and gentlemen my name is pat lawrence and welcome to my show this show is dedicated to get rid of the stigma associated with people with a mental illness and  one in four families have a person with a mental illness and that's a huge population so please watch please listen and you'll find out what's going on in massachusetts as far as this population and my wonderful guest today is kamal area who is the deputy director of the massachusetts association for mental health hello so we call the second deputy but a lot of what we do and two principal things we do is you do advocacy work in the state house for mental health issues which is where you and i first met years ago and the second piece of our work is we help to connect people with services we're not clinicians but of people who need help and they're trying to find their way through the human service maze they call us or they send a request to our website and we do the best we hand to try to watching and decide i've found the person who lead me to the promise land remember there are only two of us so it's there's waiting lists for almost everything we do but the advocacy pieces is important to us there's a lot of bills  the legislature states where we met and we do a lot of work in the statement area and unlike yourself our philosophy has always been the more people know about the longest the more they will understand it and the less they'll be frightened by it and the stigma will we can and hopefully eventually go away and in my own opinion is thanks to people like yourself and others there's been a significant weakening a lessening  invariably he or she was a person you would not want to have anything to do with that was the portrayal in the last you know several years needin going back long and we've had movies like a beautiful mind which are based the principal characters of the movie is by paula perhaps the most popular t v show a few years ago it's still on but maybe last rocco homeland the star of that show the principal understand that and the other thing that's really improved over these past years is to treatment information about the brain information about how these illnesses result that they're not something that self inflicted people don't and as the system has changed and as treatment has become more available more productive people have now beginning to that mental illness is not a life sentence there is recovery periphery for every individual recovery can be a different about the whole paradigm of the mental health delivery system a shifting to a recovery based a terrific person working at the department of mental health and various levels for her for a long time and she told my board of directors that in her lifetime she and fully expects that a commissioner  well that would be great and i think a lot of the police should work in the hospitals so they know what mental illness really looks like recently i'm not pointing their will that wicked or anything like that but recently in california and orange county there was a gentleman who had schizophrenia who was beaten to death by two police officers because he wouldn't sit down and and he kept screaming for his daddy and they have a film of it and it's on the internet and it'll break your heart and they're having they were having riots in california because of this this boy and and i guards and i i think i hope that i really helped because massachusetts had the highest suicide rate of of people in the institution like  they would kill themselves because they couldn't stand the control or the control of the voices and they had the control of the of the guards so i would go into the the penitentiary and talk to the guards while they were being taught on other mental health situations so i hope i helped them as far as compassion to sean that these people off the street that might have committed some sort that these guys are innocent in the mind it's biologically based at the only reason i get the parity bill when i roll it to pass because it's all part of the whole system to release bridgewater's state hospital that how to treat a person who's going into crisis how to go how to treat a person in ways other than the use of restraints you have down and then everyone who knows  set up five children version programs across the state where police officers would be trained as to how to approach a person who might be going to psychotic crisis and there were very effective framing him as a terrific from my perspective it's not a knock on the place they have a very difficult job and most when once almost all of the ones that i've talked to have said we want this information they've been programs where clinicians ride in the police car and i was at a hearing in lynn with a police chief said you know what i had clinicians riding in my patrol cars at night and it was terrific so my experience lois's who are very well equipped to understand the rights and wrongs of what they are or what they're doing so very often the confusion of the public becomes a person can  is no the the person that i think about when i think about mental illness and the person that started me out on this whole twenty five year trip is my daughter and when she developed schizophrenia naturally went to the biggest organization that i could find and the organization said to me give up all the hopes and dreams you ever had for your daughter because she's going to end up in denver's and  there are a lot of other people like my daughter my daughter when she was in the hospital develop this line of friends and these friends all stick together and they're all doing so well and they're working and  they also have physical problems when you have a mental health problem it starts with physical problems because sometimes medication that you take start off other things and then they have to take care of both so it's very difficult and i've always said the mentally ill are the most courageous people that i have ever met and and they are they have so much to deal with and cooling the stigma that has your education well you know mental illness is there for a person finds himself in the presence of a person with all of us or group of people with mental illnesses so we will do educational forums targeted at specific groups we will promote the system and going back well beyond that twenty five years it was a system where you have no hope you have no future we're going to put you in a salary we're going to figure out a budget and in the system  and the younger are what the department bureaucratically somewhat refers to as a transition gauge you say from seventeen to twenty eight twenty nine they are very clear on i'm not understood my father's mental health with lived experience people with mental illnesses they run a respite programs respite program as somebody who suddenly needs a little soothing time needs to get away from the hub bub it used to be they go into a facility that was just a with doctors and psychologists and say sure there are two peter run the respite peer run respite systems in new hampshire and they have better outcomes than those that are run by clinicians and we've just opened one up  should understand that the brain is the most important organ in the body also the heart of pretty important too but when you talk about emotions and things like that no love and it's the brain your heart is nothing but a pump but your brain is every thing and people should just understand that they have to help they have to help people like people make fun of them and that's not right so that's that's my thing love these people like i do because they are wonderful people and if you if you get them on the right medication if you get the meant to be respite places you're going to have a huge population of normal people on your hands which is go very and we've only got about two minutes left right so if you have anything that you really want to say to the people out there please you once asked me when i was on a show that you were doing research on things like what treatments work but when you need to do the kind of concerted effort to find a cure for a middle of the cure for schizophrenia may be very different than a cure for bipolar but not just and we'll have one have dr matt dumont and the incredible disappearance of the state hospital so we'll have him on the air and and there's a lot to learn about that so thanks for listening and will see that