Reading this conversation and the related NYTimes story about Andrey, The Man In Room 117, is emotionally exhausting for me as a caregiver for someone like him in many ways. No easy and appropriate answers for all patients, consumers, or survivors can be found to consistently favor civil liberties, the medical model, involuntary care, housing first, genetics, epigenetics, trauma-informed, peer led, neurodiverse, or other perspectives that exist. To those who says “research shows” I can often cite a contradictory study. To anyone who claims to know the policy answers, I say do more reading and think again to be less certain.
In 2024, more than 200 homeless persons died on the streets of Austin, Texas where my family lives. That is close to the annual average in this city of about a million. It is probably not far off to assume that 50 of those persons had a serious mental illness, or to guess that far fewer than 50 people die annually in our local psychiatric hospitals, shelters, and jails. We probably all agree that we don’t spend the money to provide better services for politically and economically powerless victims of serious psychiatric illness in the USA, even if we disagree on what those services should be.
Reading this conversation and the related NYTimes story about Andrey, The Man In Room 117, is emotionally exhausting for me as a caregiver for someone like him in many ways. No easy and appropriate answers for all patients, consumers, or survivors can be found to consistently favor civil liberties, the medical model, involuntary care, housing first, genetics, epigenetics, trauma-informed, peer led, neurodiverse, or other perspectives that exist. To those who says “research shows” I can often cite a contradictory study. To anyone who claims to know the policy answers, I say do more reading and think again to be less certain.
In 2024, more than 200 homeless persons died on the streets of Austin, Texas where my family lives. That is close to the annual average in this city of about a million. It is probably not far off to assume that 50 of those persons had a serious mental illness, or to guess that far fewer than 50 people die annually in our local psychiatric hospitals, shelters, and jails. We probably all agree that we don’t spend the money to provide better services for politically and economically powerless victims of serious psychiatric illness in the USA, even if we disagree on what those services should be.