Opinion: Mental illness was my family's secret — and America's great shame (via latimesopinion)
In 2011, I began a professional and personal journey to understand my profession’s abandonment of our sickest patients. I had been trained as a psychiatrist at an Ivy League medical center on the East Coast. Like most of my colleagues in my generation, I did not end up treating those with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. Also, like many people in my field, I had a personal connection to the disease that I kept to myself.
When she was 26, Merle jumped out of her bedroom window, falling three stories onto our concrete driveway. She miraculously recovered physically, yet her relentless disease led to her death at the age of 55, not uncommon for people with a serious mental illness, who die an estimated 28 years earlier than the rest of the population.In the final years, Merle fought me about accepting treatment and locked me out of the family house where she lived alone.
In 2011, at the start of my seven-year inquiry into mental illness, I toured America’s largest mental institution, the Los Angeles County jail called Twin Towers in downtown L.A., the epicenter of this crisis. Like the rest of my family, I had kept Merle’s illness a secret from most of my colleagues and friends. But in 2011, I decided to tell the story of how we neglected our neediest citizens — and share the story of my sister.
During the two times Merle was forced into the hospital, doctors and family members tried to circumvent her anosognosia with brief involuntary commitments and forced treatment. But forced treatment — which may include restraining a patient to a gurney, injecting them against their will and isolating them in cell-like isolation rooms — is brutal and disrespectful, and leads patients like Merle to distrust and avoid the medical system altogether.
Merle also needed better medicine. The few times she was willing to take her medication, the side effects were terrible. Like 50% of the people prescribed medication for their mental health illness, Merle stopped taking her meds within one year.
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