 Pleased to announce that Nowcast SA, your local public television station on the internet, will be live streaming today's luncheon so that you can view it later as well. So let's get started. I'd like to introduce you to Lisa Sanchez. Lisa is much like any other mother across the nation with the loving support of her husband. They were raising happy and healthy children while both pursuing careers. At first she began to notice small things about her son, repeated sounds and tics that seemed cute. However, the frequency and the repetition began to worry her and that nagging worry, much like every mother's intuition out there, was right on target. The problems became much larger in scope as her son grew and with a cultural bias against mental health treatment and the associated stigma, Lisa and her family had an uphill journey to the realization that treatment was the answer. Now she advocates for other families to seek treatment. Seeing her family, you would never know the struggles that they have overcome and continue to face. At home, she's the leader of her family's health. At work, she's the executive director of patient-centered care at your own university health system. Now she'd like to share that unique perspective with you. Please join me in welcoming Lisa to the podium. Good morning. Still morning. Still morning, right? Everybody hear me back there? No? Yes? Anybody not hear me? Raise your hand. Okay, this is a very quiet audience. I guess everyone hears me. Like Rebecca said, my name is Lisa Sanchez. I'm so happy and honored to speak to you today on behalf of mental health awareness. As I tell my story, I like to use a story that my daughter Holly tells. And it's called Now We're Afraid. And I wasn't quite ready to start it yet. I wanted to introduce. No, that's okay. Caitlin is just very energetic over there. Is there any way we could dim the lights, maybe just a little bit? I teach patient-centered care in the health system. And when I do customer service, I talk about customer service, I wanted my staff to understand and feel a perspective from a family member. So I often thought if I could just find someone who has a chronic disease or a chronic illness that would come speak about how it feels to be the family member. And I thought about this for several weeks and a couple of months. Today my daughter, Holly, who was about eight or nine at the time, came to me and she had written a beautiful essay for school. She was very proud of it. She made an A on it and she wanted to put it on the refrigerator, but it was about 12 pages long. But what she wrote to me, when she wrote it and I sat down and read it, I had to literally just sigh, this huge sigh of, oh my gosh, I could not believe what I was reading. What Holly had done for me was first of all show me some things that I learned about my family and how the mother that I thought I was, maybe I wasn't quite doing the good job that I thought. The second thing was here was my story. Here was my chronic family with chronic illness and chronic disease. And so I've used it many times in customer service. But actually the story is about mental health and all of the ghosts with mental health in a family. Now, if you'll start, it's called Now We're Afraid. And again, this was written by my daughter Holly about my son Jacob. April the 22nd, 1993, my brother Jacob was born. He always felt special because he was born on Earth Day. Turns out he is special in so many ways. The way my mom tells it, even when Jacob was a baby, she would tell my dad something's not quite right. She says she could never put her finger on it, but something deep down told my mom that he would be different. At three years old, Jacob was making weird noises and clearing his throat constantly. Our pediatrician told my parents that he was probably swallowed something and it hung in his throat. He was admitted to the hospital and had a scope. But after the scope, he continued to clear his throat for about two months. When he was five, we all remember when Jacob was trying to learn to ride his bike. It was probably something I will never forget. Even I remember that he couldn't concentrate. Over and over, he kept touching his face and shoulders, then his legs. And while mom and dad were trying to get him to hold on and pedal, it was more than a normal nervous and they finally gave up. We heard my mom tell dad that she was worried about him and she continues to say something isn't right. Now he's six and he cries at school every day. He keeps telling our mom that he's afraid something bad is going to happen to her. He can't concentrate. He says his mind thinks bad things are going to happen to him or our family. He says he has the same thoughts over and over in his head and in school he can't listen to the teacher and he can't sit still. He's making weird noises all the time and he says his brain tells him to even though the words don't make sense. When he was eight, he had a very hard time in school and my parents have taken him to two different doctors. But no one knows what is wrong with him and our pediatrician said he has nervous habits and then he'll grow out of it. My parents are worried. My grandmother tells mom and dad that she can heal him by rubbing him with an egg. And she has already tried sweeping him with her broom. She also told us if we were baptized as Catholics that he would be over this sickness. When he was nine we finally got the right diagnosis and he has Tourette syndrome. My mom says Tourette syndrome isn't bad that a lot of people have it and they're all normal. She doesn't seem too worried. But my dad looks very worried and he told us not to tell anybody about Jacob. And now he's in the fifth grade he's trying to stay focused on schoolwork and not be so anxious. It's getting harder and harder for him to sit still and concentrate on his work. But he's smart and he makes really good grades and he plays the violin in our orchestra. In the sixth grade he's playing football and he's picked for the center of the team and things are going pretty good for him even though he's on the B team. He's happy because he loves football and we love going to his games and he's very proud of himself. Now something weird is starting to happen to him. His Tourette's is getting very bad and his neck is jerking really hard. He can't sit still. He's still playing football but he's having a very hard time concentrating on the plays. He's overthrowing to the quarterback and the kids are starting to make fun of him. And my mom is now taking him to a new doctor. Today we saw the new doctor and he's a neurologist and said for us to come back if he gets worse. How much worse can this get? We left and I remember my mom cried all the way home. She tells my dad that we need help and dad says not to say anything that we'll get through this. That we can figure this out by ourselves. And now he's hurting. His arms have started jerking really bad and he had to quit playing football because he can't throw anymore. Today was baseball tryouts and Jacob plays first base but he told dad he couldn't throw the ball anymore. We went to the doctor, we had an x-ray of his elbow and his elbow had separated. The doctor said he would have to have surgery to put a pin in his arm to hold it together. The break was caused by his Tourette's and the jerking tics and today we saw our dad cry for the first time. Jacob continues to get worse. We went back to the neurologist and he told us to come back if things got worse. Does he not see the cast on his arm? How bad does it have to be? Is this man even a doctor? In the car my mom said he was a quack. That's a weird thing to say about a doctor. My mom is dealing with insurance problems and the insurance doesn't want to pay for us to see another doctor. My mom is trying to explain that the doctor they sent him to is not helping us. No one will listen and now no one will return her calls. Today we saw a new person. He put Jacob on Haldol and Jacob slept for two days. He missed a big test at school and she asked the doctor if there was a support group that we could go and he told her there's a Tourette's support group but it's for people who have really bad Tourette's. And they won't be able to help you because this isn't bad. And mom says we are back to square one and he's not getting any better. And I heard mom say that she paid for this visit out of pocket and I don't know what that means. In the eighth grade things were bad. My mom has to sleep with Jacob because he's afraid to sleep by himself. His whole body jerks and he's very restless and he gets up in the middle of the night to wash dishes or vacuum the floor. But the worst thing is he cannot go to school. He's having a lot of problems at school. He can't make himself go. He says he's afraid he doesn't know why. He's missed several days and getting very far behind. At least he does go. All he does is stand in the hall and cry or sit in the counselor's office. My mom has to leave work to pick him up almost every single day. He's lost all of his friends and he says who wants to be friends with an eighth grader who just stands in the hall and cries. My mom is worried and she called our pediatrician and they can't see him for three weeks. She called the neurologist and he said he would try some new medicine but the side effects would be bad and for her to really think about it. Today Jacob doesn't sleep at all. He cleans the house from top to bottom and when he's not cleaning he's asleep or crying. Today Jacob told our mom he doesn't know how he can live like this. Against my family's wishes she called a psychiatrist's office and we went to see their intake nurse. When the doctor came in to see him all my mom could do was cry. I don't know who's worse her or Jacob. And he's admitted to a psychiatric hospital and he was diagnosed with OCD, anxiety, school phobia, depression and of course Tourette's. And Holly says I guess he got worse. My mom tells that that night she left she slept better than she's ever slept before. Jacob is now going to high school and somehow he passed the eighth grade and he's starting high school soon but things aren't going well. His neck is jerking he's getting worse mom and dad are taking him to Houston to have his neck injected with Botox. Because he's jerking so bad and they told us the procedure was approved by our insurance but it wasn't. When we got there the doctor said it would cost $4,000 today to have his neck injected. My mom called the insurance company and they told her it wasn't covered. The supervisor said no one should have sent us there without it being covered. They left the clinic to return to San Antonio. They got 50 miles out of Houston the insurance called them back and told dad it was covered and that Jacob could have the injections. Dad turned the car around mom called the clinic but the doctor had already left for the day. Now Jacob is at his worst he really can't stay in class they have to put him in special ed and he says this has to be the low point of his life. He says over and over I cannot do this. We had to withdraw him from school he cried and screamed every day not to go this has been the worst year of our life. Mom and dad are trying to help him and go to work my sister and I watch as they struggle just to stay sane. And where do we go from here? I'll tell you where we went we went to Clarity. And this is my three children today. Jacob, Ally and Holly. And after our visits to Clarity and our treatment and our help that we've received there and still do. We've gone over the years all three of my children have been treated there with the proper medication and the therapy. My children can now live somewhat normal lives. My point today is the stigma for mental health is strong even an educated person who knows and understands mental illness. I was a trauma nurse in the emergency room for many years and I'd love trauma and I would take care of anyone. But to be honest with you when a psychiatric patient would come into the emergency room I was very frustrated because I didn't understand. And then I was blessed with three children with mental illness. Holly has OCD, depression, anxiety, Ally's bipolar and you know Jacob's story. But through the health of the services at Clarity we have survived this life of mental illness and we're going strong. I want you to move it forward, Caitlin, one slide. I hope you can see this. This is my son two days ago and I know this is dark and he's not really that dark. I said Jacob I want you to write anything on this paper. I'm going to give him the paper and I said I want you to write anything you want to do anything you want to say. And the first one was he wrote a note that said thank you to our physician at Clarity, our psychiatrist. I don't know if she's here I don't see her. The second one and he decided not to give that because he says she's so personal that will embarrass her. So he summed it up very well. And you're looking at a son who yesterday went back to his job in Pearsaw where he now works for Chesapeake Energy. He has a very good job there. So I thank you all for having me here today. They all know me here at Clarity. I could talk all day about this and the importance of the stigma being lifted of mental health and mental illness for everyone, for our city of San Antonio, our community and the nation. So thank you and have a good day. And I thank a mom who has the strength and the fortitude and the lioness quality about caring for children deserves another round of applause, please. It was so important for us to share with you not just the clinical side of mental illness and get those continuing education credits, but also to connect you deeply to people whose lives are affected. So we're going to continue that journey with our luncheon speaker. Pete Early is a storyteller who has penned 13 books including the New York Times bestseller The Hot House and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Crazy, a father's search through America's mental health madness. Now I've read Pete's book and I'm here to tell you that he has an insight into mental illness and the treatment or perhaps the non-treatment of our mentally ill that is going to really astound you. And so I'm excited that after a 14-year career in journalism, including six years at the esteemed Washington Post, he became a full-time author with a commitment to expose the stories that entertain and surprise. His honest reporting and compelling writing helped him garner success as one of the few authors with the power to introduce new ideas and give them currency. When Pete's life was turned upside down by the events recounted in his book, he joined the National Association of Mental Illness, finally known as NAMI, to advocate for strong mental health reform on the public stage. This new advocacy has taken him to 46 different states and multiple countries around the globe where he delivers speeches to rally against the troubled mental health systems and for the mentally ill. That's all welcome, Pete, to the stage. Thank you so much. I am absolutely thrilled to be here. And beautiful, San Antonio. I've come as a journalist and I've come as an author, but I've really come today to talk to you as a parent. And my story began when my son, Mike, was 17 only. I didn't realize it. I was going through a divorce at the time. My wife and I had been married 25 years. My son started acting a little depressed. He was a senior in high school. He started cutting school. He started doing a little drinking. But I thought it was related to the divorce. And also, there have been children I understand who, when they get to be in high school, do a little drinking, a little cutting of school. And I said to him, do you want to go see somebody? I mean, I want to be the committed dad. Do you want to go? And we'll deal with this. And he said, no, I'm happy you and mom are getting a divorce because now you won't fight so much. And now, at Christmas, I'll get two sets of presents instead of one. I said, okay, went off to college, seemed to be doing well. Again, I noticed he was drinking more, but again, I've heard that a lot of kids who go to college do a little drinking. And then one day I got a very strange phone call. He said that he had gotten up in the morning and he had taken four homeless people to breakfast. And again, I thought, well, you know, kids in college do odd things and it's my money, so he doesn't care. And then he called me that night and he said, dad, I don't know if I really did that or not. I think I may have dreamt it. And then the next day he called me and he said, dad, I can't eat food. If I eat food, I vomit. Well, I raced in New York and I took him to a psychiatrist. I had a family doctor. I didn't have a family psychiatrist. So we looked one up in the phone book and he went and he interviewed my son and he came out and he said, if you're lucky, your son is using drugs. And if you're not lucky, he has a mental illness. Well, you can imagine my reaction was, as she said earlier, well, that guy's a quack, but he gave my son some pills. He took him for a month or two. My son seemed fine. We went on with life. And then I got a frantic call from his older brother who lived in Manhattan. He said, dad, you have to come to New York. Mike is crazy. And I raced in New York from Fairfax County, Virginia, where I live outside of Washington, D.C. I discovered my son had been walking around aimlessly for five days in Manhattan. He hadn't slept. He was convinced God had him on a special mission. And during that four hour frantic car ride from New York back to Washington, D.C. area, he would laugh one minute and he began crying and sobbing the next. And I said, please take that medication. And he screamed at me. Pills are poisoned. Leave me alone. And we got to the, then he said to me, dad, how would you feel if someone you loved killed himself? And we got to the emergency room. And I remember the intake nurse rolling her eyes while Mike talked gibberish about how he was on this special mission. And then we were taken to a room to wait all by ourselves. And we waited there four hours. And finally my son said, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm going to leave. I said, hang on, hang on. And I went outside and I literally grabbed a doctor. And I will never forget how he entered the room. He came in with his hands up as if you're surrendering. And he said, I'm sorry, Mr. Early, I can't help your son. I said, you haven't even examined him. And he explained to me it didn't matter. Virginia law was very clear. Unless a person posed immediate imminent danger to themselves or others, they could not be required to take medication. And they could not be required to go into treatment. And the fact we'd been in there for four hours and no one had hurt each other was proof there was no danger. And the nurse had told him my son thought were pills were poisoned. So the doctor turned to me and he said, you seem like a nice guy, Mr. Early. I'll tell you what. You bring your son back after he tries to kill you or he tries to kill someone else. Well, I took my son home and during the next 48 hours I watched him get sicker and sicker. At one point he had tin foil around his head to keep the CIA from reading his thoughts. He slipped out of my house early one morning. He slipped out and he broke into a stranger's house. Luckily no one was home. He broke in to take a bubble bath. It took five police officers and an attack dog to get him out. And when they did, they took him over to community mental health center and I went rushing over and the policeman was standing outside and he says, wait a minute, wait a minute. Before you go in there, let me give you a little advice. Even though your son has told us that he's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, even though he's told us he's not taking his medication, even though we picked him up in a house taking a bubble bath, unless you go in and you tell that doctor that your son is threatened to kill you, he will not meet Virginia's imminent danger criteria and will take him to jail and you don't want that. And I looked at him and I said, my son hasn't threatened to kill me. And he shrugged and he walked away. So I'm here to tell you and I do with no great pride because it hurt my relationship with my son, but I went and I lied. I said my son had tried to kill me and that was good enough to get him detained for 48 hours and at that time he voluntarily committed himself. So he went into a hospital and I went, phew, now I got him in a hospital. 24 hours after my son voluntarily committed himself to a hospital, I got a call from his doctor, Mr. Early, your insurance company doesn't think he needs to be here. We can't keep him. Well, I called that insurance company and I got absolutely nowhere until I happened to mention that I used to work at the Washington Post. And I happened to mention that I was friends with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes and Mike suffers from depression. He's a friend of mine and they could expect a call. Can you imagine being that insurance company or the hospital? This is Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes. Tell me about Peter Early's son. Well, all of a sudden, my son was allowed to stay in that hospital record-breaking 14 days. In the short time from our trip from New York to Mike's hospitalization, I had lied to get him into treatment and I'd use my professional pull, which is unethical because reporters aren't supposed to bully people, to keep him there. And just when I thought things couldn't get bad, they did. I got a call from the police department and my son was charged with two felonies, breaking and entering and destruction of property. I was so frustrated. Virginia law had kept me from getting him help when he needed it and now I wanted to punish him for a crime he committed when he wasn't thinking clearly. I said to my wife, Patty, I want to help our son, but I don't know what to do. And she said, why don't you do what you do best? Peter Early, a father, can't find out much. Peter Early, a reporter, can't. Why don't you investigate this and try to find out what's going on today in mental health? Well, for once, I actually listened to my wife. This is my second wife, I should say. I learned a little something and I did a little preliminary digging. I discovered what happened to my son is not some aberration. Right now, as you're sitting here in beautiful San Antonio, there are 365,000 people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and major depression in our jails and prisons. A half million are on probation. More than a million go through the criminal justice system every year and as many of you know, the largest public mental facility in the United States today is not a treatment center. It's the Los Angeles County Jail. And if you think Texas is immune from that problem, you need to think again. A recent study found if you live in Texas and you have a psychotic break, the chances of you getting into help versus getting arrested are 8 to 1 in favor of getting arrested 8 times. And the situation with children is even more alarming. Two-thirds of the roughly 92,000 juveniles who are incarcerated in the United States today have one or more diagnosable mental illnesses. Two-thirds. Well, with statistics like that, they got me thinking, but before I did anything, I wanted to talk to my son. I said, look, Mike, I'm thinking about writing a book about this. And he looked at me and goes, well, who would want to read that? And I said, no, I'm going to find a jail somewhere far away from Fairfax County because I don't want to risk irritating a prosecutor or judge. And I'm going to go in that jail and I'm going to find people who have mental illnesses. I'm going to follow them through the system and see what really happens to them. And then I'll come back and I'll talk to the people who run the jail and the police officers and the judges and the parents and the psychiatrists and I'll try to make sense of it. And he looked at me and he said, Dad, if it helps somebody else tell my story. Well, I started the Los Angeles County Jail. It makes sense. Largest public mental facility. It lasted two days before they threw me out claiming I was violating HIPAA by being there. I tried Chicago next. They said no. I tried Rikers Island, New York next. They said no. I tried Baltimore. They said no. I tried Washington, D.C., my hometown. And they literally said, hell no. And I ended up going down to Miami because of a judge there who said, I want you to come in our jail. I want you to see what's happening. Now I'm going to take you there, Miami-Dade County, the pretrial detention center, the ninth floor where the most psychotic prisoners are held, C-wing, the suicide wing. It's a U-shaped cell block, 19 cells in this cell block. All of them face the center of the U. The officers walk up and down the center. They have plexiglass fronts on those cells. And when I looked into those cells, I saw men completely naked in cells that had nothing else in them. Three, four, five men in cells built for two. And because of a design flaw, the air blew in, was stopped by the plexiglass so the cells were cold, bone-chilling cold, but there were no blankets. And the cell block was old. The water broke down at least once a week. There was no water in there. And people taking medications were thirsty so they would be drinking out of the toilets. And when you listen quietly, you could hear the jail sounds that you normally hear, door slamming and people talking. But when you listen very closely, you could hear the asylum sounds, a person screaming at some unseen tormenter. And then I heard a thud, thud, thud. Then faster, thud, thud, thud. Then louder, thud, thud, thud. It was one of the inmates running forward, smashing his forehead in the front of the plexiglass, splitting it open. I ain't crazy he screamed. Then quit acting like you are, the unconcerned officer said. Now, I got to know the officers here because I spent 10 months there. And they called this the forgotten floor. And I thought they were talking about the persons who were locked up there, but they were also talking about themselves. Now, one of these officers had ever received any treatment to work with anyone who had a mental illness. And when I got to know the officers better, they all told me they were troublesome employees. Their bosses wanted to get rid of them. So they just signed them to work with the crazies because it was the worst job in the jail and they were hoping they'd get disgusted, quit, and leave. My tour guide there was a wonderful doctor, Joseph Portier, a wonderful guy with an impossible mission. A lot of people think, if you get somebody put in jail, they'll get help, he told me. But we don't help people here. We're at jail. I went with Dr. Portier on his morning rounds. There were 92 inmates on the ninth floor that day. His rounds took us 19 and a half minutes. If you do the math, you'll see we spent 12.7 seconds talking to each inmate. Now, I want to tell you about several of the people I met. The first, Alice-Anne Collier, chronic case of schizophrenia. The kind of person who used to be locked up in a state hospital. Now she's back in the community. She was homeless, living in South Beach. She lived out of a cardboard box contraption behind a restaurant. When I checked her record, I discovered she'd been arrested 10 times in the last four years, but never gotten any help. This time she was in jail because she was walking down the street and her eyes locked with the eyes of an elderly woman who was waiting for a bus. And Alice-Anne Collier screamed, stop stealing my thoughts. And she raced over and she shoved the older woman. Not hard enough to knock her down, but she shoved her. And then she went running off and well-meaning witnesses said, get her arrested. Get her off the street. She'll get help if she gets arrested. Well, help is not what Alice-Anne Collier got. Florida takes crimes against the elderly very seriously because so many people retire there. It's automatic felony if you commit any kind of crime against someone over the age of 65. Automatic felony. And because Alice-Anne Collier had shoved two other people at bus stops, she was charged under that state's three strikes law, which meant she faced a mandatory, non-negotiable five years in prison. But when she was taken before the judge, he looked down and he said, wait a minute. I can't put this woman on trial. She's not competent. She doesn't know what's going on. And he had to be competent in our society to be put on trial. He said, I'm going to send you to the state hospital in Chattahoochee to be made competent, competent, not treated. And there's a difference. Treatment means you get help. That's not what happened with Alice-Anne Collier. Every day she was taken into a room. She was shown three chairs. One chair was written the word judge. The next one prosecutor, third one defense attorney. And when Alice-Anne Collier could tell her keepers who sat in each chair, she was deemed competent enough to be put on trial. And she was brought back before the judge. Well, of course she wasn't competent. And he looked down and he went, wait a minute. I sent you to Chattahoochee. You go back and you get made competent. And off she went. When I discovered Alice-Anne Collier, I found out that she had been traveling between that jail and that hospital 1,151 days, more than three years. And she'd never been put on trial. Now I'm a reporter. I took out my little pen and pad. I go running to the prosecutor's office. Look what I found. Look what I found. And they told me with absolutely no embarrassment that they knew exactly what they were doing with Alice-Anne Collier. In fact, they planned to keep her for five years because that's as long as they could keep her without putting her on trial. Why? Because she was dangerous. Medications didn't seem to help her be stable. And there was no safe place. There was no safe place in the entire state of Florida. No hospital beds, no commitment places where they could put her. So they planned to keep her on that bus just to keep her off the street. Now she was typical. The first since I met with mental illness in this jail were not Hannibal Lecter serial killers. They were people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and depression. Think about April Hernandez, same age as my son. When I found her in the jail, she was serving time for stealing a car. And the officer said, you should check into that. She was framed. Who had framed April Hernandez? Her own parents. They had conspired with relatives to get her arrested and charged and convicted of car theft. Why? Because she was psychotic. She was homeless, living on the streets of South Beach, where she had been gang raped twice and attacked three times by teenagers who thought it was hilarious to beat up homeless people. And there was nothing her parents or anyone could do because she was not a danger to herself or others. Now she first began getting in trouble when she was 14. And everybody thought, oh, it's because she's using drugs and she uses alcohol. It was not until she was correctly diagnosed as having co-occurring problems did they understand that she had both an addiction problem and a mental illness. And we know that 40% of persons with serious mental illnesses have co-occurring problems and 70% of persons in jails and prisons with mental illness have co-occurring problems. Now in her case, no one thought that she could have a mental illness at the age of 14. It's interesting, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health, half of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by age 14 and scientists are discovering the changes in the body leading to mental illness may start much earlier. The last person I want to talk to you about is Freddie Gilbert, and I don't care if you live in beautiful San Antonio with your spurs down here, or if you live in Washington, D.C., you know of Freddie Gilbert. A Miami study found that in a population of 2 million at any given time, there were 1,700 people who were on the street sleeping in cars, sleeping in parks. They're homeless. 1,700, okay? That same study found, though, that most of those 1,700 were able to move through our social system into some kind of transitional housing and help, except, except for 507 people. They are always homeless. 507 people are always homeless, chronic homeless. And of those 507 people, everyone of them has a serious mental illness, and everyone in Miami has been arrested more than once. And Gilbert was one of these 507 when I met him. He was so sick he could not speak. He stood naked in his cell. He grunted like an animal, and the correctional officers controlled him by giving him sandwiches as if he were a dog performing for treats. And when I checked his record, I discovered that Gilbert had been in and out of that jail in the last year alone more than a dozen times, but no one had gotten him any kind of treatment programs because there were none available and he was only charged with misdemeanors. So he was one of these frequent fliers, two or three days in jail, two or three weeks on the street, back and forth, how in the world have we gotten in this situation? Well, if you're a student in history, you know we've really come full circle back in colonial days. If you had a mental illness, you depended on your family. You were in jail, or they took you to the county line and said start walking and don't come back. In 1843, Dorothea Dix was going to Boston to teach a Bible class in the jail, and she goes through part of the jail and there's no heat, and the people are freezing, and she goes to the jailer and she says, you can't treat him that way. And the jailer goes, oh no, no, you don't understand, ma'am. Those people are lunatics. They don't feel the cold. They're not like you and me. Well, Dix spent the next two decades teaching that people had mental illnesses needed treatment, not punishment, and she personally persuaded 33 states to open up hospitals where people could get care. Well, we all know what happened next within the next 50 years. Man, these hospitals turned into giant warehouses where people were locked up and abused. One newspaper reporter in my native state of Oklahoma, no booze please, in the 1960s, in the 1960s in Oklahoma said that state institutions there were worse, and I just said worse than Nazi concentration camps. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy heard the cries for reform, and he called on Congress to set aside $3 billion and begin to move people in the community. The discovery of a new drug called thorazine seemed to make it possible to move people out of these locked facilities back into the community. And Kennedy's plan called for the reopening of 2,000 community-based mental health centers. Well, what happened? Kennedy was assassinated, Vietnam War escalated. Congress got snarled in Watergate. Thorazine turned out not to be as wonderful as people thought it would be. Communities turned out not to be as welcoming as they should have been. And insurance companies said, no, no, no, we're not paying for community-based health care services. And people with mental illnesses, never much of a priority got shoved to a back burner. That $3 billion didn't get spent as planned. Those 2,000 centers didn't open a schedule. And next came deinstitutionalization, the closing of these hospitals. A fabulous idea. Get people back in the community. Now, I was surprised when I studied the history of deinstitutionalization. I saw one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I knew how horrible these places were. But if you check your history books, you'll see it wasn't compassion and it wasn't concern that were the driving factors in deinstitutionalization. It was money. State legislators were being pushed into a corner. They were getting sued by civil rights groups. Newspapers were doing exposes. People were saying, you can't treat people like this. You got to get them out of those places or you got to fix them. And state legislators went, oh my God, we're going to have to raise taxes. We'll have to pay millions of dollars to fix these. What are we going to do? And basically what happened then as Uncle Sam came in and said, oh no, don't worry. We'll take care of people with serious mental illnesses. But not if you keep them in those hospitals. You get them out and we'll give them Medicare and we'll give them housing. We'll take care of them. And as soon as the states heard that, they went yippy. They began shoving people out the door as quickly as possible. And there was no community safety net. And people went onto the streets, substandard nursing homes, into jails and prisons. Another event happened in 1980 that created this perfect storm for us. We elected Ronald Reagan and we sent him to Washington and we said, we want Uncle Sam off our back, get him out of our pocket. So Reagan began cutting the very programs we just said we were going to use to help people with mental illness. Housing alone, 32 billion, cut to 7 billion under the Reagan Revolution. Well, it's been four decades since the institutionalization, three decades since the Reagan Revolution. So why are jails and prisons still filling up with people whose main crime is they got sick? The biggest reason is we still do not have decent community mental health care across this country. Let's go back to Miami. Not everybody in Miami is sitting in the jail if you have a serious mental illness. There are 4,500 people in Miami who were moved out of state hospitals back in the community. That's fabulous. We live in 650 boarding homes, but let's look at those 650 boarding homes. Of those 650 boarding homes, only 250 can pass the minimum standard to operate as a boarding home. What that means is the state has given the other ones waivers. If you tried to put anybody else, except someone with a serious mental illness in that home, it would be against the law. One of the ones I visited had a hole in the roof that rain was coming through. Medications were scattered across the kitchen table. The caretaker only spoke Spanish. None of the tenants spoke Spanish. Meals were rice and beans. There was no treatment. There was nothing but smoking cigarettes and watching TV. And I would argue, in this case, we haven't improved these people's life. We're just hiding them better in our communities. Well, it's easy to pick on the people of Florida, so let's keep a little digging there. When I did my research, the average operator of a boarding home got $29.90 per day. For every person who lived in there, $29.90 a day to cover everything. Food, clothing, medication, everything. When I travel, and you can tell I live in Washington, D.C. area, I put my dog in the Dulles Executive Pet Center. And I pay $34 a day to have my dog taken on a walk, given its medication and to house it there. In other words, I pay more than $4 a day to take care of my dog than what we're paying people in Miami to take care of persons with severe mental disorders. Well, it's easy for me to pick on Florida, so let's look a little closer at my hometown. Now, I know, I already mentioned the Spurs once. You got the Riverwalk. I know you folks think you live in heaven. All right? But I'm about to prove you wrong because heaven is actually Fairfax County, Virginia. And I'm going to prove it to you. The average household income in this country is $45,000 a year. That's how much the average house makes. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the suburb I live in, the average income per house is $150,000, three times the average. And that's because both parents usually work for the federal government, so thanks for your tax dollars, okay? You would think that at $150,000 average household income, wow, they got great mental health services. Do you know when I did my research, there was a two-week wait to get into a treatment program. There was a six-month wait to get a case manager, and there was a year, 18 year, 18 year wait to get in housing in Fairfax County if you had a serious mental illness. Are there any reason I call my book crazy? I'm not talking about people like my son. I'm talking about our system. There are other reasons why our jails and prisons are our new asylums. I believe in voluntary commitment laws and only look at dangerousness, our contributor. But there's another reason, and that's a lack of hospital beds. Initially, managed healthcare was supposed to make healthcare affordable to all of us. HMOs were going to save us. But by 1997, two-thirds of HMOs were controlled by for-profit companies. As a result, we're closing down psychiatric beds because psychiatric beds lose money. And meanwhile, we're shutting down state hospitals because we want people to live in our communities. And the University of Virginia found in my state that 2,400 persons who meet the dangerous criteria last year were not admitted because we didn't have any beds. And average should be 50 crisis beds per 100,000. In Texas, you have 12 beds per 100,000. And getting help for children is especially difficult because of a lack of child psychiatrists. I was just told there's a three-month wait. You have nine psychiatrists for every 100,000 children. The ratio should be less than half of that. And a recent federal study found that every year in this country, every year in this country, 10,000 families give up their children because they cannot afford to get them mental health care. How are we responding to this crisis? Well, what we've done is we've turned mental health from a health issue into a criminal justice one. Now, fortunately, Bear County in Texas is doing an outstanding job. You've set up crisis intervention team training for your police department. You have a crisis drop-off center. You have mental health courts. And you're not alone. El Paso Dallas have mental health courts. You have reentry programs. And those are wonderful. They are the best thing you can get going. They're at the bottom. They're fantastic. CIT, drop-off center, jail diversion, mental health courts. But there's a thing we should have learned with the institutionalization. We seem to have forgotten them. Diverting a person from jail is fabulous. If you've got somewhere to send them to, if you don't have any meaningful mental health services in your community, no programs like Clarity or ChildSafe, no affordable medication, no crisis care beds where people can become stable, no longer-term beds where people can extremely ill can receive treatment, no community treatment teams, no evidence-based practices that include programs like peer-to-peer, supportive housing, clubhouses, no hope for recovery. Then CIT, mental health, jail diversion, all these pre-albums are going to be undercut. We've got to remember the criminal justice system didn't create this problem. The criminal justice system can't solve it. You've got to stop. We've got to stop thinking of mental health as a criminal justice and realize what it is. It's a community-based program that requires cooperation. You can't talk about reforming mental health in this country unless you want to talk about housing. How can you get better if you're living under a bridge eating out of garbage cans? You can't talk about mental health recovery in this country unless you want to talk about jobs. You can't talk about mental health recovery in this country unless you want to talk about veterans. You can't talk about unless you want to talk about transportation. You can't talk about unless you want to talk about drug and alcohol treatment programs and children and the best way to help someone getting arrested if they have a mental illness, is to give them services before they get arrested. Let's use a little common sense. If I had a broken leg, I wouldn't call up your police department and say, hey, can you come over and fix my leg? If I need a heart surgery, I wouldn't call up your sheriff's department and say, hey, can you come over and do a little open heart surgery? And if I had hemorrhoids, I wouldn't call up your judge and say, hey judge, I want you to come over here and take a little look. So why are we counting on the police and the sheriff and judges to solve what should be a community challenge? You know, people say to me, oh, what's the answer? Are the people that's schizophrenia? I feel so sorry for them. They really can't be helped. And I always respond with one word, bull, and I cut that short for you, okay? People get better. People can recover. Since the publication of my book, I've been to 47 states. I've toured over 100 different treatment programs. This isn't a question of us not knowing what to do. It's a question of us not doing it. I could tell you about Rick, a homeless man who lived for 20 years in the woods. He got an ACT team involved in his life. They got him into housing in Cincinnati. Now he lives in an apartment with his own cat. He's stable. I can tell you about Gloria, a woman I met in Juneau, Alaska, who now is running a theater project up there with people with mental illness. I could talk to you about the LAMP project. If you saw the solo, as you've seen it, an 86% recovery rate of people with chronic mental illness, getting them off the street. But today I'm gonna tell you about my son. Like all parents, I thought, okay, Mike's different, he's not one of them. He'll be okay. We had this bump in the road. And you know what? My son got two years probation, took his medication, fortunate that it helped him, and he did great. Got a job, became employee of the month. As soon as his probation ended, boom, he quit taking his medication. I pleaded with him. I yelled at him. I threw him out of the house. He didn't want to take it. I could see he was slipping. So we have a, we're very modern in Fairfax. We have a mobile crisis response team. So I called him up. I said, my son's off his medication, needs help, can you, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is he dangerous? No, he's not dangerous yet, but let me tell you, you can't judge him on what he did before. That's not fair. You call us if he becomes dangerous. Well, the night my son became violent, the night I didn't have to lie. I called that same dispatcher. I said, please, please come. My son is violent. He says, well, wait, wait a minute. Is he dangerous or is he violent? And I said, he's violent. Oh, we don't come if they're violent. You need to call the police. So I called the police and they came and they shot my son twice with a taser and they hogtied him and took him away. Now I'm telling you that story for a reason. If I couldn't get my son help with all my fancy, dancey Washington Post connections and Mike Wallace living in an affluent county with an education, having written a book about the mental health system, what chance, what chance do you think someone who is poor, uneducated, knows nothing about this system has in your community to get into that kind of help? Well, Mike recovered, he found a job, he was doing well, he went off his meds, he had another breakdown. The most recent trauma came, it was Thanksgiving, he came to our house, we were about to sit down, I realized something was wrong. I knew he had been off his meds and all of a sudden he got up and he bolted out of house and he jumped in his car and he just took off. And I called and called and finally answered the phone and I said, where are you going? He said, I'm going to heaven. I said, please tell me where you're going, you hung up. Well, he called me three hours later. I said, where are you? He said, I didn't make heaven, I'm in North Carolina. I said, okay, no offense to North Carolinians. I said, what's wrong? He says, I'm out of gas. I said, okay, I'll come get you. No, don't come and don't call the police. I don't want to get tazored. Well, what do you want me to do? Give me some gas. I said, well, just go to the station, I'll give you. No, I can't get out of the car. If I step out of the car, I will die. Now, that sounds ridiculous. How do you know you're listening to me? How do you know you're here? How do I know this podium here? It's because your mind is telling you. And I'm telling you, if your mind is telling you, if you step out of the car, you're gonna die, you're gonna believe it. You are absolutely gonna believe it. So I did what no father should do. I arranged for him to eat gas and he drove psychotic all the way up 95, went off the road twice, luckily did not hit anyone. We talked till our cell phone batteries came out. And then he got to the house, I said, what do you want to do? He says, I don't want to take meds. I said, okay, okay, okay, what are we gonna do? He said, I want to go in a safe house. I just need to relax. I need a safe place where nobody's bothering me. These voices go away. So I took him to, we have a safe house there and checked him in. And the middle of the night he got up, he took off all his clothes because he thought that made him invisible and he went walking down the street. But listen to what happened to him this time. This time a crisis intervention team trained police officer picked him up. And he knew instantly something was wrong and my son said to him, can I ride to the hospital without handcuffs? And the officer used discretion and he said yes and that's why he showed him that respect and that is why the last time my son had gotten tasered is because he'd gotten handcuffed and panicked. He took him to the emergency room. And when that doctor said, well being naked and walking around is not a sign of dangerousness, the officer said, honest to God, he said this, oh really? And I don't recommend this. I'm gonna look up where you live doc and I'm dropping him off in your front yard. All of a sudden my son was admitted and he got a case manager. And she said to him, well why don't you wanna take your medication? He said, I gained 50 pounds, I feel like a slug, I hate how I feel on it. And she said, let me talk, let's talk to a psychiatrist. You know my son's seven psychiatrists, only two have bothered to learn anything about him but his name and his diagnosis and that's because they're paid for 15 minute segments. That's all their job is to figure out what pill to stick in someone's mouth but treating the mind also requires treating the heart. She got him a psychiatrist, you actually listen to him and got him on a medication that helped him. He started losing weight, he was doing well. And then she said to him, you know I don't think, no offense Mr. Early, but I don't think him and your son live with you is good for his mental health. And I said amen. And she got him into an apartment with two people with schizophrenia. And then she said to him, what do you wanna do? And he goes, well I can't do anything, I'm sick. And she goes, oh come on. What do you wanna do with your life? And he said, well I'd like to help other people. She gave him hope. She told him about a thing called peer to peer. And she got him into peer to peer training where just like in Alcoholics Anonymous you have a mentor, he goes into jails and prisons and he helps people. And she got him hired, he got a job and he moved out of that apartment and he onto his own. And he started paying taxes and today my son is a peer to peer specialist. Let me tell you what he did a month ago. There was a young man, obese, refused to come out of his parents' basement. Schizophrenia had not been out of that basement for six years. My son got him out of that basement, took him to a movie. Now, that may not sound like much to you, but if that was your son, that's a miracle. So don't tell me people with mental illness can't get better. I have seen it with my own son. What was the difference? Is it really that difficult? What do people with mental illness want? A safe place to live, a purpose in life and people to love them. It really is that simple, which brings us to you. What can you do? First of all, fight stigma. Explain mental illnesses are exactly that. They can happen to anyone, happen to my son. It can happen to one of yours. Someone they love. There should be no shame in having a mental illness, only shame in not helping someone who does. What can you do? Educate your politicians. Everybody knows we're broke. There's no new money. But look right here in Bear County. You saved $3 million by having CIT crisis training. Instead of putting people in jail, Miami-Dade, there are 1,200 inmates in that jail, cost the city $1,000 a day. 1,200 inmates with mental illness. They're not getting any better. For half that, you could give them housing first and an ACT team. By redirecting funds from Band-Aid services like overnight homeless shelters and emergency rooms to lifesaving transitional services like housing and Housing One Assertive Community, we can actually invest now in programs that will help us in the future and save us money. We need to educate our politicians about that. Remember, Freddie Gilbert's not going away. He's costing you $60,000 a year. Do you want to waste that money or do you want to actually help him get better with good programs? What can you do? If you don't remember anything else from my speech, just remember this one thing. You matter. You can make a difference. I've seen it. Fort Wayne, Indiana, a doctor there, son, committed suicide by cop. That doctor went out, learned about Fountainhassen, New York, brought it back to Fort Wayne, started a clubhouse. He changed that entire community. Margaret Meade said it best when she said, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever really has. You've been very kind listening to me. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. My dad was a minister there. And any of you who know anything about Oklahoma or ministers know that that means I got dragged to church every Wednesday, every Saturday, every Sunday. And I got real good sitting there like this, not hearing a word my dad said, all right? But there was always one story that snapped me to attention. And that's because it's about a woman having sex, all right? They're in the Bible. You just gotta know where to look, all right? A woman has caught an adultery. She's hauled in the center of the city. Everybody gathers around. They're gonna stone her. They're gonna kill her. Notice there's always women in the Bible who have adultery, by the way. They're gonna kill her because of this horrible thing that she has done. And we read that the teacher says, let ye who's never sin throw that first stone. And we read that one by one, the people put down the rocks, they put down the stone, they walk away because everybody's sinned, everybody's guilty. None of us are pure. Well, sadly, we live in a world today where people are eager to throw those stones. They don't wanna put them down. They wanna throw them at people who have drug and alcohol problems. People with mental illness who are different. They don't want them around. They want them locked up. They want them off the streets. They wanna get rid of them. Just lock them up, stone them. Get them out of here. I believe you have been called to a higher calling. I believe you have been called to become what I call stone catchers. People who stand behind those, between those angry mobs and people who can't defend themselves and you defend them until they're strong enough to join you and defend others. And it's the stone catchers in our society who give me hope. My son has a mental illness to me, this cruel illness where it's his face and I will forever be grateful to people such as you who can look beyond the madness in his eyes and see someone who is a person who has parents and brothers and sisters who love him. So thank you for being here today. Thank you for listening to me. Thank you for choosing to make a difference with your life without getting paid much for it. And remember that there are four million children in the United States today who have a severe mental illness such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They need you to be their advocates. They need you to be a stone catcher. Thank you very much. Now, I think we delivered on that promise not only to educate you, but to bring you stories of peoples whose lives have been impacted by mental illness. And Pete and Lisa were such great examples of that. And Pete is going to be available until your next session to sign this amazing book. You know, it's so hard to have someone who's written a book of this magnitude and have them compress all that great information into a luncheon speech. I'm telling you, having read this, there are so many facets that you need to know and they're available right over there at registration and then Pete will be able to sign those for you right here in this room. So with that said, your next sessions will start at 1.45 and you've got the choice of six amazing presenters and then you'll have another breakout session an hour and a half later with six more options. And again, all in the effort to educate and form. But before you leave, I know you've got them out there. Raise up those cell phones, those blackberries, those iPhones, raise them up real quick. I know you got them. I know you're Jones in form right now, right? Okay, here's what I want you to do. It's not enough to be educated and to be that person that catches those stones, we've got a way for you to do that. Clarity Child Guidance Center launched an anti-stigma campaign. We've got amazing advocates supporting it. But we need you, you in the field, you out there in the trenches making a difference to also sign the pledge. So I want you to go to 1in5minds.org. You can use the numbers or you can spell it out. We're gonna get you there one way or another. So 1in5minds.org and all those cell phones, blackberries and you're gonna go to the Participate page and you're going to say that you're going to make the pledge to help advocate for children's mental illness and eliminate the stigma. So you can follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter as well. We're actually doing a tweet up right now from this event but get involved and advocate for those kiddos. So we'll see you at 1.45. Go visit those exhibitors, get your book signed. Books are available right over here and we'll see you in a little bit. Please ask me to remind you that every one of you that buy...