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A Mental Health Quiz

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Eleven Questions about Mental Health  

           Question one:  A recent president appointed a commission to study mental illness. Critics immediately attacked that commission and recruited a celebrity to blast it. What president appointed The President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health: Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America and who was the celebrity who criticized it? 

  1. President George H.W. Bush and Tom Cruise
  2. President Bill Clinton and John Travolta
  3. President George W. Bush and Patch Adams
  4. President George W. Bush and Britney Spears 

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CIT Returns to Fairfax County!

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Great news for those of us who live in Fairfax County, Virginia!
The Fairfax County Police Department just finished conducting a CIT class that was held from September 28th to October 1st and was attended by 49 officers.
In an earlier blog, I criticized the department for not including Crisis Intervention Team classes as part of the police force’s regular training program.    For those of you unfamiliar with CIT, it is a specially designed program that brings mental health professionals and law enforcement together to find ways to improve community mental health services.   
Sadly, police officers today deal with more persons with severe mental disorders than psychiatrists do. It only makes sense that the police undergo training that helps them identify someone who might be having a mental break and teaches them successful methods to deal with those persons, hopefully without force.

What Advice Would You Give? What Advice Do You Wish Someone Would Have Given You?

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  A family friend stopped by unexpectedly and began to cry the moment she entered our house. She explained that her son had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

She asked me for advice.

It’s easy for those of us who have been dealing with mental disorders for many years to forget how we felt the first time we learned that someone we loved had a brain disorder. But seeing my friend in distress instantly reminded me of how confused, angry and hopeless I had felt when Mike first became ill.

What advice could I share with her? What advice do I wish someone had given me?

Police Shootings Stir Local Activist

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Not long after a still unnamed Fairfax County Police officer fatally shot an unarmed motorist named David Masters last November at a traffic light in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.,  I received a telephone call and letter from Nicholas Beltrante, an 82 year-old, former D.C. police officer, longtime private investigator, World War Two veteran, and frequent appointee to various criminal justice advisory boards in our area.
Beltrante had read a piece that I’d written in the Washington Post about the shooting of Masters, whose family said he had a mental illness, and Beltrante felt the Fairfax Police Department needed someone to begin looking over its shoulder.

Sadly, no CIT Officer of the Year in Fairfax

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I returned from speaking at the International Crisis Intervention Team conference in San Antonio, Texas, with mixed feelings. The conference was great and I was especially pleased to bump into Robert Cluck from my local NAMI chapter in Northern Virginia, as well as Major Tom Ryan from the Fairfax Police Department, who has been one of our county’s strongest CIT advocates. They were among the 1,300 attendees making the conference the largest to date. 
The focus of CIT has expanded from when it was first introduced.  Initially, it was seen as a training program for the police that taught officers how to respond when they encountered someone with a mental illness who was in the midst of a crisis. Now the emphasis is on using CIT to bring different community leaders together to improve mental health services.