Capitol Hill Symposium Draws Advocates

I took a day from writing yesterday to attend an all-day symposium in Washington D.C. that was entitled LOST: Dollars, People, Hope.  The keynote was given by Tipper Gore, a long time advocate. The thrust of her speech was that we needed to tie mental health to bigger issues that are important to all Americans if we want to stop Congress from cutting federal mental health funding.  Her first example was war.

Gore said that 18 veterans die each day by their own hands, an alarming statistic and an example of why we need a better mental health care system. If we just complain to politicians about mental health care cuts, she said, we probably will be met with deaf ears.  But if we explain that those cuts are going to penalize veterans who are suffering mental health problems because of their service to our country — then Congress will be more likely to authorize funding. 

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Psychiatric Advance Directives Make Sense!

If you have read my book, this blog, or heard me speak, then you know that the first time my son, Mike, became psychotic, I raced him to a hospital emergency room seeking help. Mike 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. Mike had a right to be “crazy.”  Forty-eight hours later, Mike 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 about how PADs, as they are known, are becoming more common in my home state of Virginia.
A PAD is a legal document that is filled-out by a person with a mental illness while he/she is  well. (One of the biggest myths about persons with mental disorders is that they are always psychotic and, therefore, incapable of rational thought.)
PADs are generally divided into two sections.