Home » Fairfax County

A Girl With An Untreated Mental Illness and a Sexual Offender: Who Gets Committed?

by

I received a desperate email this week from a father who explained that his daughter has a serious mental disorder but she doesn’t believe anything is wrong with her and consequently will not seek any help. Last week, she assualted him.

Finally, he thought, his daughter had reached a point where he could get her involuntarily committed into a hospital where she could get treatment.  But at her hearing, a special justice ruled that the woman did not meet Virginia’s criteria for involuntary commitment. Even though the woman was psychotic and had attacked her father, the special justice would not involuntarily commit her to a hospital.

“What’s it going to take for me to get my daughter help?” the father asked in his email. “Does she have to kill me?”

I should mention that the father lives in Fairfax County, Virginia, where I also reside. I should also mention that the three special justices, who oversee involuntary commitments here, have a well-deserved reputation in our state for being reluctant to force anyone into treatment.

Contrast that father’s experience with what happened to another Virginia resident who also wrote to me this week. He complained that he had been involuntarily committed to a state facility even though he has never been diagnosed with a mental illness. Click to continue…

Great News for New Year!

by

Washingtonian magazine has named Trudy Harsh as one of its twelve Washingtonians of the Year in its current January issue.

“For 39 years, The Washingtonian has honored those who bring help and hope to the neediest among us, give at-risk children a fighting chance, enrich our educational and cultural lives, and make Washington a better place for all of us,” the magazine announced in introducing this year’s winners.

I first wrote about Trudy last year on Mother’s Day in this blog  after seeing for myself   how she was helping persons with mental disorders find supportive housing in Fairfax County, Virginia.  Click to continue…

Sadly, no CIT Officer of the Year in Fairfax

by
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.

A Mother Who Lost Her Daughter But Is Saving Others One House At A Time

by

Today is Mother’s Day and I would like to tell you about an extraordinary mother who also is an amazing mental health advocate. Her name is Trudy Harsh and she lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Trudy’s daughter, Laura, developed a brain tumor when she was eight years old. Doctors at Georgetown Hospital in Washington D.C. were able to remove it, but they warned Trudy that Laura would only live for six more years at best. 

As often happens to persons who undergo traumatic brain injuries or have parts of their brain removed, Laura awoke from her surgery a completely different person. She was not the bright, sensitive and loving child that Trudy had given birth to. The parts of her brain that controlled her emotions, especially anger, had been destroyed.