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Outpouring of Frustration, What’s Next?

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I have been inundated this week with emails, mostly from parents and family members, expressing frustration and anger about our broken mental health care system. 

Here is a sampling:

*You touched my heart today on Sunday’s CNN show. I tried to get my son help over and over. He is now in prison. .. What now? No education, no job, a criminal record….no help.

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Before You Vote, Question Candidates

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Bob Carolla at the National Alliance on Mental Illness has been tirelessly lobbying editors, bloggers, and columnists to ask candidates in the upcoming November elections about the need for mental health reforms. Because of the recession, many states are cutting budgets and mental health funding often is an easy target.

We need to stop that from happening. 

Carolla and NAMI are wisely pointing out that cutting the budgets for mental health programs is counter-productive, especially when those cuts lead to persons with chronic illnesses ending up in jails and prisons because of a lack of adequate community services.

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Is the Past — Prologue?

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I gave two presentations last week in Saint Louis at what used to be called the Saint Louis Insane Asylum. It is a magnificent structure with an iron-domed cupola.

Behind the Scenes at Minds on the Edge

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Many of you are already aware and have seen MINDS ON THE EDGE: Facing Mental Illness, an hour long program broadcast on your local PBS television channel. It was released in October and the National Alliance on Mental Illness is pushing each of its chapters to show the film at various times this year.  I want to give you some background about how this show came together.
Not long after CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, was published, I  got a telephone call from Arthur Singer who said that he wanted me to be his guest at a lunch in Manhattan. He had read my book and was concerned about how jails and prisons had become our new mental asylums.  While I appreciated his interest, I couldn’t afford to fly to New York just to have lunch with him, I said. But he was persistent — and he also told me that he would arrange for my flight.
When the taxi dropped me off at one of New York’s most exclusive private clubs, I began to wonder who this guy was.