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Our next Zoom Cast, "Homelessness & Housing”, is scheduled to air October 16, 2020 @ 1pm CT/ 2pm ET
We couldn't be more honored to have Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg as our special guests to help shine a light on how America has lost its way when it comes to providing housing as a critical component of a full continuum of coordinated psychiatric treatment and care for people living with untreated and under-treated serious mental illnesses.
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Program Description
Those familiar with the challenges associated with untreated and under-treated serious mental illnesses will be familiar with this common refrain: "discharge to what?" Many people diagnosed with SMIs live in a perpetual state of transient crisis care, moving from ERs and hospitals, to shelters and jails, to group homes (often unlicensed) and apartments with inadequate supports. Doctors, social workers, Emergency Medical Service personnel, police, sheriffs, attorneys, families, and patients themselves, are frustrated by the lack of destination options for those in the bottomless revolving door cycle where they continue to deteriorate. Cities and states are drained of dollars with zero return on investment. The problem isn't just lack of funding. In fact DJ Jaffe demonstrated in his book - Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill- that the federal government does, in fact, spend plenty of money on mental health care annually ($147 billion in 2017) but, in spite of that, 140,000 seriously mentally ill are homeless and 390,000 are incarcerated.
The problem is also ideological as Eric Smith, our Zoom Cast Series cohost, wrote in this recent article - Assisted Outpatient Treatment: A Blueprint to Freedom.
- "Advocating for a person in a decompensated state of mind to be able to refuse treatment is not a protection of liberties. Rather, it serves to deny a diagnosed person’s ability to pursue liberty and choice, as liberty and choice are suffocated by the presence of untreated/under-treated SMI."
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
 Drew Pinsky, M.D. is a practicing physician, Board Certified in Internal Medicine, and Board Certified in Addiction Medicine who spent most of his career working in a psychiatric hospital.
“Dr Drew”, as he is commonly known in his role as a radio show host and in media, is passionate about the homeless crisis in L.A. County that impacts his psychiatric patients:
“I’ve done this work for thirty years and I never thought I would see my patients dying in the streets. I am morally uncomfortable that I live in a state where this is allowed to go on.” In December 2019, Dr. Drew spoke at the White House Summit on homelessness, drug abuse, and gave a concise history of the systemic mistakes that led to the United States’ mental health crisis. At the summit, President Trump announced increases in funding to address the mental illness to stem back the homelessness and incarceration pipeline.
He explains from the book, American Psychosis, how psychiatrist Dr. Robert Felix, who had spent one summer working in a state mental hospital, influenced President Kennedy to close all state mental hospitals in favor of community health centers. This continued on through several administrations and by the time Ronald Reagan became Governor of California, half the state hospitals had been closed. Due to the total failure of the community centers, which were designed to prevent mental health “problems” with no directive on treating psychiatric disorders, Reagan had them closed.
Pinsky, who believes the majority of schizophrenics are now on the street says, “Because there were no provisions or plans in place, patients were pouring out of the hospitals by the hundreds of thousands and were going to the nursing homes, prisons and the streets to die.
”One of the many things Pinsky talks about are the “resistant cases,” the transients who refuse services, shelter and treatment. He believes these cases represent about sixty to eighty-five percent of the homeless population, and one of the biggest reasons for this is anosognosia, a condition in which the person is unaware of having a disability. This deficit in self-awareness, which blocks the brain to a person’s insight, affects patients with dementia, stroke, psychiatric illnesses and drug addiction. Check out the following piece he wrote earlier this year, The Only Plan to End Homelessness:
‘If you’re not motivating people to get better, you’re condemning them to die’
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Kenneth Paul Rosenberg
Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, M.D. is a clinical associate professor of  psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital, and he is a member of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, and a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Since 2001, Dr. Rosenberg has been listed every year as a Top Addiction Psychiatrist in New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors” issue, and is listed as a U.S. News Top Doctor in U.S. News and World Report. He has produced films for PBS and HBO to educate the public about medicine and psychiatry, for which he is the recipient of a George Foster Peabody Award and has been recognized by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Rosenberg is also the co-editor of a Elsevier Press psychiatric text, Behavioral Addictions, and the author of the Hachette book, Infidelity: Why Men and Women Cheat. While maintaining an addiction psychiatry practice in Manhattan, Dr. Rosenberg directed and produced the acclaimed Sundance FIlm Festival documentary, "Bedlam" which was broadcast onPBS last April and he wrote the Penguin Random House book Bedlam: An Intimate Journey into America's Mental Health Crisis.
Dr. Rosenberg has appeared widely in the medical and popular media to discuss America's failing mental illness delivery system. Dr. Rosenberg has spoken about our broken system from not only a professional perspective, but as a brother of a sister with schizophrenia and explains,
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Join co-hosts Janet Hays and Eric Smith who will lead the interactive conversation and Q&A.
Read more about our zoom cast series 2020: Focus on Serious Mental Illness, on our Zoom Cast 2020 webpage!
[NOTE: Occasionally, Zoom has streaming interruptions due to internet issues beyond our control. Please, consider emailing questions in advance to: HMNzoomcasts@gmail.com, subject line: "Housing".
All broadcasts are recorded and archived at http://healingmindsnola.org/video-archives/]
Warmest regards, Janet and Eric
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PS: See below, you might also be interested in the auditory hallucination simulation exercise we will be conducting this weekend. Check it out!
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Registration and additional Information can be found HERE. |
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