Editor’s note: This speech was delivered last fall by Ken Braiterman, my adopted dad and advocacy mentor. More of his writing can be found at KenBraiterman.com, and at MadinAmerica.com
When I found out I was getting a lifetime achievement award from the Riverbend Community Mental Health Center, I laughed out loud. I’ve been working since 1995 to close it down, or change its treatment mode from meds first to meds as a last resort when alternatives fail. I thought of rejecting the award, but that would be a small spiteful gesture.
Then I realized that the award made me feel
Continue reading My Riverbend Mental Health Center Acceptance Speech
NAMI started when it became too common to demonize parents for their children’s problems.
This originally came from a post on Mad In America, about Jani, a six year old with a schizophrenia diagnosis, who has gotten much media attention which was sought by her parents. The comments link to the parents’ admission of child abuse, which may have pre-dated the psychosis. But the question is, is it fair to publicly criticize these parents? Is it fair also to put a child’s health information online?
My blog is directed at parents, not ex-patients who are well-represented in the recovery
Continue reading By Rossa Forbes – Let’s not demonize parents, and work together
Here are my thoughts on some innovative ways to increase peer leadership in your state. This was a conversation that came from SCOPE, an organization of peer in Missouri. The acronym stands for Support Consumer Operated Program Enhancements, but unfortunately, leadership didn’t do a good job developing joint problem solving capacities of the members and it just turned into a reporting mechanism for the state to monitor the peer programs. They put out a call for ideas and I sent them this and got no response. So this is re-post so that other people may be able to use the
Continue reading 24 tips to increase Peer Leadership In Your State
An open letter to Jabulani Leffal and KCUR Central Standard Time in Kansas City,
We met at the Kauffman Foundation after the Global Women’s Entrepreneur’s summit. I’m building a business to help people learn accurate information about the psychiatric system, namely that mental health treatments are not evidence based, and psychiatric labeling often does more harm than good. I thought you knew some of this research based on our conversation.
I thought you understood that psychiatric survivors have a different approach than disease marketers.
Peggy Swarbick and Laura Ostrow are psychiatric survivors, here at the Carter Center social inclusion
Continue reading An open letter to Jabulani Leffal and KCUR Central Standard Time
Editors note: Cliff Wright wrote this essay in our UnDiagnosing Emotional Distress Facebook discussion group. We’d love you to join this group – We are talking about how to create a language that can move beyond labels and medications and the disease model of emotional distress. This discussion on reducing veteran suicide gave us all some new ideas. The participants gave us permission to reprint their comments.
Corinna West: “What is the best way to help veterans? For reducing veteran suicide? If one vet dies by suicide every 80 minutes, what is the solution to that problem?”
The Chocolate
Continue reading Cliff Wright – The best ideas for reducing veteran suicide
Right now many Missouri and Kansas mental health centers repeatedly face huge budget cuts. In fact, this is true nationwide. We simply can’t afford as a society to keep spending as much money on useless mental health care costs. Right now the mental health system faces a choice that is also being faced in the energy, agriculture, freshwater supply, transportation, and education. In all of these areas there are market failures causing a re-allocation of resources away from science-based, effective, low-cost solutions. We are subsidizing unsustainability by pouring money into these systems in directions that make problems worse, not better.
Continue reading 10 Easy Ways to Reduce Mental Health Care Costs AND Improve Outcomes
This is an article that talks about how the Occupy Movement could show that living in tents in tent cities could be a viable way to handle homelessness. Right now our best solution for homelessness is permanent supportive housing, where people are placed into long term living situations with peer support to help them resolve issues that may cause them to lose their housing. Permanent supportive housing is cheaper than the default situation or the current status quo, where homeless people get support in jails, homeless shelters, and emergency rooms. It’s cheaper and much more effective than the current situation,
Continue reading Is Permanent Supportive Housing the Gold Plated Solution to Homelessness?
We need more peer involvement in decisions that affect consumer/survivors of mental health services, treatment, and the mental health system. Otherwise, corporate interests driven by a profit motive will be the only voice decision-makers hear on decisions that affect us.
We need more peer involvement in policy making
We must have more peer involvement at the tables of decision-making organizations, more outcomes-based research institutions, policy and regulatory domains, as well as educational institutions!
I attended the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) public input event earlier this year. There were only TWO of us Mental Health Peer Advocates speaking out
Continue reading Dee Jacobsen – Why We Need More Peer Involvement
In 2004, California voters initiated and passed a new far-reaching Mental Health Services Act (called Proposition 63 in Calfornia) to upgrade its obsolete, notoriously underfunded mental health system. Since it was enacted, MHSA has raised more than $8 billion for mental health services, Valley Public Radio reported Aug, 9, 2012.
The services are paid for by existing mental health funds, plus a “Robin Hood tax.” People who make more than $1 million per year pay one percent of their income, earmarked for “recovery services” for folks with mental health labels.
Now, a Republican lawmaker is calling for an audit of
Continue reading Audit Requested of California’s Mental Health Recovery Services, and Special Tax That Pays for Them
Earn money and keep your benefits unchanged
If you are collecting Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), or living in subsidied housing, the law allows you to work part-time, earn some money, and keep your benefits unchanged.
Your Medicare continues for three years after you go off SSDI, to make the transition to full-time employment a little smoother. You can take a job that does not include health insurance right away.
And SSDI lets you earn $1,010 per month, and leave your benefit unchanged. That number changes a little every year according to the cost of living. It can be
Continue reading How to Work, Earn Money, and Keep Your Benefits Unchanged
CRPD, the UN disabilities rights treaty, needs 67 votes in the U.S. Senate
On July 26, 2012, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to recommend that the full Senate ratify the International Convention on Human Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), with a reservation that the treaty requires no change in state of federal law.
Like all foreign treaties, this disabilities rights treaty requires a two-thirds majority (67 Senators) of the full Senate to become law.
Over 300 disability organizations support this treaty, also 21 veterans’ groups, including Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans
Continue reading Some Mental Health Advocates Disagree with “Reservation” Attached to Disabilities Rights Treaty
This letter to the editor by Su Budd, one of the founders of the mental health civil rights movement, is an answer to an op-ed in the Washington Times by D. J. Jaffee of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC). Jaffee calls for closing SAMHSA (the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) for not “doing its job” of protecting people from violence by dangerous people with untreated mental illness. Jaffee, TAC, and its founder, E. Fuller Torrey, MD, support forced treatment and confinement.
Dear People,
E. Fuller Torrey M.D.
I am very concerned about a proposal to close
Continue reading By Su Budd – Closing SAMHSA is Wrong; People Who Favor It Spread Irrational Fear
Subject: Antipsychotics: Time to introduce choice?
Dear Friends and Colleagues
We (Tony Morrison, myself, David Shiers, Doug Turkington) are trying to start a debate around anti-psychotic treatment and choice, drawing attention to what we perceive as a changing cost-benefit ratio. Please find attached our paper published today in BJP, together with a companion piece by the editor, Peter Tyrer.
Whether you agree with our arguments or not, please do consider contributing to the debate: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/letters/submit/bjprcpsych;201/2/83
*Service-user opinions will be particularly important here.*
Please also consider distributing this email and the attached papers around your networks – I’d be particularly grateful
Continue reading Please join the debate calling for choice for anti-psychotic use
Access to fresh. organic food is a needed mental health system reform.
These are some of my opinions about what should happen in Mental Health Reform NOW…. and what I’m trying to get our group to have an impact on. These are broad sweeping statements focused on the overall objective and outcome- they are ambitious and they will require community involvement and organization.WHOLE BODY HEALTH & HEALING:
1. MEDICATION TRUTHFULNESS as a partial, transitional solution, rather than as the sole focus of treatment.
a. MEDICATION FREEDOM. the right of individuals to choose to take or not take medications- and
Continue reading By Elvia Knoll – My Most Needed Mental Health System Reforms
Any forced psychiatric medication treatment should be an extremely last ditch effort, when lives are truly at stake.
The force should be as little as possible, with huge inputs for full peer oversight, full reversal and appeal processes, full knowledge that psychiatric medications are painkillers and addictive, not effective in the long term.
A lot of academic literature shows that fasting and hunger cause biochemical and emotional changes that make people want to keep fasting. I know this from personal experience as well. So this means decisions are affected by this chemical and emotional state that does not accurately
Continue reading My Personal Position on Forced Psychiatric Medication
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