and gentlemen welcome to mental health matters my name is pat lawrence and today we're going to talk about kids i have with me my wonderful friend and she is the executive director of the parent professional advocacy lee and her name is lisa lambert and hello lisa how are you i'm great pat thanks for having me a you know it's my this i like to hear a little bit about your background and the reason you're so passionate because you've been doing this for at least twenty years at least yeah absolutely well like many people it was a person has been a personal experience and a personal odyssey i was a young person moved to california got married and had a son who by the age of three years old had a bedtime ritual that if you interrupted the bedtime ritual he would have to restart from the beginning it was an empty spray bottle we had to spray the entire room for monsters and if you missed something you had to start all over again and it took twenty minutes every single night so i went to my pediatrician and he said it's only a phase and so i waited and things became more intense and my wonderful son became very fearful of going to school and it ended up with him being fairly depressed at the age of seven we had a birthday party when he was seven years old at chucky cheese and he lay on the floor and he cried and he said i want to die about two months after that he had a psychiatric hospitalization and i looked around and i said who who has a seven year old with these kinds of issues and so i was looking for people like me who had that experience and i ended up finding a few but it sort of pushed me to start groups of my own for families who had similar experiences and our odyssey continued again and again and through his  school years in his teenage years and i learned a lot about the system and you want to change it for your own child first and then you realize that the people coming behind you need the system to change too and that led me to do more advocacy and the work i did to day i also have another son who's a younger son and he has what i call sibling spillover part because if you have a child who lives with a brother or sister that's and predictable that ends up getting a lot of attention and resources in the family because their their needs are so intensive it affects your childhood it affects how you grow up and there's not really a clinical word for it but if you go into a group of families and you say  i remember from my own self and my son was six or seven the psychiatrist turned around and looked at me and said i think it's time to start meds i said what's a meds i had no idea this lingo this jargon it's all an uphill learning curve for us and if you find a veteran parent who's sort of been through it before you can reach out and give you some skills and teacher the ropes it means a lot yeah it's like my youngest daughter now she's pregnant with the first child  four and a half months pregnant i told her in well you need this you know just in case of like and she says what's call it you know what's mitt's it's kind of similar but anyways talk to me about the terms mental health diagnosis serious mental health issues whatever that the state or other people used but that doesn't always resonate with families families will usually call us up and say i have four kids three of them my parent well in this other child everything i do doesn't seem to work so they define it in a way that's really describing their life and so we you know open the door in terms of our support groups our advocacy  training and everything to any family who says i think my child has those kinds of issues too and it could be trauma we hear a lot about trauma it could be a definable kind of mental health issue or it could just be something that the parent defiance this is this child is different from my other children i just know it and parents are experts about their children and their families and when they say it's different you know we take them at their word i think the data is one in five children have a diagnosable mental health issue in america i know that there was an article about a year and a half ago in the journal of american medicine that said five of the six chronic illnesses now that pediatricians are seeing ar behavioral health and that was not true ten years ago are we better at diagnosing are we better at asking for help i don't know it could be something else but we do know that there's sort of an uptick in recognition at least of what's going on and people need help to figure out what to do people definitely you know first struck my family and it was like a freight train coming through and didn't have a clue as to what to do nothing exactly had never had any problems or any any experience with mental illness and i imagine you know with young kids especially you don't expect it and you don't expect with older kids exactly we had an experience that i called the morphing diagnosis another one of those things that most parents will nod their head and understand so when my son was six years old or seven years old at that chuck e cheese party they said oh he has t what they said because people don't want to label children and over the years it changed from anxiety and dysthymia to depression to bipolar and finally at age sixteen they said he has schizo affective disorder and i say to people he didn't get cured of all those other things we were seeing the beginnings of the same thing he's the same person struggling with the same kinds of you know behavior is an impacts on his life but people don't really know what to call these into it to find out what kind of which is good because if you know what you're dealing with you have a better chance of dealing with it such as it is  i understand your organization fully funded and for that i'm very thankful that as far as the department of mental health for the older people  they really lost it's true true so as far as community resources and things like that it's just not there and which is a shame because what it does is when you talk about families and the child being in the family and you talk about respite care for the family which is essential it is truly put out there that everyone who's been touched by mental health issues or mental illness needs to become an advocate because things don't change on their own i look at some of the other movements like breast cancer awareness hiv aids and it was only through really strong advocacy and creating a movement that first people began to talk about it and they didn't shy away from the discussion and that it became something that we all agreed was important to see funded  and so on now is it just because it's children don't they consider all of the mentally ill will and innocent why do they take away the of weird things on the screen then it says get so and then there's somebody walking behind a window and then it's fades out and you see this handsome young man and he says hello my name is and i have schizophrenia and i've had it for so many years yes and then you see glenn close come aside him and say you know go into my a car accident or any family member or they're there they might be undergoing treatment for cancer your neighbors and your church show up with a casserole and everybody feeds you but if your child is diagnosed with a serious mental health issue or or another family member you don't get the casserole lines coming to your house at all get nothing you get a lot of stigma you do and in my family my my daughter to her grandparents her cousins her friends her father everybody and that's sad because you really need the support of the family and i have been supporting her for now for twenty five years and i'll support for the next however long i'm here and and it's a pleasure it's an absolute pleasure because she is an absolute godsend she she's compliant she says on her meds she's wonderful she's sweet gentle and that's a way a lot of people can be so angry and your kids that eventually turn into lawyers and doctors things like that what if they're i don't think they do either i think that it's some people underestimate the impact of stigma when one of the things we do as an organization is we survey our families and we've been doing surveys since two thousand and one i think we just completed our  survey which this time was on electronic health records and privacy and what parents think about that so over the course of the years we tend to ask questions repeatedly to see sort of trends and one of the things we ask about often is stigma and when we began this work in two thousand and one asking families really struck really structured questions about seventy percent of families said that they felt their child's mental health issues were blamed on their parenting and it's the same today so unfortunately that we don't seem to have made a an impact on the schools because it starts in the schools usually when the kid is very young my daughter got you know and they tend to make fun of other kids if you teach them when they're little you might teach kids about cancer you might teach them about bipolar and diabetes and stuff like that  but mental health i'm not sure it's taught that much in schools if it is it is not there is a program called mental health first aid which make it some funding in congress this year but probably not until after the midterm elections and  there are there's a youth version of that and the mental health first aid is a program teaching people to recognise early symptoms teaching them in a way that sort of takes the the fear and the blame out of identification and viewing the earliest signs of mental health issues and there's a one of the targets or one of the hopes is to introduce this curriculum in many schools and teach school staff and change the environment a little bit but like any other teaching program of course you can have so many volunteers but there does need to be some funding in order to be able to have the reach increased and the impact increased so we're keeping an eye on that nationally and hope that that will happen both the police i mean kids get who are very proactive and if they know that their child might be explosive or difficult to manage and that they might call upon the police as somebody to help them in an emergency before that happens they do go and talk to somebody in the police department and if you have that relationship it can be terrific for you can really forestall things we know other people who have used the police as an emergency kind of backup or plan safety plan and the children have been arrested so it varies from town to town in massachusetts a lot and there really needs to be better education of the police officers that what they're seeing a lot of the time is not activity that's intended to harm somebody it's the result of somebody spots or feelings being being out of control we do know simply so officers that say they're very confused as well if they walk into a house and a parent says my child's in serach well they have no idea what that means so if they only were you know understood that that meant that you know their child might have a mood disorder or their child might have certain kinds of really difficult behaviors then they would have more information going into that household than they did by just hearing about what families that are involved with d c s in this in the state it's because of neglect not overt abuse in most most cases we do sometimes talk to families where maybe the parent is because of their own trauma for  instance isn't able to parent as well and if the child is removed sometimes those please do come to our group and we try our call as we try as best we can to help them navigate that system as you know pat to effective y navigate a system you have to be able to put aside some of your own feelings and take action if you're really caught up in having to you know justify yourself or express your anger or not going to be as effective and advocating in that  system so so we try to talk to families about that it's much more effective for a veteran parent to talk to another parent than it is for somebody who they don't feel could be in their shoes you know there's just that link that happens but we certainly do we certainly talk to families whose children are involved with d c s and also families whose children are involved with the way asked or in the juvenile justice system as well they always see the system from a very holistic point of view i have this child and then they receive services or are connected with these these you know different agencies the agencies tend to have the silos the parents don't tend to what about the dui is how is it goes into the  involved they tend to be families more at the beginning though we are talking to families whose children have been to lock up or detention and may be coming back out children returned to their home no matter what because children want a sense of family whether they're teenagers  young adults they want to sense a family as we all do and they're going to return so if that family doesn't have sort of a better skills and a better understanding they can be helpful most families want to be helpful we don't judge families we talk to them in a very about the court process about the system some families have actually gone to court because they can't find services and they say i just don't know what else to do so i'm going to go to the judge and ask the judge to please help and we don't think that family should have to go to court to get services and if we can help them before that that's a much better thing absolutely and foster care when one a child has a major problem and then cannot go home and is put into foster care you know these are total strangers to this child and sometimes it's cooler but then sometimes it gets better it does yeah foster families are not trained about mental health issues sometimes a shop child will show up on their doorstep and without medication they need a warrant with medication they have no idea what it what is except for the color of the pill and they're not informed we have foster families who come to our groups who call us we have foster families who become fantastic advocates for children it depends on where passion lies this isn't everyone's passion but many of them do want to know more so they can do better some of them this isn't where their comfort and they say that the pretty honest if you ask them all your training sessions are free yes they are for families for families and we have some upcoming trainings for professionals who may charge a fee and that sort of how to engage with families how to there certain kinds of we do have a training for police officers we've done for probation and we need to cover the cost of materials and transportation and all so the fees are usually pretty reasonable and how do you fund your organization we have a variety of different funding streams which i'm very glad to say because we are an advocacy organization and we need to be able to do that as well as the support organization so we have some state contracts we have some federal money we have private foundations who fund we fundraise we have fundraising streams and trying to think of there are other fund raising mechanisms but we do have a if i could have brought you a pie chart you'd see that it's quite varied the different the different funding mechanisms that we have and you  convention we did we had a great conference on may thirty we have one every year and usually about five hundred families professionals to do show up it's one of it's one of our goals our original name of our organization the parent professional advocacy league it was an aspiration to have parents of professionals partner would be the same ramp and now it's a regular thing so we have to look out and see that this year our speaker was lies along who wrote the blog i am adam lanza's mother after newtown and told her own story and she was a fantastic speaker and people really connect in the same room with a speaker who tells their personal story and many times they look around at each other and say i thought it was just me say guilt but it wasn't her fault you know you can't blame anything on parents exactly like when they used to call the schizo for an agenda mother exactly you know that is totally child is different absolutely and do you know of any good news stories good news stories about those stories about good news stories about kids one of the things that we're excited about is that we have a youth group in our wister office and some of the young people come from locked hospital units they come and others come from the community we have youth from different cultural backgrounds health needs they connect so much with each other that even after they've moved out of that area or no longer top come to their group they stay connected and they want to be a voice for young people and i personally think that that's probably at the next there was a great book a couple of years ago by a young woman named caitlin belle barnett called dosed the medication generation grows up and she said why are we having this conversation about whether psych medications are good or bad without talking  to the young people who grew up on them and i think that a lot of our youth feel that way too that they really say were we having these conversations about the system without talking to us who grew up in them we have a lot to say and it's important in the same thing goes for the older people exactly with the employer or things like it's the mentally ill people themselves getting together and saying you know why can't we have this legislation why can't we have this paid for why can't we have more research why can't we have cures you know and that's what i say to why can't we have more  daughter's been on medication for twenty two years and i have my daughter back and for that absolves thankful i really am i can't tell you how much i love her and so then she got into they did a an article in the boston sunday globe the last edition on people who inspire and laurie and i were in there was twenty two well and what an accolade that's terrific yeah and the next day when we went to get coffee there were people that said to laurie because i was in the car there were people who said we saw you in the paper and i tell you she was  p l dot net and there's an email you can contact us there we also have very active facebook page our main office number is six one seven five four two seven eight six zero i want to  that social media is a boon for families with families who go on our facebook page at one in the morning when everybody's finally asleep and it's the few minutes that they have to sit down and connect or express to you so we're also on instagram and we're also and i welcome families connecting us to us in any way that makes sense for them absolutely so they have it ladies and gentleman and we have lisa lambert who was of director and who has a great job in the past twenty some years and if you have kids that need help you know who to call now you just give a call the least and she'll be able to direct you in the right direction and thank you for being my guests and thank you for having me my pleasure and we'll see you again in very short time thank you for watching i know