What if you mandate treatment that doesn’t work?
This comes from Stephany. The issue of meds not being the answer — especially in people with severe mental illness — is a very real one.
I understand a few things based on my experience as a mother with an adult daughter who is taking an anti psychotic medication, and also walks:
1. The meds are not as efficacious as the general public is led to believe via NAMI and other groups.
2. Med-compliance is not a cure or guarantee for safety or mental wellness.[of the person taking the meds]
3. My daughter was recently missing for 4 hours in the dark, in an unfamiliar city, while medicated, and in care of a mental health outpatient residential home.[that requires med compliance].
This is the point where I can say, yes people like my daughter DO deserve the right to live in a least restrictive [unlocked] environment, and that medication is clearly not the entire answer here. What is the answer?– is what we must all ask, because right now the mental health system across the United States is a malfuntioning system, based on a psychiatric medication paradigm–that clearly is not working. The terror of finding my daughter dead was unbelievable, and I am grateful she was found by police.
The article discusses eating food from dumpters, etc. as reason to tout forced medication–those same people can read here that med compliance didn’t work in my daughter’s case. What if you saw her wandering the road? lock her up for walking while medicated? She got lost in the dark.
liz | 8:36 AM | Uncategorized
Decencency, compassion, housing, liberty, and of course the criminilization of organizations like NAMI and TAC, is the answer. Happy Thanksgiving.
Liz your current doubts about forced treatment likely relate to seing a failed case in your current job and Stephany’s experience with her daughter certainly show that medication is not a panacea (although the fallback position could be that her daughters meds need to be “adjusted”).
Medications don’t always work and forced treatment has its failures. What are people proposing as an alternative? Should we leave non-compliant psychotic patients to their own devices? City Starbucks may start to look like outpatient clinics- my own experience is that there is usually at least one customer who needs their medication reviewed. Not trying to be flip, just wonder what folks are suggesting.
My daughter, at age 19 is on the “last resort” antipsychotic, Clozaril.
A thru Z have been trialed on her since age 11 in 1999.
What is needed, is a psychiatric paradigm that enlists a human approach, that often helps intervene, in regard to quality of life, alongside or off of medications.
For the record: She has been trialed on Abilify, Risperdal,Melleril,Seroquel and Zyprexa. Clozaril is a deadly drug, that requires law-mandated bi-monthly blood draws to watch CBC low white cell count, heart attack, etc.
At age 19, she appears to be the one who needs these questions answered fast.
Before she dies too young as a result of body damage on less than adequate medications and a bad system for care in the psych world. She lives in a SSI funded group home!
ASK HER what she wants us all to do. She would rather be riding a horse, or finishing High School.
In entertainment and popular culture, medication is depicted as a panacea for everything from a bad day at the office to schizophrenia. The truth is almost never that simple. Environment, genetics, talk therapy all come into play. From my own experience, medication is not an insulation or a guarantee that bad things won’t happen, it just lowers the probability. I wish you the best in your daughter’s treatment.
Has anyone asked schizophrenics what they think the solution is? I doubt forced medication would be a first choice. The schizophrenics I’ve met have opinions of their own but I’m not hearing anyone interested in listening to them. Also, as for options–I can tell you that the decision to clean out the mental hospitals was NOT fueled by the new drugs, which is the current party line. It was totally an economic decision. I was a social worker at the time this happened. Most, if not all, of my patients were on thorazine and the like. New drugs had absolutely nothing to do with it. These people were thrown to the wolves. I saw some of the most courageous people I’ve ever known plopped back into home towns they never knew, try to shop, pay rent, etc. with very little help. The system we have now is demeaning and designed for dependence (and money making) so yes, there are a whole lot of things we could be doing better besides cramming pills down unwilling throats.
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