Broken system of MH Care

[JulySky]

What do we expect?  We closed down our psychiatric facilities 30 years ago pretending we had community facilities ready.  All we really did was release our mentally ill citizens onto the streets.  We spend more money on prisons than we do on higher education because that's where they ended up.

We demand working children take care of their Alzheimer parents, while at the same time making them scramble for day care for their own kids that charges a $1.00 a minute after closing.

I just read that 50,000 people used the homeless facilities in NY city this year, not including the tunnel and sewer people.  In my town they live underneath the bridges.  

We'd rather wage wars then take care of our own.  And now some of our military our raising cups on a freeway exit hoping for a quarter or two.  

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[MammaMia]

JulySky

You nailed it.  The USA sends billions of dollars in foreign aid to countries that hate us and cannot wait to stab us in the back, while our own mentally ill citizens suffer from a lack of basic necessities like medical care, food, and housing.  

Funding wars that are sucking the lifeblood out of our economy and killing our young is wrong on so many levels.  Caring for a mentally ill loved one is a huge financial and emotional burden on families already struggling to just get by.  Where is the humanity they deserve?  

No one really seems to care as long as mental illness does not directly affect them.

[qcarolr]

Seems there was a point about 'patient rights' and a lot of abuses that went on in many psych inpatient facilities in the era that this transistion took place. Instead of fixing the system to support the patients that needed to be there - they set them out to become more 'independent'. So the next failure was not funding the community care. The failure after that was limiting family access to being involved in the case management of their loved ones with mental illness once they reached that magic age of 18 -- so they could refuse the treatment that would allow them to truly move toward greater independence. And there are many that refuse treatment no matter what - no matter the misery they live in. Maybe in the skewed reality they feel like they deserve the suffering, or are enmeshed with their own delusions and hallucinations. And then the whole drug culture exploded in our communities at broader and broader levels and younger and younger ages. This allowed so much self-medication to numb out the pain - so preferred to feeling dominated by family or professionals.

And then there was me - admitting my DD at age 6 to an inpatient psych hospital for her violent behaviors. Her projected hatred of me for doing that to her - still today at age 26 she holds onto this, usually suppressed until the next need to get at me - so that I promised myself that I would never "do this to her" again. And maybe there were times in adolescence that an inpatient stay would have helped. And maybe not - I had no knowledge of the existence of something called BPD at that time in ourlives.

My vent for today.

qcr  

[sunshineplease]

Oh, SO broken, JulySky. It's a travesty.

[vivekananda]

i heard someone once say that the strength of a democracy can be measured by how it cares for those most vulnerable in society. Whoever it was said, go to the prisons and there you can assess if a society cares for its own. Why is it a measure of a democracy? because in a democracy we are supposed to be equal and treated fairly with justice.

We all have a long way to go.

some also suggest we vote for what we get, we get what we deserve... .  this isn't to mean we deserve to be treated unfairly, unjustly etc, but that if we want it to be different, then we have the capacity to change things through our political system.

just my little 2 bob's worth 

Vivek