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College Disability Services: A Tricky Issue

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Should someone born with only two fingers on one of their hands be admitted into a medical school?

   What if someone with a severe stutter wants to work as a broadcast journalist? Should a college allow that person to enroll in its school of mass communication?

These are some of the questions that disability and special needs officials on college campuses routinely face.

I hadn’t thought much about these questions until last week when I was a keynote speaker at the AHEAD in Virginia Conference held at Sweet Briar College in Amherst. AHEAD is an acronym for Association on Higher Education and Disability.  Nancy Beach, one of its members, invited me to speak about my book and experiences with my son, Mike, whose mental disorder first surfaced while he was attending college.

Most AHEAD members are responsible for making certain their colleges comply with federal and state disability, discrimination, and privacy laws. That can be tricky business.

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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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Apology from NPR’s CEO to NAMI

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Last Friday afternoon, Michael J. Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, received a telephone call from Vivian Schiller, the CEO of National Public Radio, during which she apologized for a comment that she made during the firing of Juan Williams.  

Schiller made a flippant remark during the recent Williams’ controversy, saying that my former Washington Post colleague and friend, needed to consult “his psychiatrist.”

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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.

NAMI and Drug Makers’ $$$

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As a Washington Post reporter, I was trained to “follow the money” so last year when the New York Times published a story about how the National Alliance on Mental Illness had received $23 million from drug makers between 2006 to 2008, I winced. The driving force behind the story was Iowa Republican Senator Charles E. Grassley who was using his congressional powers to investigate the drug industry’s influence on the practice of medicine. 
NAMI’s critics were quick to attack, arguing that NAMI was in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies and that is why it endorsed the so-called “medical model,” which blames severe mental illnesses on chemical imbalances in the brain; backs Assisted Outpatient Treatment, which enables judges to forcibly medicate selective persons who have a history of violence or of not taking medications that help them; and believes that mental disorders can strike children as well as adults.
Obviously, all of us who support NAMI would prefer to have more of an arm’s length relationship with drug makers.
But I don’t believe for a second that drug makers control NAMI and, if I did, I would resign from it.

A Never Ending Debate

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Mental Health America asked me to moderate a thought-provoking panel that featured four nationally-known activists during its annual convention in Washington D.C.

Kay Redfield Jamison doesn’t need an introduction.  Her memoir,  An Unquiet Mind, was the first book I read after my son, Mike, became ill, and it spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list.  She is not only brilliant and well-spoken, but also unassuming.

The other three panelists were new to me.

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