Pete Earley

Treatment Advocacy Center’s Lisa Dailey accepts award. (Peg’s foundation photo.)

(11-15-22) The Ohio based Peg’s Foundation recently announced recipients of its 2022 Morgan Impact Awards for mental health and chose the Treatment Advocacy Center for its Excellence in Advocacy award. TAC’s Executive Director Lisa Dailey accepted the award on behalf of the non-profit organization.

The Morgan Impact Awards, established in 2010, recognize individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievements in mental health, education and the arts.

Peg’s Foundation is one of the larger mental health foundations. It was endowed by Margaret ‘Peg” Clark Morgan and her husband Burton whose son, Dave, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite the family’s wealth, they struggled to find suitable treatment for Dave. “(Peg) was a mom who loved her son and wanted the best for him, and this illness wouldn’t always allow that for him,” recalled Rick Kellar, Peg’s Foundation President. “They couldn’t find the help and support to fulfill his needs to recover.” Peg Morgan died in 2013 at age 95.

The Foundation’s goal is to “promote and help implement promising and evidence-based practices that can create the immediate and urgently-needed opportunities to improve the lives of people with serious mental illness and their families.” It listed assets worth $106 million and annual revenues of $40 million in its most recent public filing. (Click here to read about Peg and Burton “Burt” D. Morgan’s personal life and business acumen.)

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Overcrowded hospitals. Patients on gurneys in hallways

(10-24-22) How long must you wait to get a loved one into a psych bed in your community?

The last time that I checked, the average wait time nationally in a hospital emergency room for a NON-LIFE threatening emergency was four hours. The average wait time for a psychiatric problem was FOUR DAYS.

We all know why. It started with the closing of state mental hospitals and got worse with little funding for community services. Hospitals traditionally lose money on psych beds. They make much more of surgical and other beds. So hospitals began shutting down they psychiatric wards. Many ERs are reluctant to accept patients in the midst of a psychiatric crisis. The requirement of immediate danger gives some hospitals an excuse for turning folks away. Those with the most serious illnesses – schizophrenia – are the quickest to be shown the doors.

My former employer, The Washington Post, published an example of what is happening today because of our dwindling supply of psychiatric beds.  Thank you Reporter William Wan for educating the public about this travesty.

By William Wan

Reprinted from The Washington Post.

By his fourth week waiting for help in the emergency room, Zachary Chafos’s skin had turned pale white from lack of sun.

His mother, Cheryl Chafos, bathed her autistic teenage son daily in the ER’s shower, trying to scrub the sickly pallor off him. His father, Tim Chafos, held the 18-year-old’s hand, trying to soothe his son’s pain and confusion over what was happening.

They’d brought Zach to Howard County General Hospital on Nov. 12, 2020, amid a severe mental crisis. All his life, he’d been the joyful center of their family. But after months of pandemic isolation, Zach had become uncontrollably angry and begun physically assaulting his parents and his younger brothers.

Now he and his parents found themselves in medical purgatory, waiting for psychiatric treatment that never seemed to arrive. Every day, Zach’s case manager in the ER would call to see if a psychiatric bed had opened up. Every day, the answer was no.

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Vince with his mother, Dr. Claudia Granata, before her murder.

(10-18-22) Individuals with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims of crimes, rather than perpetrators. But a small percentage commit violent crimes and, what too often goes unnoticed, is that much of this violence is aimed at their own family members and caregivers.

A study published in the Clinical Social Work Journal noted that family violence has increased during the Covid crisis.

“Although most persons living with serious mental illness (SMI) do not act violently, this population is at a modestly increased risk of engaging in violence, with family members being the most common victims. Consequently, evidence suggests that a sizable minority of family members—many of whom are caregivers—have experienced violence by their relative with SMI. The risk of conflict and violence in families of persons with SMI is likely currently heightened due to a range of challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., interruption in treatment services and the occurrence of arguments while sheltering in place together).”

Two men whose lives were dramatically changed by family violence recently contacted me. Though their friendship may seem unlikely (because they come from different vantage points), they are now speaking out to help others and to push for treatment before tragedy.

Mother Is Murdered

“My family’s story is a tragic one,” Vince Granata told me in an email. “My little brother, Tim, began struggling with schizophrenia. At nineteen, away from home at college, his world transformed. He became convinced that his landlord was poisoning his food, that one of his classmates wore a necklace that was a demonic amulet, that shadows chased him across campus. Over the next three years, Tim struggled to find support and received only intermittent help from his college’s counseling services. Eventually, he returned home to our mother’s care.”

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(10-7-22) Three moms with sons who have schizophrenia question me during this podcast about such subjects as the new 988 number, being a dad in the trenches as opposed to being a mom, and NAMI’s “Big Tent” approach to mental illnesses. They remind me that not everyone with a serious mental illness gets better – rather there are good days with good memories and bad ones.

We must savor the good memories.

Three Moms in the Trenches is a thoughtful podcast created by Randye Kaye, author of Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia To Hope, along with Miriam Feldman, author of He Came With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness, and Mindy Greiling, author of Fix What You Can: Schizophrenia and a Lawmakers Fight for Her Son.  

All three of these accomplished authors are veteran mental health advocates. Check out their joint podcast and their individual books which describe their journeys with an adult child with a serious mental illness.

Show Information Posted on Podcast.

Keys marking each year of stability. (Photo courtesy of Pixabay)

(10-3-22) Margalea Warner writes about her journey from being repeatedly hospitalized because of schizophrenia to her recovery today. To help others, she identified 27 “keys” that helped her. I’m delighted to share her story with you. 

I Found 27 Keys To Better Mental Health: You Can Find Yours

By Margalea Warner

The heaviness of my sigh matched the weight of the steel door that locked behind me with a loud clunk.

I hadn’t committed a crime and I wasn’t in jail.  I was in a locked hospital psychiatric ward because I had a brain disorder called schizophrenia.  The hospital wasn’t a terrible place to be.  Unlike in the hellish insane asylums half a century ago, patients weren’t restrained with straightjackets.  The awful practice of lobotomy had long since been discarded.  This hospital was renowned for evidence-based medical treatment.  There was a sunny day room.  Eating with other patients in the dining room helped things feel a little more normal.

Except I didn’t want to be here.  Again.

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