Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mark Redmond, who is the executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services and the author of “The Goodness Within: Reaching Out to Troubled Teens with Love and Compassion.”
[L]ast Aug. 17, I attended an Agency of Human Services mental health stakeholders meeting at the Waterbury headquarters. A large conference room was filled for an all-day session with leaders from the mental health field, advocates and private citizens.
Since I work in the social services field myself, I stood up and made a statement near the end of the morning session that I knew would generate controversy. I voiced my belief that there are times when an individual’s mental health condition has deteriorated to such an extent that the state must exert its power to intervene and place that individual in a safe and secure setting even if it is against that person’s will. The technical term for such is “involuntary commitment,” and as an example I cited the case of a Burlington man well-known to all mental health providers in that city – a man who has had 860 police incidents since 2011, yet whose mental illness was not deemed serious enough to meet the involuntary commitment threshold. He thus lived in homeless shelters or on the streets, even during the coldest months, suffering intensely while also wreaking havoc in the community.
When I finished my statement, a woman in the meeting approached me and asked if we could talk privately during the break. We did so, and she told me the tragic story of her son who at one point in his life had been a talented trombone player, AP scholar and had graduated from high school with honors. While he did struggle at times with mental health difficulties, she was able to guide and participate in his treatment since he was under age 18, and he did well enough to go to be accepted at and enroll in a university.
Once he turned 18, however, she and her husband’s ability to intervene diminished, despite the fact that they were both social workers and knew all the available resources. That is because this is the way the laws are written in Vermont. She told me her son’s illness escalated, he had no insight into this, and he left the state. She did everything she could to find him, at one point even hiring a private detective to follow up on a rumor that he was living in a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. (he was). For the next 11 months she had no idea where he was until the police in Massachusetts found him walking in the middle of I-91 during the night. To this day, no one knows how he got from D.C. to New England and what might have happened to him along the way.
I have kept up a correspondence with this mother since last August. Her son is now back in Vermont, and she is doing everything in her power to convince the courts and the mental health authorities that her son should be given access to the proper treatment, even if he does not agree. As she recently wrote to me, “My son never aspired to become homeless. He had so many dreams for his life and talents. But he can’t access any of it without treatment. I understand civil liberties, but I know who my son was, and I know that this life is not what he dreamed of.”
She makes another important point, which is that we claim to have parity between physical health and mental health, but we do not. “There are no Caring Bridge sites; no prayers during church services; no GoFundMe sites to raise money for travel, hotels, lawyers, private investigators; no cards or flowers; no shawls knit by volunteers; no trays of lasagna delivered to the home …”
She’s right. Families who have a member suffering from severe and persistent mental illness feel stigmatized by others, and that is wrong.
No one wants to return to the days when there were over a thousand individuals living in the state hospital. Changes in medications, practice and policy have brought about tremendous good in the ensuing decades. But I believe the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
The Vermont legislative session is ended, and $5.5 million was budgeted to build 12 new psychiatric beds at the Brattleboro Retreat which should come on line in September 2019. That is a good first step because our hospital emergency departments are filled with individuals suffering from mental illness, and delays in treatment can exacerbate mental illness and make recovery all the more difficult. But even if we do add beds, our involuntary commitment laws are written in such a way that parents like this woman are helpless to get their adult children the timely treatment they need to recover, or at least to live in a humane fashion. And ironically enough, it is often the mental health advocacy organizations in Vermont that resist modifying these laws.
In one of her last emails to me, she wrote, “Our system has let our son down. He would be aghast and humiliated that people bore witness to his decompensation and that there were people actually advocating for his ‘right’ to do so.”
It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that this mother is correct.
