by LaMara HunterKelly | Aug 16, 2016 | In The News
BOSTON GLOBE -AUGUST 12, 2016
OPINION | By Sera Davidow
THE AVERAGE citizen has now heard (multiple times) the story of people with psychiatric diagnoses who are slipping through the state’s cracks, how their families are desperate but lack resources, and how the mental health system is failing us all. Yet there are two related stories that are hardly getting told: one good, and the other very, very bad.
Let’s start with the latter. While so many people argue for increased access to treatment, few stop to examine those elements of which it is composed. Here’s just a handful of the many points getting missed:
• Patients of the mental health system are dying, on average, 25 years younger than the rest of us, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.
• The highest suicide risk directly follows forced hospitalization.
• Unlike with diseases such as diabetes, outcomes for psychiatric diagnoses have not improved.
• Long-term use of psychiatric drugs appears to beckon worse outcomes for many, and even short-term use potentially increases the risk of violence.
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by LaMara HunterKelly | Aug 8, 2016 | In The News
Caroline White at the office of the Hearing Voices Network in Holyoke, Mass. The program, which relies on members supporting one another, does not use the words “patient” or “treatment.” Ms. White, who hears voices in her head, said psychiatric therapy had made her feel “hopeless, because the drugs just made me feel worse.” Photo Credit – Sasha Maslov for The New York TimesBy Benedict Carey
Aug. 8, 2016
HOLYOKE, Mass. — Some of the voices inside Caroline White’s head have been a lifelong comfort, as protective as a favorite aunt. It was the others — “you’re nothing, they’re out to get you, to kill you” — that led her down a rabbit hole of failed treatments and over a decade of hospitalizations, therapy and medications, all aimed at silencing those internal threats.
At a support group here for so-called voice-hearers, however, she tried something radically different. She allowed other members of the group to address the voice, directly:
What is it you want?
“After I thought about it, I realized that the voice valued my safety, wanted me to be respected and better supported by others,” said Ms. White, 34, who, since that session in late 2014, has become a leader in a growing alliance of such groups, called the Hearing Voices Network, or HVN.
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