(2-29-16) What’s the key to helping someone with a mental illness recover?
Is it robust community mental health services? Is it by forcing someone to take anti-psychotic medication? Is it housing? Jobs?
I’ve spent the past ten years traveling our country touring programs, examining services and talking to mental health experts, other parents, family members, and persons who have recovered. And I’ve come to believe that everything we do to help people recover is a temporary band-aid if the individual who is sick doesn’t want to get involved in their own recovery.
Lessons I’ve Learned: The Key To Recovery Is Engagement is the title of a new speech that I will be delivering to audiences beginning this year. (Here is a five minute snippet of my speech.)
This doesn’t mean that I’m no longer going to speak about the inappropriate incarceration of persons with mental illnesses in our jails and prisons. I still plan to talk about the need for Crisis Intervention Team training, jail diversion, mental health courts, and re-entry programs. I’m still going to speak about my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, and how my son’s breakdown and arrest led to me spending ten months inside the Miami Dade County jail following persons with mental illness through the criminal justice system and back onto the streets.