While 50 percent of mass homicides are associated with severe mental illness, desperate families cry out for help managing psychosis.
“I’m afraid to die.” “What happens to my son when I die?” Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) Executive Director Lisa Dailey says she will never forget that testimony from a Virginia mother in her 80s who had spent much of her life caring for her son, now in his 50s, with severe mental illness.
He was unstable, but she couldn’t get him into treatment because he didn’t think anything was wrong with him.
“The difference between a person with a heart attack and a person who has psychosis is that a person with a heart attack is willing to receive care, and they want the care,” Ms. Dailey told The Epoch Times. “The person in psychosis might be actively fighting against it. They might have to be tied down to receive care, and that is perceived differently by the medical system.
“There doesn’t seem to be a full acknowledgment on the part of the medical system that a person who is refusing care may not have the capacity to be refusing care.”
The Treatment Advocacy Center is a national nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to the treatment of mental illness. In the United States, 8.8 million people—roughly the size of the population of New York City—suffer from severe mental illness, and nearly half of them go untreated in any given year, according to TAC data.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, which was supposed to decrease the number of institutionalized individuals in psychiatric hospitals by creating local mental health care centers. The local centers weren’t funded; most were never built. But many psychiatric hospitals closed anyway.
Since 1955, when the United States had its most psychiatric beds, the number of state hospital beds had fallen by 97 percent by 2016, according to TAC. That’s left few beds for people in need of care.
By Beth Brelje
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