Debbie Moritz is the administrator of the Bucks County NAMI (holding laptop) stands with fellow NAMI members Lynn Plewes, support group facilitator(left); Jennifer Refford, board member; Kathleen Campbell, president of B.C. NAMI (right) and Raighne Kirk, board member (far right). The organization provides support and advocacy for people suffering from mental illnesses as well as their families. Moritz has two adult children who were diagnosed when they were younger, one with schizophrenia, the other with ADHD and bipolar.
Read the article online at Do-Gooders
The Intelligencer January 2, 2013
By Theresa Hegel Staff writerPhillyBurbs.com
For Lynn Plewes of Warminster, one of the hardest parts of caring for her three special-needs children was the isolation she felt.
Years ago, one of her daughters was diagnosed with childhood-onset schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder and was receiving psychiatric care by the age of 2. Another daughter has autism and intellectual disabilities, and her son struggles with learning disabilities.
“When you have a child with a mental health disorder, everyone seems to disappear,” Plewes said. “A lot of times, you’re told in a roundabout way that you’re not a good parent, that it’s your fault that your child is behaving this way.”
Plewes began an exhaustive search for someone who shared her experience. She tapped a network for parents of children with special needs, but the closest family she could find lived at the other end of the state.
Then, when she was almost ready to give up, she struck up a conversation with a new friend, who happened to know someone whose child also had childhood-onset schizophrenia.
That someone was Debbie Moritz, now the administrator of the Bucks County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Moritz became a friend to Plewes, introducing her to the camaraderie available at NAMI.
“She’s an angel,” Plewes said of Moritz. “She literally takes phone calls 12 hours a day, seven days a week, if needed. She’s always there and always such an inspiration to me.”
NAMI Bucks, which has about 200 members, provides support and advocacy for people recovering from mental illness and their families.
There are more people affected by mental illness than you may think. NAMI estimates that one out of 17 people has a severe and persistent mental illness and that half of those people show symptoms by age 14.
NAMI educates families and schools about the early warning signs and symptoms of these biological brain disorders and how to get effective treatment through free education classes and support groups, according to Moritz.
NAMI Bucks is one of 10 exceptional charities the newspaper is highlighting in its Do Gooder series for the good deeds they perform daily for area residents, like Lynn Plewes.
Plewes said NAMI’s support has been invaluable over the last decade and a half, as she has struggled to raise her children in a world that still largely stigmatizes mental illness.
“It’s almost like a family to me,” she said of NAMI. “Nobody outside really quite gets it. It’s one of those things you have to live through. ... It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there who has gone through the same thing and can give you little, helpful hints and that sort of thing.”
The organization is mostly volunteer, and Plewes herself now teaches one of NAMI’s free classes, helping families with young children and adolescents diagnosed with mental illness. NAMI Bucks offers a variety of classes, all taught by family members and people living in recovery, Moritz said.
“We feel very strongly about that,” she said. “It’s not that we’re trying to replace professionals. ... We couldn’t replace them.”
But, as Plewes said, families and people in recovery have a perspective that others may lack.
Besides running support groups and classes, NAMI provides 40-hour crisis intervention training for police officers, teaching them how to handle a mental health crisis in a way that keeps the ill person, the police officer and the community safe, Moritz said.
NAMI hosts public forums five times a year, inviting doctors and others to speak about mental health issues. And the group runs an annual fundraising walk to raise money and awareness.
This month, the alliance will begin teaching 50-minute health classes at area schools. They are designed to help students understand what their mentally ill peers undergo and to help them understand what such a person needs from a friend, Moritz said.
“The bottom line is they just need someone to be a friend, just like anybody else,” she said.
Six times a year, NAMI runs something called the Lower Bucks Consumer Club, which Moritz describes as a Sunday dinner that’s just about socializing and fun, not therapy or programming.
“A lot of these people are in programming all week,” she said. By the weekend, “they don’t want to hear it anymore.”
Moritz said she runs NAMI because she doesn’t want to see other families founder in the system the way she and Plewes did years ago. Moritz has two grown children, one of whom was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 12. Now 31, he’s married, has a job and is living “a life just like everybody else.”
But when her son was younger, Moritz struggled with the same isolation and confusion about where to go for help that Plewes did.
“I just don’t want to see other families go through feeling like they’re alone, because they’re not,” Moritz said.
The Woman Who Died in the Waiting Room
Instead of helping her, they ignored her. The story behind the videotape that shocked the country.
From the magazine issue dated Jul 21, 2008
for full story and video see http://www.newsweek.com/id/145870?tid=relatedcl
As disturbing as the circumstances of Esmin Green's death were, they should not have come as a surprise. Public hospitals across the country have struggled to provide acute psychiatric care to the poor and uninsured since the early 1960s, when large mental hospitals began closing their doors en masse. Rather than lock them away in cold, uncaring institutions, the thinking went, the mentally ill should be offered a place in society. But with insufficient outpatient services and a dearth of community-based support, the least fortunate of them have ended up in already overtaxed emergency rooms. They are the poor, the uninsured and the undocumented. Many of them suffer from chronic conditions that could potentially be treated with medication and regular counseling, luxuries most of them cannot afford. With just 50,000 inpatient psychiatric beds for tens of millions of people across the country, the mentally ill typically wait twice as long for treatment as other patient populations do. "It's like landing airplanes at O'Hare airport," says Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. "For psychiatric patients in particular, every day is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving at O'Hare. There is just no place for them to go." http://www.newsweek.com/id/145870?tid=relatedcl
The Shortage of public hospital beds for mentally ill Persons
A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center
Since the 1960s there has been a mass exodus of patients from public psychiatric hospitals. Data are available on the number of patients in such hospitals in 1955 and in 2004–2005. The data show that:
|
In 2005 there were 17 public psychiatric beds available per 100,000 population compared to 340 per 100,000 in 1955. Thus, 95 percent of the beds available in 1955 were no longer available in 2005.
|
|
The states with the fewest beds were Nevada (5.1 per 100,000), Arizona (5.9), Arkansas (6.7), Iowa (8.1), Vermont (8.9), and Michigan (9.9). The states with the most beds were South Dakota (40.3) and Mississippi (49.7).
|
|
A consensus of experts polled for this report suggests that 50 public psychiatric beds per 100,000 population is a minimum number. Thus, 42 of the 50 states had less than half the minimum number needed, and Mississippi was the only state to achieve this goal.
|
|
The total estimated shortfall of public psychiatric beds needed to achieve a minimum level of psychiatric care is 95,820 beds.
|
|
The consequences of the severe shortage of public psychiatric beds include increased homelessness; the incarceration of mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons; emergency rooms being overrun with patients waiting for a psychiatric bed; and an increase in violent behavior, including homicides, in communities across the nation.
|
|
The consequences of the severe shortage in public psychiatric beds could be improved with the widespread utilization of PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) programs and assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), both of which have been proven to decrease hospitalization. It could also be improved with greater flexibility in federal and state regulations allowing for the development of alternatives to hospitalization.
|
read full report on Treatment Advocacy Center website: http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/Reportbedshortage.htm
A Vital Tool - Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT)
PA, Bucks County
News
