When my son, Ben, finally began treatment for mental illness,  I kept careful notes on all the symptoms I saw between appointments.  At best, Ben would see his therapist and/or psychiatrist for 1 hour a week and was often able to hold it together for that one hour in a much better way than he'd been able to do all week with us.  So I made an effort to fax these notes to the provider the day before the appointment. Some read it. Most did not, citing "no time" as the reason. Really? What kind of session can you have if you don't have all the facts? Families know. They know a lot.

My brain is still absorbing all I have learned, ideas I've been introduced to, and the amazing people I met at last week's NAMI National Convention. (read Hold onto the Hope: NAMI National Convention) I'll do my best to share some of this wisdom with you here, as I file these amazing possibilities  next to the reality of my son Ben's current relapse. The nurse on the psych unit where Ben is still a patient calls to inform me that Ben has been in "an incident." My pulse jumps up by about 20 beats - what Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor would say is my amygdala sensing that "I am not safe" - and I ask for details.

Tops in the NY Times this week are reactions to last week's story about Deshawn James Chappell, a man with schizophrenia accused of killing one of his caregivers in Massachusetts.  There are those (like our family this week, with Ben back in the hospital after six years of success) who experience first-hand how a cutback in services (to save a penny in the budget) can result in a much-more-costly hospital stay, and the necessity to  repeat recovery steps that had worked before. This doesn't even address the human cost. Still, how much worse when the outcome is a horrifying tragedy like the one in reported in the Times; one that many agree could, and should, have been prevented by proper care. Among the points made in the reactions: From a letter signed by John Olham, President of the American Psychiatric Association : "only a very small percentage of people who live with schizophrenia ever become violent, and then it is usually when the treatment system fails them and they discontinue their medications. " Marilyn and Edwin Andrews of Massachusetts wrote: "When politicians try to balance serious budget problems on the most vulnerable among us, we all pay the consequences. The mentally ill may not have the influence of the wealthy or the cachet of popular programs, but they most certainly need comprehensive, decent care. " Solutions? Better care, managed well, can prevent so much relapse.