hello everyone and welcome to my show mental health matters certainly does you know this show is designed to  educate to in education what we're trying to do is get rid of stigma for these poor people who are actually very innocent and they have a brain disorder and they need to be cured and they don't need to be out on the streets and they don't need to be dying so my great guests today don't look like  time of an epidemic of leukemia which was the result of our good government's testing of nuclear weapons in new mexico and so forth thoughtful doctors they seem to be most attentive to their patients curious about them the surgeons are cutting the internists were giving whatever medicines they were they didn't really know their patients as people and the psychiatrists wanted to know who it was they were talking to as i'm beginning to know you  i would say well how are things at home and opened a door he's pointed out often as an explanation for why this also acted up and how or why a pain has become chronic and intolerable and so i found myself hanging around the department of psychiatry and i wound up being sent to a place jones came back and was giving a lecture to departments a country which i attended and to have to tell you something very exciting i went to his place in belgium where they have been taking care of patients for a very long time hundreds of years by having them remain in the homes of the villages and they would be incorporated into the lives i would eat with the families who took them would work in their farms what turned out to be the first research that have been done here i asked patients and their families how they found each other and discovered that the tradition of caring for patients in that village was beginning to change because the town was becoming less rural and morris suburb of antwerp had just finished building a highway and perhaps for years things got increasingly shorter not true they took usually therapeutic reason but because the states were cutting their budgets and mental health began the process of the mating beds and cosying down one hospital the after another including with the state hospital that i eventually spent twelve years working at westborough state hospital council when they were selling danvers state hospital and and my job with the department of mental health was to get extra money from the people who purchased  land in the hospital for offsite housing and i used to go by danvers and the people that used to be in it would be sitting on the steps you know maybe twenty people would be sitting on the steps waiting to be let back into their home which was not a home anymore because all of floor to collapsed on to each other their water break and and the vandalism from the kids and our lad so they eventually did sell out and with eighteen months of education i get four point seven million dollars for office i housing which i think it was pretty good but if you put it in a bucket with what he needed it was actually according to them it was a small amount but me i've never gotten you know more than a few thousand in fundraising but four point seven million i mean that was just amazing so i don't know what happened to my one point seven million but it wasn't my so but the hospital thomas kerr right there were a lot of state hospitals that were of the same a beautiful architecture and inside the the wood was absolutely gorgeous i mean i went through danvers state with a flashlight and waiting through the water and and it was interesting it was very interesting and i came across the doors that had the bars on them and then the big fire places where people probably use a corner gate because i wasn't heated from the hospital to the condos down below and if she then got her masters degree in education for her yes and nobody's child would milo thomas with my daughter in the lock units i used to go up every single day i used to if they wanted to sit on my lap because a lot of them were teenagers they want to call me mom if they wanted to if when people talk of fear of the mentally ill i wasn't afraid they were they were people and they had a problem and you know i made it my life's purpose to get rid of stigma to have more cures more research more even movie stars getting on television and having some sort of fundraiser for the mentally ill to know be nice to get four point seven million dollars and just put it towards research but i don't know what is that's that's what i did and that's what i still do i'm going to hear that you thought it was so generous because there's a lot of psychiatry just do it there was a pediatric unit that was loosely associated with the hospital but on the same grounds run thank they had to replace the children's bad they had to put them somewhere so they put them on the jury acted unit which had the only available beds so these young children who was quite disturbed were surrounded by these older people who suddenly blossomed in their presence cared for them they were getting the kind of maternal care that they had often been denied in the past they needed it and the kids thrived jury had she patients thrived and the state of profiting from that experience that spontaneous experiment as soon as they repaired the damage for schizophrenia bipolar or if you are true that yeah but i also want prevention yeah and folks say that word has come to mean early case finding and i have problems with that because i think too early implanting of a diagnosis like schizophrenia which they use very loosely or even bipolar disorder on  give them anti psychotics which don't cure them it actually causes very serious side effects as you know hope yes and behavioral problems that sedating and  their thinking is not as sharp and focused as it would otherwise be and they're going to carry this around often for the rest of their life and they're often told by my good colleagues that  they're going to have to take these meds for the rest of their life which i know for a fact is not necessarily because i would when i was in chelsea community clinic it's a clinic that for sixteen years i have the if there were any currents of symptoms that their family saw or they experienced or eyesore and i was going to follow them off benison i would try to keep them off their anti psychotic and over half the time i was successful in doing that and i continue to see the pensions who are very devoted to me by that time and i to them and i thought that was a learning current about compassion before they're taught control and massachusetts had the highest rate of suicide that's correct yes highest rate of suicide of the fifty states so they implemented a training program on suicide prevention and and you know when i go in in there  and i hear the teachers talking about these men who cut themselves and are destructive towards themselves and they said the teachers would say oh well it's an attention getter don't pay any attention to him because that's what he wants and i'm thinking to myself don't think you know the symptoms of borderline personality disorder  know that that's a cutting disease and that the people that have borderline cut themselves to get rid of the pain mat to cause the pain but to get rid of the pain and something you know what kind of a training representation to prisoners who are often complaining of brutality which i unfortunately continues mental brutality and physical brutality and despite all the legal restrictions against those things and the video cameras the staff the guards have ways of working around them and they would gather around the patient who was being destructive in some way or problematic so that the video camera could not perceive what was happening and the rates of suicide are horrific as you point out the highest in the country and it is a pathogenic system and forty percent is a conservative estimate forty percent of the prisoners in massachusetts are seriously mentally ill right and would otherwise have been in state hospitals or in clinics  e taking the funding that would help these innocent people and using it for something else i feel that it's  there was a kind of public perception of the state hospital system that was distorted by the cuckoo's nest egg of story and  even books sometimes serious ones about the insane asylums in fact in the late fifty's when kennedy came in there was a very strong push for community mental health clinics supported by the federal government with by the way federal salaries for the employees going from the states it was also an enormous amount of money being made available to the state hospitals so that were once more or less warehouses became much more therapeutic and rehabilitation or into places with many activities for the your next birthday which was six months later and they said just find some role in the state no whole system but you can work it well at that point i was asked invited to be the just proposed in the state and at that point i was looking around with some desperation for some alternative i actually spent ten days at the indian health service in new mexico and i was thinking of a famous name but not a psychiatrist he was a psychologist and he said brought you come out here and take a look so i did and i had another few months before i could retire and you get hopes there are people there there are people to take care of there are people to look after there are staff members who are caring sensitive intelligence thoughtful people who fifty years is there anything that really stands out in your mind that you really want to tell the audience that  don't but talk to patients anymore when i went into psychiatrist as they said it was because they took interest in their patients went over their condition and the only doctors who did more or less  that's not the case anymore the culmination of managed care of private eyes situations a fee for service arrangements doctors are spending mere minutes and sometimes less than that at the worst i have found is the jury actually psychiatrists who are connecting homes will often see the patient if they do it all for seconds and write up a note based on what they've learned from the record in talking to tell and they are eager to talk yet and don't have the opportunity with a professional to talk to each other sometimes right but you're right i've found that out and twenty two years of  something of fifty years of psychiatry and so police think about it think about how you think think about how you feel about  mentally ill person and and get rid of the stigma get rid of the fear they're nice people with medication they're even nicer so i'll see you in a couple weeks and