Search Results for: violence

(11-15-22) The Ohio based Peg’s Foundation recently announced recipients of its 2022 Morgan Impact Awards for mental health and chose the Treatment Advocacy Center for its Excellence in Advocacy award. TAC’s Executive Director Lisa Dailey accepted the award on behalf of the non-profit organization.

The Morgan Impact Awards, established in 2010, recognize individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievements in mental health, education and the arts.

Peg’s Foundation is one of the larger mental health foundations. It was endowed by Margaret ‘Peg” Clark Morgan and her husband Burton whose son, Dave, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite the family’s wealth, they struggled to find suitable treatment for Dave. “(Peg) was a mom who loved her son and wanted the best for him, and this illness wouldn’t always allow that for him,” recalled Rick Kellar, Peg’s Foundation President. “They couldn’t find the help and support to fulfill his needs to recover.” Peg Morgan died in 2013 at age 95.

The Foundation’s goal is to “promote and help implement promising and evidence-based practices that can create the immediate and urgently-needed opportunities to improve the lives of people with serious mental illness and their families.” It listed assets worth $106 million and annual revenues of $40 million in its most recent public filing. (Click here to read about Peg and Burton “Burt” D. Morgan’s personal life and business acumen.)

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(9-22-22) Should someone with a severe mental illness be blamed for “choosing” to be ill if they refuse treatment and later become violent?

A prosecutor in Genesee County, New York, argued earlier this month that Nicholas Maher, age 38, deserved a maximum prison sentence because he’d refused to take medication and seek treatment prior to him fatally stabbing his 69 year-old father, Martin Maher, last year.

“Nick Maher is a college-educated person,” District Attorney Kevin Finnell told a judge. “He’s smart enough to know that he needs to get mental health treatment and that he needs to take his medication, even if it doesn’t make him feel real good. But he chose not to do that.” Finnell said Maher was clearly responsible for his father’s death, even though the prosecution and defense agreed that Maher was legally insane when he attacked his father.

Maher had no prior criminal history, but he had a long history of mental illness, his defense attorney, Public Defender Jerry Ader told the court. “I sincerely believe that our community, our country, has a difficult time dealing with mental illness, especially when it comes to mental illness in the criminal justice system.” Ader questioned whether Maher had enough insight to “choose to be ill.”

“Some (said) he chose to do these things, and that he could have done something else. And I’m just not quite sure that’s true. And I don’t think anyone can know for sure if that’s true. It’s easy to say because we don’t understand mental illness. But in my experience, when someone is placed in a psychiatric hospital, it could take years in order to get a patient, an inmate, to understand, to have the insight as to their illness, why they need help and why they need medication.”

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(7-13-22) Mental Health First Aid,  a widely popular national training program, is being called “ineffective” in a scathing report issued by the Manhattan Institute, a New York City based conservative think tank.

A newly released study, Mental Health First Aid: Assessing the Evidence for a Public Health Approach to Mental Illness, concludes that the training program fails to “connect mentally ill individuals…with an appropriate level of treatment before a crisis leads to tragedy.”

The goal of the training program is “to teach everyday citizens how to identify, understand, and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders,” the report’s author, Carolyn D. Gorman, writes. She notes that more than two million Americans have completed MHFA training. Some police departments have elected to use MHFA’s three-day training program rather than the more comprehensive 40 hour Crisis Intervention Team training program.

But Gorman writes there is scant evidence that the program actually benefits or impacts the lives of individuals with symptoms of serious mental illnesses.

In an email exchange, she explained: “Just to be clear, there was no evidence the program helped even non-mentally ill individuals. Mental health was not improved among recipients of MHFA, for those with no baseline need for mental health care, nor for those with a baseline need for mental health care. I make the point only because I often hear arguments that those who take MHFA training ‘feel good that they took the training’ but even for the average person, it is no better than having no training.”

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(5-20-20) How important is it for us to tell our personal stories – to put a human face on mental illness?

Six years ago, Senators Bill Cassidy (R. La) and Chris Murphy (D. Conn.) got Congress to pass a major mental health bill, Now they want to improve their legislation by addressing concerns their first bill didn’t cover. In a recent interview on NPR, which consistently covers mental illness, they spoke about their agenda. They also mentioned how my book helped bring them together.

This is why I believe telling our stories is the only way we can make the public aware of how badly we treat individuals with serious mental illnesses and their families in our country. Speaking out can make a difference and you never know who might be influenced by your words.

Two Senators Are Working Across The Aisle To Address The Mental Health Crisis

8 minute listen

Transcript of NPR broadcast 5-19-20

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Mental health care in the U.S. has long been riddled with the same problems – not enough funding, not enough programs, not enough providers. And the pandemic has only worsened this crisis. Rates of depression and other mental illness have soared.

BILL CASSIDY: Everybody has a personal experience with somebody who has had serious mental illness.

CHANG: That is Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. He and his Democratic colleague, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, are working together to renew a mental health reform bill in Congress.

CHRIS MURPHY: So Bill and I kind of found each other six years ago and developed, you know, what, at the time, was really the most comprehensive piece of mental health reform legislation that Congress had seen in a decade.

CHANG: That bill, which was signed into law in 2016, is set to expire this year. Now the two senators are working across the aisle to get Congress to reauthorize what they say is an improved version of the legislation. And this increasingly rare bipartisan partnership, well, Senator Cassidy says it emerged from a well-worn book.

CASSIDY: I was reading a book by Pete Earley called “Crazy,” a journalist who had written about his son’s travails with mental illness and in the criminal justice system. And, Chris, let me turn the story over to you.

MURPHY: Well, so I was interested in working on mental health but needed a partner. And I ran into an advocate on a bus who told me that I should call Bill Cassidy because he saw Bill Cassidy walking into a hearing the other day with this worn out, dog-eared copy of “Crazy.” And that’s what I did. I read the book first. I reached out to him. He had just gotten to the Senate. We found out that there’s a lot of things that Bill and I disagree on.

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(2-17-22) A much anticipated book by Dr. Thomas R. Insel, who directed the National Institutes of Mental Health between 2002 to 2015, will be published February 22nd but is available now for preorder. I am an unabashed fan of Dr. Insel and am happily endorsing:  HEALING: Our Path From Mental Illness To Mental Health.

In addition to being a passionate advocate, Dr. Insel is a compassionate doctor. Several months ago, I told him about a friend whose husband was showing symptoms of a serious mental illness. Even though Dr. Insel was swamped and had little time, he telephoned the family, spent more than an hour talking to the husband and wife, and pulled strings so the husband could get a treatment bed, enabling him to achieve the help that he needed to fully recover.

The Atlantic magazine published an excerpt of the first chapter of his book this week. In that opening chapter, Dr. Insel recalls how he was doing a power point presentation at a mental health convention that showed the progress NIMH funded scientists were achieving studying the brain. Here’s what happened next.

A tall, bearded man in the back of the room wearing a flannel shirt appeared more and more agitated. When the Q&A period began, he jumped to the microphone. “You really don’t get it,” he said. “My 23-year-old son has schizophrenia. He has been hospitalized five times, made three suicide attempts, and now he is homeless. Our house is on fire and you are talking about the chemistry of the paint.” As I stood there somewhat dumbstruck, he asked, “What are you doing to put out this fire?”

In his new book, Dr. Insel describes how we can put out that fire.

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(12-21-21) I’ve always argued that using “dangerousness” alone or as the primary legal standard for involuntary civil commitment is foolish. I do not believe anyone can accurately predict dangerousness. This doesn’t mean I oppose all criteria intended to protect individuals from being abused and unnecessarily hospitalized. I have written before about how other countries lean more on “need for treatment standards” rather than solely sticking with dangerousness. (click here to read about Australia and here about Europe.)

In 2010, Drs. Megan Testa and Sara G. West published a well-researched paper that chronicles the abuses that led to the dangerousness criteria and the unintended consequences that criteria has created.

“Although the shift toward strict dangerousness criteria for civil commitment was based on the honorable intentions of protecting the rights of individuals with mental illnesses and ensuring that they received effective treatment delivered in the least socially disruptive settings, serious unintended negative consequences have occurred…Current civil commitment criteria force relatives to watch their loved ones go through progressive stages of psychiatric decompensation before they can get them any help at all.”

Strict adherence to dangerousness has increased homelessness and incarceration of individuals with serious mental illnesses, they conclude.

Sadly, most major mental health organizations shy away from discussing civil commitment, except for the Treatment Advocacy Center. One of its board members, Evelyn Burton, published an editorial this month in The Baltimore Sun arguing that Maryland’s civil commitment laws need to be reformed. I suspect she is speaking for many others who are watching a loved one grow sicker and sicker without any way to intervene.

Treatment Before Tragedy; Reform Maryland Involuntary Commitment Law

Guest commentary for The Baltimore Sun written by Evelyn Burton

Involuntary psychiatric hospital treatment can help prevent homelessness and incarceration and is a potential lifesaver for those in the midst of a psychiatric crisis and people around them — people like Sara Alacote, Ismael Quintanilla and Sagar Ghimire, who were killed in Baltimore County in May by a neighbor with severe, untreated paranoid delusions. It is a safety net for those whose mental illness makes them unable to recognize their need for hospital treatment and can lead to successful community living.

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