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What Is Critical To Recovery?

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What’s the most important ingredient to recovery if you have a mental illness?

I’m beginning my week by flying into LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where I will speak tonight at Viterbo University.  As always, I will talk about my book, my son, and what happened to our family. I will explain how those terrible events led me to the Miami Dade County Detention Center where I followed persons with mental disorders through the criminal justice system.  I will talk about how our jails and prisons have become our new asylums, why this is wrong and how we need to turn our current system back into a community health issue rather than having it continue to be a criminal justice problem. 

But on this trip, I’ve also been asked to speak in the afternoon to a number of local leaders as part of an informal afternoon “conversation.” The goal of this talk, which is sponsored by the Mental Health Coalition, is to discuss what is happening in La Crosse and what it might do better. 

My role is to describe successful programs that I’ve seen visiting 46 states and three countries — Iceland, Brazil and Portugal — and touring more than a hundred different programs.

I am always happy to talk about programs that are making a difference and I don’t mind citing specific examples.

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What were the first signs?

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“Did you see any warning signs that should have tipped you off about your son’s mental illness?”

It’s a question I get asked whenever I speak in public. 

Like other parents, I have spent hours thinking about my son’s past,  wondering if there were behaviors that I missed which were red flags.  If so, what were they? When did his mental illness first begin revealing itself?

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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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Chemical Imbalances: Real or Imagined?

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One of the first terms that parents and others hear when someone shows symptoms of having a mental disorder is “chemical imbalance.” It is the catch-all that often is used to explain why someone suddenly shows signs of major depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. I remember being shocked when I used this term in a news article and was later confronted by someone who proudly identified themselves as being “anti-psychiatry.” She told me that there is absolutely no evidence that mental illnesses are real and/or caused by biological problems inside the brain. 

I soon learned that this is an ongoing argument, often a bitter one, waged between different factions in the mental health community. 

So I was happy when I was sent an advance copy of the book: SHRINK RAP: Three Psychiatrist Explain Their Work   written by Dinah Miller, M.D. Annette Hanson, M.D. and Steven Roy Daviss, M.D.. Their book is being published by the Johns Hopkins University Press next month. 

The doctors, who write a popular mental health blog offer their take on “chemical imbalances” and I found their comments helpful.

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Complaints Make A Difference!

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Straitjacket dance criticized

Robert Morris team’s performance called insensitive

By John Keilman Tribune reporter
The Chicago Tribune
 A Chicago dance team that performed in straitjackets last month has drawn criticism from a mental health advocate who said the outfits displayed insensitivity toward people with mental disorders.  

The Robert Morris University competitive dance team wore the costumes, which included wild, frizzy hair and dark eye makeup, at a national contest in Minnesota. Chrisa Hickey, a Barrington mother whose 16-year-old son has schizoaffective disorder, complained to the school after she saw an online photo of the dancers last week.

“It’s accepted as entertainment,” she said. “But if you’ve seen your kid restrained and medicated because he’s having a complete psychotic break, it wouldn’t be entertaining.”

Robert Morris President Michael Viollt said the costumes were inappropriate and will not be worn again. Outfits for the dance team, which until now have not been approved by the school, will go through the same committee that approves the uniforms of sports teams, he said.

He said mental health awareness at Robert Morris is conducted mostly in classes dealing with the subject but added that the university will consider any changes that might help increase sensitivity toward people with the disorders.

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A battle worth fighting!

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When Rose Alberghini, the executive director of NAMI PA York, invited me to speak about barriers to good mental health care, the first obstacle that entered my mind was stigma. The way that the media, especially Hollywood, portrays persons with mental disorders is so crass, cruel and destructive that people are often afraid to acknowledge that they might need help.  

We should not separate the mind from the rest of the body when it comes to illnesses. The heart can get sick and so can the brain. Yet, we insist on viewing mental disorders separate from other physical aliments. Part of the problem, of course, is that we don’t  know the biological underpinnings that cause bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Until we do, there are bound to be arguments. But what we do know is that persons who suffer from mental disorders are rarely portrayed sympathetically.

We would never make a person with Downs Symdrome the butt of a joke. Yet, persons with mental problems continue to be easy targets.

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