Richard Jacobs: This is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast now part of the Finding Genius Foundation. Today I have Janet Hays. She’s the founder of Healing Minds NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana). The website is www.healingmindsnola.org.
Tell me about a little bit about your background and then how did you come to a form Healing Mind Nola?
Janet Hays: It’s a long and windy road kind of story. I don’t want to use up the entire time that we have together, but the short stories that after hurricane Katrina, I got involved with a fight to try to reopen charity hospital, which was our largest public hospital at the time that had been intentionally shuttered by the state and the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors who had jurisdiction over the building. People were set out of healthcare, a lot of tragedies start to happen and all kinds of different disasters. I have a friend who, unfortunately, because it was closed, she went to another hospital and visited their emergency room. She was having an asthma attack, but she also had some psychiatric difficulties and she got in an argument with the nurse and I think they gave her a shot. It was a steroid that she had an adverse reaction to. She was trying to get an antidote and felt strongly that this was denying her treatment because she didn’t have insurance. So the nurse called the police team and picked her up. She promptly bit the officer when he grabbed her. Now he did to his credit say that she did that just because she was reacting to him and it was not deliberate, but they put her in jail in general population.
Richard Jacobs: Why is this? Is it because she didn’t have insurance?
Janet Hays: Yes, she didn’t have insurance and got in a fight with the nurse. The police officer came to pick her up after the nurse called the police and she bit the officer. She was being disruptive and so on, so they took her to jail and put her in with the general population. The sheriff said she was trying to hang herself. They transferred her to the Psych floor, which I believe at the time was the 10th floor of the House of Detention. They tied her down at five point restraints and rested down on her back, while she was having an asthma attack. As you can imagine, she died. So it was after that. A mutual friend of ours, let me know that there was this group that had been trying to get the hospital reopened and that hadn’t been opened.
Her name was Sally Kane. She would probably still be alive. So I got involved with this group of activists and got passionately involved in this issue of the closure of this hospital. Ultimately, it really was criminal because the building was ready. It was ready to be open that the army had come in and cleaned it out. It was cleaner than it ever been about three weeks after the storm. Yet the state still decided to keep it closed, which was an injustice that I had a hard time living with. So we lost that fight.
Later on, there was a plan to try to get the state and the LSU to retrofit their new hospital plans into the old building. The LSU had decided that a long time ago to demolish it in historic neighborhoods to build a new hospital in an area of New Orleans called Lower Mid-City. They really wanted to move everything from downtown where Charity Hospitals is up into Lower Mid-City. They had plans for downtown. There were always plans, right? These developers always have these major plans. They could never get the money to do that. The state kept denying them there half a billion dollar allocation that they were asking for in order to do this. After hurricane Katrina, they decided to take advantage of the FEMA. There was feeling money attached to Charity Hospital, and they wanted to get FEMA to buy them a new hospital, which in the end is exactly what they did. But we fought and I became the community Outreach Coordinator for www.statecharityhospital.com, which became the activism arm of the group that was trying to reopen the hospital and then eventually get the state to retrofit the new hospitals in the old building.
We staved off the demolition of the historic neighborhood for a long time and exposed a lot of the injustices that were going on around that issue. Again, we didn’t win. We ended up with a million square foot of empty buildings sitting in the middle of downtown. The idea about what to do with it. There were a lot of ideas being bounced around the state was putting out RFIs, RFPs and all of this other kind of stuff. So I submitted a proposal to reuse the building as a mental health care and research. A “One Stop Shop Center” of excellence because when they closed Charity Hospital, we lost about 200 Psychiatric beds overnight. We started seeing a huge uptick in people being channeled into the criminal justice system, homelessness and people who were dying as a result of not being able to get Psychiatric care.
It kind of made sense to me to pair the problem with the solution. A problem that was created by the state. It would have been redeeming, if they’ve agreed to do that. After the injustice that was really done to the community, this was some something they could have done to sort of aid to or make up for all of the tragedies that were created as a result of their actions, but they didn’t want to do that. So the plans for the hospital are to reuse the building for research and residential.
Richard Jacobs: From your experience, why do people have these mental health crises? What other common factors that precipitate them? What are these people’s circumstances?
Janet Hays: I created this organization, Healing Minds NOLA about five years ago, really it was to have to be able to attach a name to my proposal, where we used the building, that wasn’t just me and it wasn’t saved www.charityhospital.com, which came with a lot of baggage. The idea was to start fresh, let’s replace what was lost, which were 200 psychiatric beds, mainly for people in psychiatric crisis who have issues with Schizophrenia, Bipolar disease, in particular Bipolar-1 and serious Major Depressive Disorder. Those are kind of the big three serious mental illnesses. Of course, there’s a continuum or spectrum of mental illnesses from the most mild to the most severe. So people could go to Charity Hospital for whatever their issue was. Also, the hospital provided treatment and care for free.
It was the hospital for the indigent and the poor. You didn’t need money or insurance to go to charity hospital. They would patch you up and off you would go. They would discharge you. For the medications you had to pay, but the treatment itself was free and they would take care of you, even if you’re not from the United States. There were wait times as you can imagine, associated with a free hospital care. So people used to complain about wait times, but when you got into treatment, the care was as good as you’re ever going to get, because it was a teaching hospital. They always have the latest and greatest treatments, supervising doctors and your residents. You’re going to see the resident, but they’re going to be operating under the supervision.
We had about 50 crisis beds at Charity Hospital for people in psychiatric crisis, where they could go get stabilized and then if need be, they would be transferred to the inpatient unit. They could stay there for as long as needed to be stabilized, get onto the treatment plan and then they were discharged. This is mainly for people with psychiatric diseases where they demonstrated that they’re dangerous to themselves or somebody else, or gravely disabled, which is what allows at the time and still happens. This way allows police officers to intervene, to pick them up, and to take them to the hospital. It’s civil commitment law. Depending on their behavior, their symptoms, if they meet eligibility criteria to be held longer than they can be held for as long as needed to get them back on their feet. What we say being made competent. So that when they’re discharged, they’re being discharged into a situation where they’re supposed to be able to care for themselves. “Is that always happen? ‘No.’” “Is that supposed to happen? ‘Yes.’”
The problem with Charity Hospital was, we had a really good system of inpatient treatment and care what we didn’t have and what we still don’t have is anywhere to discharge people to. So technically if you have a full continuum of psychiatric treatment and care, which is what my organization advocates for. If somebody is in crisis, they would go to get treatment at the hospital, but then they should be discharged into whatever program services or facilities are appropriate to meet whatever their needs are. Those systems have to be coordinated and we don’t have any of that. In fact, the whole country really is struggling with how you create a coordinated system of care that no matter where a person enters the stream, they’re going to find whatever resources they need to be able to manage their illnesses.
I started this organization to really look at how do we remove these policy barriers to treatment and care for people living in particular with untreated and undertreated, serious mental illnesses that are high utilizers of crisis systems of care, including behavioral health systems, criminal justice systems, social secure or social services, and families. They’re in and out of family care. What handcuffs us to from being able to help people when they need help? It’s really why I started the organization and the evolution of its creation. There was an interesting thing, I had this great idea for this one-stop shop, Mental Health Care Center of Excellence. People kept asking me, “How are you going to pay for it? How are you going to fill the space?” In doing that research, I really went down the rabbit hole of how broken and fractured the system of mental health care is in America. In fact, it’s so broken that in a lot of cases, people will say that we don’t even really have a system at all. What we have is a patchwork or a piecemeal programs and services that don’t connect to anything. We have broken laws. There’s just no continuity anywhere. There’s nowhere to plug into when a family is in crisis or somebody is in crisis. Usually they have no idea where to start because nobody researches what happens or what do you do if you’re in a psychiatric crisis? Nobody like does research about that until you have a psychiatric crisis.
Typically, I get a lot of calls from family members whose loved ones had a psychotic break. Usually in late teens and early twenties. The family usually recognize that something’s wrong because the individual’s behaviors is bit strange or odd, they are not making any sense. They’re just behaving in ways that confusing and saying things that don’t make sense. So the family will know at that point to take the individual to the hospital and usually to the emergency room. It almost always starts there.
For a lot of people, the problem is that in about 50% of cases, people with Schizophrenia and Bipolar disease, lack insight that they have a serious mental illness and will not voluntarily agree to seek treatment or care for themselves. They don’t think they’re sick. If you don’t think you’re sick, then why would you seek treatment? It makes perfect sense. Right? But usually the reason for that is being caused by a Cognitive Impairment or a Thought Disorder. It’s unfortunate and kind of ironic that the very part of the brain that a person uses to know that they need help is the same part of the brain that’s impacted in ways that they lack insight that they need help. So it’s really difficult for family members then to convince somebody to go to the hospital that there’s something wrong. You need help. They’ll say, “No, there’s nothing wrong with me. You’re the problem, you need help” or they have these delusions. It happens a lot with delusions and hallucinations that the family is trying to poison them, or that they’re with the CIA or FBI.
These kinds of paranoid delusions are very common. It’s really difficult for the family member to get the individual into treatment. Usually, there’s a breakdown in the family. There are conflicts and ultimately the individual might be pushed out into homelessness or ended up in the criminal justice system. There are ways for families to have their loved ones, committed to hospitals in voluntarily. The system is not designed to really provide adequate and long enough treatment and stays, so that the doctor really has the time and the ability to properly diagnose the illness and get the individual on medication that’s going to work for them and then discharged into some sort of continuity of care or maybe they need longer period of stability in a facility, like a residential treatment center. These kinds of things don’t exist, where you have 24/7 onsite support. It’s not a hospital, it’s a residential setting. It’s still transitional, but people aren’t living in the hospital. They’re living in facility where they’re getting the same kind of supports that they would be getting in the hospital or the community, but that doesn’t exist.
So what happens is families will have their loved ones committed sometimes because there’s no barriers in insurance coverage. Insurance typically will only cover two weeks stay at a hospital for somebody in psychiatric crisis. After two weeks, the hospitals will just kick them out often undertreated or undiagnosed with a prescription plan in order to follow up with an outpatient provider. The expectations that people who have Cognitive impairments and thought disorders for them to be able to be their own best caregiver is completely unrealistic, but that’s what we do. Often people end up being repeatedly involuntarily committed to hospitals, because there’s nothing for them in between, which is really traumatic for the individuals. It’s also traumatic for the families like with our families all the time know that their loved one needs treatment and help but they just really don’t want to have that individual in voluntarily committed because of an experience they had the time before, where they did what they were supposed to do, but the hospital let them out. Now the loved one won’t talk to them anymore and the family members is furious.
Richard Jacobs: When the people go in for two weeks, does it help them at all? What do they do? What’s a typical protocol for someone in the hospital?
Janet Hays: It’s an acute care. Over time, we really decided in America that we wanted to deinstitutionalize the asylums of old. I think I need to explain about the horrors of these ginormous state asylums that were in a resource and horrible things happened. President Kennedy in 1963 passed the community mental health act. The idea was to transition people out of hospitals into community care, but that never happened. They just deinstitutionalized the idea of a long-term stay. Long-term stays are really hard by now. There are very few long-term hospital beds. Most states are averaging nine beds for a hundred thousand people. When really we need about 50 beds for a hundred thousand people, but we do have acute care beds in Louisiana.
Back in New Orleans, the term that we use is over bedded. In our area, we have plenty of acute care beds, but you’ll hear EMS and police all the time saying we don’t have enough bed. They’re saying that because they’re taking people to the hospital and the hospitals won’t admit people, because they’re saying their beds are full. Well, these are two weeks stayed. Beds. People are revolving in and out as fast as you can say, Boo! The problem is that because we don’t have long-term beds, the hospitals are boarding people in their acute care beds where they’re not supposed to be. These two weeks beds are for people in acute crisis. You go to the hospital, you get a diagnosis, you get treatment, then you get out of the hospital and then you’re discharged to somewhere where you’re supposed to follow up, so that the doctors can monitor. Even if the medication’s not working, come back and give them the justice that works really well for physical illnesses. It doesn’t work very well for mental illnesses.
In our University Medical Center of New Orleans, which is a public hospital. They have 60 inpatient beds and they have 26 crisis intervention beds. Their beds are full because some people have been in those beds for four months or longer. It happens because, once the insurance runs out, after two weeks, we have this process called Judicial Commitment. So if the doctor feels that the patient needs a longer stay in the hospital and that two weeks is inadequate, they can petition for a Judicial Commitment, which allows them to hold the individual for as long as necessary until the doctor feels the need to be discharged. Sometimes those students can be there for months because there’s nowhere to discharge the individual.
Richard Jacobs: Are they still in the same hospital beds?
Janet Hays: Yes, you see this backflow. It is because these folks are taking up these acute care beds, so other people can’t enter the care. Now you have this whole backflow in the system. You have emergency medical services, the police, and even family members to a certain extent they’re screaming, we don’t have enough beds. Well, it’s true, we don’t have enough long-term beds, but we have plenty of acute care beds. Is this stay long enough or adequate? For some people, it is. Especially if those people have additional supports around them to help them. Once they’re discharged, maybe they’re living with family or they’ve just better resources. I don’t want to get the impression that if you have resources that is a panacea because I have a lot of families that are extremely well-resourced and have the exact same problems as other people. With a lack of programs, services, or facilities for their loved ones, they need that long.
Richard Jacobs: Where do people go then? If there’s no more asylums, are there other places where they can go long-term?
Janet Hays: Yes, they can go to jail. It’s they offer 24/7 supervision in a jail. You go there, you’re locked up and you stay until a judge decides when you get out.
Richard Jacobs: Is there nowhere to go besides these temporary beds or jail?
Janet Hays: You can go live under a bridge. See, this is the thing our laws require that a person to be dangerous to self, others, gravely disabled, or half dead before we can intervene to help them with therapeutic involuntary intervention. If they are not dangerous, then they don’t show up in the system. You show up when you’re dangerous. Depending on the level of dangerousness, if you’ve committed a crime, as you kill your family member, you’re probably going to jail. You might go to the hospital for a specific realization, but then you need to go to jail and that starts this whole process where you might be deemed in competent to stand trial. After that you’re transferred to a forensic hospital where you can get long-term treatment and care.
The only problem is, you have to commit a crime to get into a jail. The law requires people to be dangerous in order for us to be able to help them, if they’re not able to help themselves. It doesn’t recognize they have an illness. It’s completely inhuman and torture in my opinion, what we do before people that need treatment. If you’re not dangerous, then you’re just sick and deteriorating, but you’re not dangerous enough for someone to intervene and say, “Hey, you’re not acting right. So I’m going to take you to the hospital.” Due to Psychiatric Crisis calls in New Orleans, our police will intervene and take people to the hospital. They do not take people to jail just based on the fact that they’re dangerous. They will take people to jail if they committed a crime, but if you haven’t committed a crime, you’re going to the hospital.
Richard Jacobs: None of these seem like solutions at all. Even a hospital bed. We could be in a bed for any length of time. If they’re not physically sick, they want to get out of there.
Janet Hays: What we do and what I advocate for is alternatives to incarceration, homelessness, unnecessary repeated hospitalizations, and death for this population. What I feel needs to happen is we need a full continuum of streamlined, coordinated, psychiatric treatment and care that would look like this person gets sick. When you get sick, what do you do? You go to the hospital. The person gets treatment in the hospital and can stay as long as necessary in order to get on a good treatment plan, then they’re discharged into whatever is appropriate for their situation. It would be coordinated programs and services (intensive wraparound services) or maybe you don’t need that much, but they also need somewhere to go. They need house. So I think the three components that make up a continuum of care for me are the building blocks of inpatient care, outpatient programs, and services and housing.
If you have those three building blocks, then it’s a matter of just connecting the dots. What is appropriate for the individual? What level of housing do they need? What level of programs and outpatient program services do they need? Ultimately also, I think that by providing this kind of care on the front end is really going to save a lot of money on the back end in this ridiculous situation that we’re in right now. People are just in and out of the jail they’re in and out of the hospitals. Hospitals are extremely expensive modalities of treatment. An inpatient bed in New Orleans probably costs somewhere around $1500 to $2,000. You’re looking at people in and out of the hospital multiple times a year. Those costs really add up what we should be doing with that money is investing in;
These are the kinds of investments that we should be making. Not in all this ridiculousness of sending people to jail and the in and out of the forensic hospital back and forth.
We have one guy that I’m dealing with. He’s 25 years old and he’s been in voluntarily committed 97 times since he was 16 years old. His mom added up the costs to the state ten commitments ago. It was $3 million, for one guy. His life looked like one hospital stage, the next and in between maybe three or four days, where he’s at a motel until he gets in a fight and then he gets involuntarily committed again. He’s been living like that for years, but that’s not living. There’s so much we need to be doing better. Also I want to add onto the list of programs that aren’t needed as clubhouses. We talk a lot about treatment, which is really important, but then you have a care aspect as well. The treatment is medical, whereas the care part is helping people reconnect to themselves and community. Places where they can go and they’re easily peer run and can find various programs that they can participate in make friends or get jobs. It’s where the clubhouses are really an important piece of the puzzle as well that we don’t fund enough.
Richard Jacobs: What are the excuses that are made? Why the psychiatric patients can’t get the help? They need housing and proper care, etcetera. Is it expense or what are the reasons?
Janet Hays: Well, the politicians will tell you “We can’t afford it.” So that’s, probably the most irritating thing that we hear all the time. We means, myself and other advocates like me all around the country. For instance in New Orleans we have politicians say, “We can’t afford these things because the state won’t allocate money, but we can afford to increase our low barrier homeless shelter from a 100 to 300 people. We can afford increasing the size of our jail to build a mental health jail.” Also, the governor solution is we need a bigger forensic hospital. We have 600 bed hospital in the state and the governor is saying, “It’s not enough. We need more beds.” Well, that’s fine. You can get long-term care there, but what do you have to do to get into a forensic hospital?
You have to commit the crime. The process of getting into that hospital is no bowl of cherries. It takes sometimes a year of going back and forth. Our hospital is 3 hours north of New Orleans. So you’re talking about psychiatrists, lawyers and family members who are chasing their patients, clients, and loved ones up and down the highway all day long every day. How is that not costing us money? There really never been a good study done on the cost of not caring, like how much is it actually costing us for these individuals who are really high utilizers of these crisis systems as opposed to what we should be spending at the front end that would save all this money at the bank?
The other reason for why people aren’t getting treatment is, you have these civil rights groups, who are very patient centric and believe that people have the right to be sick. We can’t interfere with a person’s self-determination and right to do the things that they want to do. If they choose to be sick, we can’t interfere with coercive measures or force them into treatment. They have to want to go on their own, which is kind of like trying to get grandpa with Alzheimer’s disease to get his short-term memory back. It doesn’t work that way. We do Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, the same way that we treat serious mental illnesses, even though the symptoms are very similar, it’s discriminatory. The other way we discriminate or the civil rights groups tend to discriminate is that, let’s say, you have two people with serious mental illness. One as a result of no treatment, their behavior results in some kind of nuisance behavior. Maybe it’s a misdemeanor offense, they have shoplifted and they didn’t know they were shoplifting or maybe they just went to the store and took something or maybe they’re trespassing. We do horrible things to people who are homeless and we don’t provide them with restrooms and so on. So they have to defecate and whenever they do, we arrest them for that. These are definitions of torture as far as I’m concerned.
A serious mental health could be exactly the same illness, but their behavior results in something that’s so violent, like they’re having delusions that their family member is coming at them, maybe there’s a demon, or they’re trying to kill them. So the individual kills the family member to defend themselves. They’re not acting that way because they’re violent, they’re acting that way because they’re untreated. We discriminate on the basis of behavior. We have a lot of civil rights groups that want solutions for people with mental illnesses in jail, but they’re only talking about people who have committed misdemeanor offenses. They’re not interested in people who have committed more serious offenses because in their opinion, those people are just smiling and they would have been violent anyway, even if they didn’t have a serious mental illness. To me, there’s just such ignorance.
They just really don’t understand how serious mental illness works and in particular people who lack that insight, they’re sick and won’t voluntarily accept help or seek help. They just won’t. We’re talking about the guy that’s digging through the dumpster who thinks he’s Jesus. If you go over and say, “Hey, I can get you housing. I can help you. I can get you whatever treatment you need. Come along with me, I’ll get you a meal.” First of all, this guy’s just going to eat, then he probably going to yell at you and say, “I’m Jesus. I can save you. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Is it okay to just leave that individual with his brain melting in the dumpster or should we take steps to intervene and say, “This is a disease.” If we don’t intervene, it’s going to get worse. Serious mental illness never gets better, it can only get worse.
Richard Jacobs: What’s happened since COVID? How the situation is change?
Janet Hays: There’s been a huge uptick in people needing psychiatric beds and we don’t have adequate capacity to accommodate them. Also, we’ve lost a lot of workforce. This isn’t just in New Orleans, I’m hearing in Virginia as well. A lot of it is just payment structure, nurses aren’t being paid enough. So they’re leaving to go and work in other areas of care, but COVID has really exacerbated the situation because now you have people who are experiencing situational illnesses, like depression. I lost my job or stuck in my house. If the situational illness is serious enough than you may get a bed. But they’re kind of pushing out people who were seriously mentally ill before COVID happened. This very vulnerable population is shuffled to the bottom of the pile in favor of helping people now in situational crisis.
For instance, someone loses their job and he is depressed. Often the solution to that is a paycheck. I’ve been there. At one point, I been devastated for not being able to care for myself and my loved ones, because I didn’t have enough money and just the depths of depression there. I’ll tell you what, when I got that check, my depression went away and it’s the same thing for anxiety. People are experiencing anxiety for the first time is serious. People need help when they need help, but this isn’t serious. Serious mental illness has a biological component to it. If you are seriously mentally ill and find yourself in the situation that I just mentioned about paycheck, isn’t going to help you get better. You’re still going to be depressed, even though you get your paycheck. It’s a disease and we need to think of it as a disease, because if we’re looking at it in terms of just behavior, then we’re not doing enough for the individuals that are really suffering.
Richard Jacobs: Any particular solution that you’re working on? Would it be very helpful or is it a mess?
Janet Hays: Yes, it’s a mess. I get really inspired when I listened to Judge Steven Leifman from Miami-Dade County. He’s done tremendous work within the criminal justice system to decriminalize mental illness so much that they’ve closed three jails in their area. Police responding to crisis and very rarely taking the jail anymore. We actually did an event. It’s posted along with some discussions that we’ve had with national leaders on these topics on our video archives page, on our website www.healingmindsnola.org under the home tab. This man just reminded me that these are complex issues. Solutions, aren’t complicated, but it’s hard to know where to start. It’s like, when you listen to this kind of stuff, it’s like getting hit with a fire hose of information.
They’re building a facility, first of its kind. A one-stop shop that’s really designed for the most vulnerable, provide housing program services, and everything that we know we need. He’s doing it while I was doing it. He always says, “You can’t start with where they are right now.” When they started 20 years ago was when Judge Leifman became a judge. He called everybody to a summit and got all the major stakeholders to work together and collaborate in the same room to determine what are the long-term and the short-term goals that we need to solve these problems of this broken system. The fragmented system caused bad policy, lack of funding, and all of that stuff.
From that summit, they then formed a task force to implement the solutions that they’d all agreed on. They all signed a document saying, “I agree that I’m on board and we’re going to work together toward the solution.” What made the difference was this diverse stakeholder group, all collaborating together. You have the DA, the sheriff, the public defenders and the behavioral health authority, the judges, family members, providers and so on. They all sit around the table, and start working, sharing resources and information. All of a sudden, it takes a little bit of innovation. When they first started, there were a lot of naysayers that were saying, “This is never going to work and they just ignored that and kept going.
Now they’re leading the nation. People are looking to when they’re visiting the Miami Dade facility, and for leadership and inspiration to do the same thing in their own parishes and counties. So what can you do? Do what you can. I started here in New Orleans. One of the things I was advocating for was Assisted Outpatient Treatment. I mentioned that earlier on that people were really starting to get excited about. There was a resonance that was starting to happen in the state around this. We had a law that was passed in 2008, but it was really underutilized until, I sort of came along and discovered that we had this law.
It really addresses the issue of a lack of insight that causes people to have trouble with medications. They don’t take their meds. When they take their meds that are okay, but when they’re off their meds, they’re not. So how do you get people to stay on their treatment plan? We have these laws that anybody can use it, but law works best when you also have a program in a jurisdiction like the parish or county, where you get together a collaborative group of stakeholders that are all kind of wrap around the individual. They provide whatever services they need in order to be successful, but they have to agree to do their part, which is take your medication. So it’s not a Punitive Court, it’s really designed to encourage the individual to be involved in their own treatment plan because these are court orders.
Eventually the order is going to expire. When the order expires, you want that person to have gotten into the habit of caring for themselves. It’s really amazing how the program works. It’s a whole other conversation unto itself. The readers can go on our website and learn more about it. If you go to the home tab and the video archives under the home tab, you can scroll down. We did a whole segment on Anosognosia, which is a term that we use to describe the lack of insight that people have. We brought in Judge Oscar Cason and another individual, we spent the hour talking about how AOT works.
I want to throw out a resource to readers www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org. They’re one of the only national organizations that I know of that are focused only on serious mental illnesses and removing policy barriers to treatment and care for this population. They do a lot of research. They have a lot of data on our website and they have one section on their website dedicated solely to Assisted Outpatient Treatment and how to implement programs in your area. You can reach out to them. They’re more than happy to help. People are interested in starting programs. Of course, you can always reach out to me and I can connect people to, whoever they need to speak with, if they’re interested in getting involved in advocacy.
It’s where I started. It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of skepticism in the various departments in New Orleans. There was some misinformation about the program, we’re hearing rumors that it was racially discriminatory and would increase incarceration and things that have been entirely disproven in studies a long time ago, but that doesn’t actually happen. In New Orleans, we tend to sometimes get into analysis paralysis.
Richard Jacobs: I was going to ask you for resources. So we’ve got Healing Minds NOLA, then you stated TAC.
Janet Hays: Yes, its www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org and from there, you can drill down into resources on their resource page and find more resources. It’s a really great place to start. There’s some wonderful things happening all over the country. I’m connected with advocates all over the country. More likely than not, you’re probably living somewhere where there is somebody doing something and that’d be happy to.
