a national problem.

This week, the Treatment Advocacy Center is turning a spotlight on the inpatient bed shortage by launching a national campaign called: A Bed Instead. 

In an email to me, TAC’s Executive Director John Snook said the campaign is designed to educate and engage.

Everyone in mental health knows the system is in crisis. But we too often find that those not personally affected by mental illness simply have no idea just how bad the levels of care can be. This campaign sets out to change that.

It shouldn’t be only those with a mental illness and their families who are disgusted by a system that substitutes jail cells for treatment beds. Or one that eliminates nearly all of the crisis care beds as a budget cutting measure and relegates those in need to ER hallways. These are human rights issues that impact us all, whether we have or know someone who has a severe mental illness… or not.

The aBedInstead campaign will bring these issues to the public, creating a movement that can no longer be ignored.

During a recent trip to California, I heard about 13 hour waits in emergency rooms for patients experiencing a psychotic break. In Washington state, I was told it could be up to 24 hours. One North Carolina jurisdiction told me that it could take as long as three days to find a bed. It is not uncommon for troublesome patients to be handcuffed to gurneys or restrained by the police while waiting for a bed.

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Still A Chance For Passage of Major Mental Health Bill, But Only If Funding Fight Is Avoided

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Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the powerful Senate Majority Whip, is making passage of Mental Health Reform Act, his top priority in upcoming lame duck session.

(10-3-16) I’m hearing the Senate may still pass the  Mental Health Reform Act (S.2680) in November when Congress returns for a lame duck session, but only if several new obstacles can be overcome.

The bill is the Senate’s version of Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Murphy’s  Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act and was initially introduced by Senators Chris Murphy (D. Conn.) and Bill Cassidy (R. La.) as  S. 1945 but has been renumbered now that it is under the control of  Sen. Alexander Lamar (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

You might recall that the Senate version ran into trouble when Senator John Cornyn (R-TX.) moved to merge his mental health bill into the Murphy-Cassidy bill. Senate Democrats, including Senators Charles Schumer (NY) and Harry Reid (NV.), took issue with parts of Cornyn’s bill that dealt with restoring gun ownership to veterans who the Veterans Administration had decided were incompetent to handle their own financial affairs. I’ve been assured that  issue has been overcome.

However, now two new ones could kill the Senate version and both concern money.

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Advance Directives Help Clarify Treatment When You Can’t : Useful Tools During A Crisis

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From My Files Friday:  Psychiatric advance directives are more common today than they were when my son suffered his first breakdown in 2002 or when I first posted this blog in early 2010. If you aren’t familiar with a PAD — you should be because it can be an important tool for a person who has a mental disorder and those who love him/her. Here’s my 2010 blog.

Psychiatric Advance Directives Make Sense: You should have one!

If you have read my book, this blog, or heard me speak, then you know that the first time my son became psychotic, I raced him to a hospital emergency room. Mike (his name in the book) was delusional, but he didn’t believe anything was wrong with him, and he was convinced that all “pills were poison” so he refused treatment. The emergency room doctor told me that he could not intervene until Mike became an “imminent danger” either to himself or others. That was the law in Virginia at that time.

My son had a right to be “crazy.”

Forty-eight hours later, he was arrested after he broke into an unoccupied house to take a bubble bath.

The second time Mike became psychotic, I waited until he became dangerous and what happened? Our local mobile crisis team refused to come help me, the police were called, and Mike was shot with a Taser.

As a father, those two situations frustrated and enraged me. What I didn’t know at the time was there was an alternative that could have helped Mike and possibly prevented what had happened to us.

It’s called a Psychiatric Advance Directive and this week, I received a wonderful email from my state National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter telling me that PADs, as they are known, are becoming more common in my home state of Virginia.

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Knott’s Farm Shuts Down Offensive Ride After Advocates Complain: Father Of Son Beaten By Police Led Campaign

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(9-28-16) Complaints, a petition drive, criticism in blogs, the threat of a protest and a telephone call from Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez yesterday caused Knott’s Berry Farm to close its offensive and stigmatizing virtual amusement ride that featured guests being strapped into a wheelchair and chased through a psychiatric hospital by a deranged patient.

The company shuttered the ride in all three of its amusement parks. Whether it will reopen the ride after making revisions remained unknown. When mental health advocates initially complained, company officials attempted to pass off the patient as a zombie.  The makers of the ride did not comment about the closures.

In an article today, Lopez describes how Ron Thomas, the father of a young man with schizophrenia  beaten to death by the police while homeless, led the campaign against Knott’s.

I am grateful that Knott’s shut down the ride. ABC and Disney have never apologized for the insensitive and offensive Modern Family Halloween episodes that they have broadcast, which have been more harmful than the Knott’s ride.

 Knott’s closes attraction that was insensitive to people who care about mental health

By Steve Lopez writing in the Los Angeles Times.

 In anticipation of Halloween, the folks who run Knott’s Berry Farm did a lousy thing, and mental health advocates were outraged.

Then on Tuesday afternoon, park managers reversed course and shut down an attraction. But did they do so for the right reasons?

Here’s the story; you be the judge.

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Knott’s Berry Farm Opens Stigmatizing Ride: LA Times Gushes About It: Shame On Both

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(9-26-16) Mental health advocates are expressing outrage about a new Halloween amusement park ride that demonizes individuals with psychiatric disorders.

Initially called: Fear VR: 5150, the virtual reality “haunted experience” promises to scare patrons by transporting them inside a psychiatric hospital where a demonically possessed patient is on the loose.

The 5150, which refers to California police code for a mentally ill person who is a danger to himself or others, was dropped from the title last week after several bloggers, including my friend, Chrisa Hickey at The Mindstorm, joined the National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter in Orange County in complaining to the ride’s makers — Hollow Studios — and Knott’s Berry Farm where it is being featured.

Knott’s Berry Farms is offering the ride as part of a seasonal Halloween Haunt. It also is being featured at California’s Great America park in Santa Clara and Canada’s Wonderland outside Toronto.

News of the offensive ride spread after The Los Angeles Times (a paper whose editors should have known better) published a flattering review of the ride written by Brady MacDonald who described his five minute “VR experience” as “immersive, captivating and scary.”

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