If You Don’t Want To Create Stigma and Prejudice, Then You Don’t Make Stuff Up Treatment Advocacy Center

   message about violence and severe mental illnesses from the Treatment Advocacy Center’s executive director –

As someone who has been treated for bipolar disorder for 12 years and who has no history of violence, I understand it would be highly unfair and completely inaccurate for any organization to argue or imply that all people with severe mental illnesses are dangerous. That has never been our position.

The Treatment Advocacy Center has repeatedly pointed out that people with severe mental illnesses who receive proper treatment are no more likely to commit violent acts than people without severe mental illnesses. However, we simply cannot ignore the evidence that shows that people with severe mental illnesses who go untreated are more likely to commit violent acts.

We are very sensitive to the need not to stigmatize people with mental illnesses. Again, as a person who has struggled with bipolar disorder, my attitude toward others who struggle with mental illnesses is one of compassion and empathy. Our overriding desire is to help people who may not be able to help themselves – not to cast a negative light on them.

The Treatment Advocacy Center publicizes stories about people with mental illnesses who commit harm to themselves or others to highlight the need for better treatment laws and practices. We are not the source of stigma. Rather, the stigma arises because of the tragic number of incidents in which people neglected by a broken system end up committing harm to themselves or others. Our mission is to bring about more effective and timely treatment for people with severe mental illnesses. When we succeed in fulfilling this mission, violent acts and resulting stigma are reduced.

Labels: stigma, violence

  Is preceded by this entry on the Treatment Advocacy Center blog:

Cry for help ignored

Cindy Powell entered the emergency room with large knife cuts on her arms. She was sent home with stitches, ibuprofen and brochures on bipolar disorder.

“She said, ‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself’ — she actually said that,” [Dr. Robin]Henderson said. “At that point, we’re not seeing intent, and this particular injury was not holdable. If we do, then we’ve got a civil rights violation on our hands.”

In Oregon, two physicians must find people are a danger to themselves or others before they can be put on a five-day psychiatric hold against their will.

Because Powell said she didn’t want to kill herself and told a nurse that she never had a desire to hurt anyone else, St. Charles’ staff couldn’t keep her, Henderson said. Three days later, Powell committed suicide.

Yes, Ms. Powell killed herself, but not because she wasn’t committed or because there was something wrong with Oregon’s laws.  If you read the actual article TAC links to, you find quite a different tragic story.  She was not diagnosed bipolar for one, she had been labelled borderline personality disorder, a controversial diagnosis that is often used to deny (mostly women) treatment as untreatable.  So when Ms. Powell went voluntarily for help over and over in the days before her death, she was told to go home and told the mental health center was closed for the weekend etc.  But on the day she died, she had been in the hospital, in treatment, in fact, she was never out of treatment nor off of her prescribed medications, she used them in an attempt to die prior to her final successful suicide in fact.  She died while being transferred to another psychiatric facility that she didn’t want to go to.  She died because staff did not follow protocol for transferring patients and took her through a route that gave her a chance to jump to her death.  She died because of a really stupid policy of not chasing any patient who runs even if they are on the way to their death, that policy staff followed while ignoring the safety protocol for means and route of transport. 

Why was she suicidal?  She was poor, she had a disability, she was an abuse survivor, she was afraid of losing her home, she didn’t have enough to eat, her mother had died and her sisters would have none of her in life, thought she should be “institutionalized”, her mental health provider had committed suicide.  She asked for help over and over and what she mostly got was disdain from the comments by the doctor and nurses after her suicide. 

So we have a possible case of investigation of this hospitals protection of patients and adherence to protocols and we have a woman who died BECAUSE she was committed to a hospital.  Maybe she would have succeeded in dying anyway, but to take this woman’s tragic story and use it as a justification for easing commitment laws is to lie and distort and dishonor her memory.  This was a compliant patient, look where it got her. 

It is also absurd to say that if laws were changed no one with a mental illness would ever commit a violent act.  What? Are people with mental illness better people than everyone else in the country?  Because people in general are violent on occasion, in every group in our society, and if you choose to single out every instance of violence by a member of a certain group and not compare it to rates of violence in general in the population, you are deliberately creating more prejudice and you are fear-mongering.  If you did it with any other group that group would be up in arms calling you a hate group.  Well, Treatment Advocacy Center, I’m calling you a hate group and lots of folks I know agree with me.