Treatment Advocacy Center, So Many False Assumptions, So Little Time to Correct Them :)

I know the Treatment Advocacy Center folks are trying very hard to improve their image, I see their efforts to be more compassionate and less fear-mongering about people with psychiatric disabilities/diagnoses/histories, but it seems they just can’t stop themselves from making huge assumptions about the relationship between mental illness and homelessness. 

I wonder if the good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center are aware of how many people diagnosed with mental illness are put out on the street by their families of origin?  Or how many are not allowed to come home if they leave home and then realize they need support and help only a family could give?  Or how many parents have bought into or been fooled into believing “tough love” is appropriate for their children in emotional distress?  I am aware of it.  I know too many people who as young adults, in some cases very young adults, were disowned by their families because they were given a serious mental illness diagnosis.  It is not the majority of folks of course, but it is a real and not uncommon phenomenon. How exactly will more forced outpatient treatment laws, which is what the good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center want, help any of these people who have been disowned by their families and forced onto the streets or left on the streets?  If a person, any person, is homeless, what they need first is a home.

And how does the Treatment Advocacy Center make the leap from homelessness to jail? Sure some people end up in jail for status crimes who also happen to be homeless but to write that the choice is homelessness or jails is a big reach.  The choice is giving people who are homeless a place to live and lay their head or not making that commitment as a society and as individuals.  Unfortunately in most places in this country we have not made the commitment to provide a safe place to lay their head for every citizen who through hard times or hard situations or disownment due to emotional crisis has become homeless.  I would opine we have made a bad choice in that regard and that no amount of expensive outpatient commitment programs will help if we do not make the decision as a society to support people through hard times with at least a  bed and food. 

Yes, homelessness will get worse with these bad economic times and yes living on the streets will cause some folks to go into an emotional crisis and all to be unhappy and distressed, how could it not?  But no drug will fix their distress when it is caused by no place to call their own or even a pillow inside to lay their head on.  If a person, any person, is homeless, what they need first is a home.

Okay, that’s all I have time for tonight, tune in for more updates on the good but assumption-prone folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center as I have time.

From the Treatment Advocacy Center’s new and improved blog that still allows no comments and has no RSS feed (silly rabbits, no RSS feed is for kids ).

“Too many people with mental illness end up homeless. People with untreated psychiatric illnesses constitute one-third, or between 150,000 and 200,000 people, of the estimated 744,000 homeless population. The quality of life for these individuals is abysmal. Many are regularly victimized.

For some of those homeless, it is often part of a cycle between life on the streets and jail.  A choice no one, especially someone with a serious illness, should face.
When someone with a mental illness lives on the streets, they face a number of threats from the environment and weather, the lack of sanitation, theft, and violence.  At any given time, there are approximately twice as many people with untreated severe psychiatric illnesses living on America’s streets than are receiving care in hospital.

Given the current state of the economy, many fear the problem will grow worse. 
“With the nation and state in recession, the problem is likely to grow before it improves, but how a society treats those citizens who most need the help of other people or institutions says a great deal about it,” wrote a recent editorial in the Tennessee Knox News Sentinel.  Like in other states, the jail there has become the state’s largest mental hospital. 

Living on the streets-and all that it entails-is a difficult circumstance for someone without a severe mental illness to adapt.  For someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder it can be a living hell. 
There need to be better alternatives.  The choice between life on the streets and jail is not choice at all.  As the Tennessee paper wrote, “Jail is not the proper place for any society to house homeless people with mental health issues.”"

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Lack of Screening for Domestic Violence May Have Led to Death of Man

The Treatment Advocacy Center is unlikely to publish the end of the story of the woman who was taken to a Fairfax crisis stabilization center by a police officer, left to wait for 45 minutes and then left and ended up killing her live in boyfriend when she got home because it does not fit with their agenda of psychiatric patients as irrational perpetrators of violence.  I do hope that the Office of the Inspector General however will re-open its investigation into this critical incident now that new information and a verdict of not guilty have occurred.  The woman in question was, according to news reports of trial testimony, in an abusive relationship and that is what got her so upset and taken to the crisis stabilization center.  However she was not seen quickly and if she had been there is no space on Virginia’s pre-screening nor any requirement in performance contracts that women or men who seek crisis psychiatric services be screened for domestic violence, unlike most medical contacts for women even with their obstetrician or in a medical hospital.  This despite the known fact that women with mental illness are far more likely to enter into abusive relationships than women without mental illness diagnoses.

If this woman had been screened for domestic violence it is unlikely she would have been sent home.  Instead she would we hope have been referred to a domestic violence shelter for women.  If that had happened, she would not have faced a murder trial even though she was found not guilty in the end, and her abusive boyfriend would probably still be alive. 

It is past time to take the issue of domestic violence perpetrated ON people with mental illness labels seriously and to screen for it at every juncture that a person with a psychiatric label interfaces with the mental health system.  It could save lives.