LIVING IN AN INSANE WORLD...

UP CLOSE & PERSONAL

Living with someone living with Paranoid Schizophrenia is STRESSFUL & DEPRESSING! 

I've watched helplessly as a loved one angrily throws things, breaks numerous cherished items, bangs violently on doors and walls, curses while raging, issues commands, uses hostile body language and threats, defends all actions, and refuses to leave my home.

I've watched helplessly as a loved one shows obvious signs of mental deterioration after being off medication for more than two years.  But what can you do? How do you deal with someone whose very disease (schizophrenia) creates an inability to perceive there is a cognitive or thinking problem; a shift in reality that is different from the average person?

Who can help? No one, YET!!! The physical health system is more developed than this country's mental health system. Break an arm, you get quick treatment. Have a broken brain, you don't.  No one wants to have a mental illness so the public discourse is already too little, too late. Questions about what's going on in someone head typically come AFTER mass shootings and even if they come before who is really charged in our society with doing anything about sick minds. MENTAL HEALTH REFORM is critically needed, now!!!

 Who can help people experiencing MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES? ANSWER:  No one, really. The law is narrowly defined: an individual has to be a danger to self or others to get any kind of immediate treatment. But, there aren't enough beds in hospitals or jails for the mentally wounded. And many are quite functional some of the time and do not always display a danger to self or others 24/7. Plus mental health is not a top priority in a society that continues to stigmatize those with mental health concerns or conditions. Even though many relationships exhibit some semblance of compromised thinking, the lack of public discourse about mental illness leaves people generally uneducated about non-physical health conditions. We're more likely to freely talk about cardiac arrest, cancer, or diabetes because these are more acceptable "diseases." AND, when it comes to mental diseases research shows more people are now admitting they are depressed, BiPolar, or have PTSD but few are willing to reveal they have  Schizophrenia or problems with their mind... usually because they can't.  

 

SO... how do we help individuals LIVING WITH individuals LIVING WITH Schizophrenia? THE ANSWER:  You're pretty much on your own! One ends up suffering alone without viable options. Family members end up enduring and being terrorized by the frontal lobe disease called schizophrenia.

For example, what do you do when you're being domestically abused by someone with schizophrenia? Do you call the police and risk criminalizing a schizophrenic or do you seek an Emergency Petition from the Court only to have someone with schizophrenia taken to an Emergency Room but released after 72 hours on a psych ward; not surprisingly that individual is even angrier once released. OR... Do you force treatment on those with broken brains via the legal system as advocated by the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC)?

While there are some resources to increase understanding about the behavior of someone with schizophrenia and support groups... so much more is still needed.  NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) is to be commended for its free education courses, awareness campaigns, and lobbying of Congress for more help. Thanks to NAMI, TAC, and other organizations, Congress is finally recognizing the "critical need for mental health reform."  Meanwhile... the friends and relatives of those with mental health issues wait.

And until more help comes families and loved ones are having to have to themselves!!!  The first step for now is sound the alarm and become a critical mass for alerting the nation that too many parents, spouses, older adults and others are being held hostage by the deteriorating minds of of untreated schizophrenics.

HOW CAN A LOVED ONE NOT BECOME STRESSED AND/OR DEPRESSED? How tempting it is to use alcohol, drugs or food to cope with the unrelenting behavior of someone with schizophrenia.  But best-selling author Marianne Williamson uses her newest book - TEARS TO TRIUMPH -  to encourage all of us to face the pain rather than trying to numb or ignore it.  TEARS TO TRIUMPH (2016) offers some useful insights for extending a much needed discourse about what to do when confronted by compromised minds. The national health care system benefits from familes trying to help those who are not cognitively at their best.
  The book below is a reminder that anxiety and depression are frequent outcomes when living in an insane world or with insane people.

May you find daily Peace & Love!

Telling Your Stories Matter...

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Sunday, June 24, 2012 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/when-my-crazy-father-actually-lost-his-mind.html?ref=magazine

When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind

                                                By JENEEN INTERLANDI

And what it took to get him the help he needed.

Elinor Carucci/Redux, for The New York Times

                         The author with her mother, Patricia, and her father, Joseph.

A REVIEW

No one really understands how a person with a broken brain struggles like those engulfed in the struggle. Here's a daughter who tells a poignant story that captures the "craziness" and myth of a working mental health system in the USA. The leaky social net for treating mental illness is so vividly exposed that it becomes clear even the latest health care reform efforts aren't enough.  It takes ten pages for the author to fully tell what happened to her and her family after her father lost his mind to a bipolar disorder.  As you read her story, remember that in the mental illness political ring there are two ongoing narratives:  those favoring unconditional civil rights for the mentally ill and those favoring helping the mentally ill when they can't help themselves, by committing them to treatment against their will.  There is no middle ground. Mentally ill people have civil rights all the time or they don't under exceptional conditions.

As you read this heart-rendering story, you should be able to identify your position by the end of it.  And it's that position that you will want to make clear when you tell your stories about coping with a mentally ill loved one. When you do you will thus be advocating for either AOT or ACT. Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) allows involuntary treatment with a law that moves beyond the narrow "danger to self or others" standard.  Assisted Community Treatment (ACT) sidesteps the involuntary committment issue by using the courts to order a mental health team to provide treatment BUT only if mentally ill persons volunteer or agree to the court-ordered solution.

Please take time to thank The New York Times for publishing this well-written and deeply personal article about mental illness.  The paper's heroic effort helps to lift the stigma veil and helps to bring attention to mental health illness issues; the article is important because it helps to increase  awareness about the second-class treatment of our mentally ill relatives. Thank you NYT and Jeneen Interlandi. You've both done what Hollywood and the White House haven't been able to do: make real the very real experiences of so many American mental health caregivers and their relatives. Anyone who involuntary treatment is unnecessary because violent incidents by the mentally ill are the exception, rather than the rule, miss the point - each act of psychotic violence probably represents tens of thousands of families already struggling to keep the same from happening with their mentally challenged loved-one.

Mental Illness is a huge and often well-hidden problem.  Instead of being treated like modern-day lepers, the mentally ill need better treatment and respect . No one wants to be mentally ill; recovery when it does occur is often a lengthy process.  It's thus in the public's interest to increase beds and services for those who can't mentally handle their situations.  Would you let a person in shock after an auto accident refuse treatment when you see him bleeding on the side of the road?  Would a physician refuse to treat a child with a broken arm? Wouldn't a parent be held negligent for not taking an injured child to the doctor. Yet because few people recognized the physical symptoms of mental illness of any kind (bipolar, schizophrenia, depression, personality disorder, etc.) it often goes untreated in the initial stages.  What makes a mental illness so insidious is that you can't see a broken brain.  That coupled with the disease itself, often causing its victims to declare that they are not sick and don't need treatment, as Jeneen Interlandi's story so painfully depicts.

As a certified teacher for the Family2Family education course for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), I continually teach our mantra - you can't know what no one has told you.  Re-education then is the first key; re-dedication to funding mental health programs and positions, is the second.  Treatment works.  But getting long-term and consistent care to help stabilize a problem in the head, is a major frustration for caregiving families and individuals. Not surprisingly families of the mentally ill become exhausted and stressed as they take on the roles of case managers and protectors.

One of the most revealing and painful facts in When My Father Actually Lost His Mind occurs when it becomes clear that getting their loved-one stabilized is more difficult without long-term coordinated services. While it is fortunate that Mr. Interlandi's bipolar symptoms began to subside, which is sometimes the case after many years, it should be noted that his improvement might have come sooner with a better kind of health care system.  Indeed, it should not be forgotten that much of Mr. Interlandi's improvement may also have been the result of the strong support system provided by his loving family.  I know of hundreds of families providing the same kind of up close and personal, intensive-kind of loving care for a mentally challenged loved one.

Jeneen Interlandi thus makes a significant contribution by so eloquently bringing some very much needed attention to an almost hidden epidemic.  By increasing the awareness of millions about mental illness with her story, I am confident that many more are now aware that mental illness is a family issue and a biological problem. Perhaps now more people in and out of the mental health care system will understand to what extent mental illness is a precusor for the increasing number of individuals who are homeless or in our jails.

Because stigma prevails...  we need to keep telling and hearing about stories involving mental illness.  Stepping Forward2Day is one way to do that.  This Blog is therefore being used to sound an URGENT clarion call for action.  The comments and stories you share will be presented to Congress, state legislators, the President, Governors, and other policymakers in September 2012.  It's time to wake-up America with more stories about real people coping with a mental health care system that often does as much harm, as good in the 21st Century.

Again, thanks to the NYT, magazine editor Vera Titunik, and Jeneen Interlandi for sharing an extraordinary and moving story about the ongoing effect of mental illness in our communities.  Well done!

               

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