hello my name is pat lawrence and welcome to the show today my guest is massachusetts state representative paul coverdell from alabama and as you know if you followed by shall we talk a lot about mental illness and the stigma of mental illness and we tried to bring all of you people up their education and what's going on in massachusetts so that's why paul is here he's going to let us know what's going on in the state house and so stick around for a while and when we just get into it and number one what got you into politics well used to work the mass prison system and there was you know a lot of good to be done at the legislative level that could have helped move prison reform along and so that's what kind of intrigued me about going into politics and you know i decided to leave the mass prison system and went back to school and i now freshman representative he went to harvard i did  masters at harvard yet the kennedy school of government prior to that i did a master's in criminology at the university pennsylvania they did a bachelor's in psychology and neuroscience at the university of southern california now that intrigues me because the presence of the system intrigues me because i've gone in there and i have been able to talk to the cards and tell them you know about the symptoms of mental illness and a lot of times scary to them and then they are in jail and they're under a lot of control by the guards and have you ever been in there have you ever seen what happened because i do know that message has had the highest rate of suicide a mentally ill people you know the jail or prison are not the right place for people with living with successfully or unsuccessfully a mental illness and sometimes jails are prisons are often called the largest mental health provider within you know the jurisdiction reside within it is a lot of different programs a lot of the services that are offered but you're still in  environment that is you know quite scary to folks with mental illness and correctional officers they have to go through a lot of training and you know the degree to which the correctional officers get trained in mental illness you know awareness and  first class training with the most compassion that you billable to dealing with these inmates because he's at a lot of the if they're in jail or they're in prison they're probably not in the best setting the prisons when when there has been there have been key people who taught the recruit and and the guides would say ok now they cut themselves and so somebody was teaching would say well that's a sign of it they wanted tension and but there is a mental illness where cutting is very involved and people cut themselves that's called borderline personality disorder and they say it's mainly a female disease but i figure a good percentage of the males are in prison because of the anger that they have and what they're trying to do when they cut themselves is so let out the pain that's inside or the anger and rage i would like to see more of that teaching in the prisons as far as borderline personality disorder so there it's getting bigger and before when i first started with this was over twenty years ago there was hardly anybody that i could go to in the state house and there was what is called parity that was what i went after that's what i succeeded in doing was writing the parody bill to give the people insurance and they didn't have any they had they had i think six visits to a psychiatrist so six weeks in the hospital and that's all they had and well parity means equality and so fred very wonderful fred very he helped me and byron rushing help me and took four years but we got parity and now they're able to get you know more and more care and that's what i want is more care and are there any other bills going on in the state house to help that out well there is still a lot of more work to be done with mental health parity some insurance companies more talking about stigma though and with the bill was talking about was that if somebody has a mental illness and they are a danger to someone else and they don't appreciate the nature of their mental illness then they could be committed to an involuntary patient treatment program and you know we do testimony went on for about four hours and i sat through the entire four hour testimony listen to all the you know the pros and cons of each side people opposing it people were in favor of it and i didn't know where i stood at the beginning of it but at the part about two thirds the way through i realized that if we i was looking at the bill i had in front of me and i swapped the word mental illness for the word hiv positive and then i said would we force anybody to participate in a treatment if they were hiv positive as opposed to having mental illness and that's when it kind of occurred to me that this bill was kind unintentionally with all the good had good intentions but as i was unintentionally picking on a population because of the nature of the mental illness and a couple of questions i asked the people who are this experts i said well we're talking about a state like mental illness or a trait like mental illness you know we're talking about something that is you know something that's permanent within their personality or just something you know fleeting like postpartum depression which doesn't last so they didn't really have very good answers so those you know when i asked them the questions one and then i also i said who are the mentally ill i mean just is there anything that's in the d s m five or is it something that you have to be vindicated for just how do you define mental illness and so this is some bills that are up on beacon hill that are looking at mental illness and what we should do with it but some of them are that is a mental illness and you would like it if somebody forced you into doing something that you felt that you didn't want to do right now and that's what this bill is talking about because we already have involuntary inpatient commitment and we also have something called i'm sure you know will rogers orders and you know we had something in place now where you do have outpatient  involuntary commitments if in fact the rogers orders are so yeah you're taking away somebody's freedom but then the proponents of this their argument is well that's probably the lesser of two evils if that person is going to end up incarcerated at a later date because of the behavior that's resulting from their mental illness so on the one hand you're trying to keep you know somebody from losing all of their civil rights being incarcerated but on the other hand you're basically saying you're guilty even though you haven't done anything wrong yet therefore we're going to in voluntarily commit you so which is there's really no good option there with those two options but i would say the best option is to work with the individual you know work with the person see what they want to do it's sometimes easier said than done but you want to have the least restrictive  know that's the difference because people would be to sir cancer or things like that they know what they have but people with mental illness it's an illness of the brain it's a physical illness and they're very and they don't even realize it so field so much when i was in high school just as a couple of electives i took a couple psychology classes and those are the classes i probably enjoyed the most through high school and then after high school i started working with five to twelve year old children  going to local community college and i took some child development classes in psych classes and then from there i transferred to the university of southern california where i continued to do work with kids out in los angeles but i wanted to be a clinical psychologist  so i applied to fourteen ph d programs and i got rejected every one of them that happens you know the yeah you might get four hundred applications they'll take about five people for that year but it was a very very competitive programs and so then after that i found myself in saudi arabia for a little while then i came home did a master's in criminology and then i was working in jail and then prison and you know shortly thereafter i started writing for the huffington post and one of the things i wrote about quite frequently was mental illness stigma and you know i also write about crime i heard about international affairs and i write about mental illness but when i write about mental illness that's when the e mails just pour in from all over the country where people say thank you for writing about living normal with bipolar disorder or thank you for writing about why do we stigmatize this and this being mental illness so that's kind of my background with the you know i don't suffer from any mental illness i'm not living with a mental illness you know their problems are taken away their housing is taken away and they find themselves caught and it's getting colder this is just you know one year but this has been going on since time began  and it's not fair it's really not fair you know when my daughter got sick it was like somebody hitting me in the in the head constantly constantly everything that happened that was bizarre just kept hitting me and finally when the that was when the insurance was and she had two major insurance and so therefore you can't take care of her home all then have to put her in a shelter and that was really hitting me in the head years my gentle wonderful girl and so then i approached the doctor the psychiatrist and he said no the law money can't stay here they have to put her in a shelter and  then the social worker exact same saying you know it's like you know you're being surrounded by all these people that are telling you the worst thing they can possibly tell you and here i could see in my young eighteen year old daughter in this shelter with people that she didn't know and i don't know what kind of people were in there and etc etc etc so i went to the politician there was nothing else i could do  i went to a wonderful politician in wakefield very young man like you and i just cried my heart out you know and he wasn't used to people coming into his office crying and  he was so good to me and he said well let's see what we can do and so i went home and then he called me later and he said i put a political hole in the hospital and i said what is a political and he says wallets i'll do something for you if you do something for me and he said they're going to keep her in the hospital but they're just going to put it up stairs w hospital people are and that was one day anniversaries calls ng and there were six replacement units across the state and it scared me that you know we're here or there but there were people from danvers which was the they were very mentally ill but it didn't make a difference because my kid didn't care you know she was couldn't careless who was beside  and so they they kept her in the hospital for weeks and they actually that was run by the department of health and they actually put her on the medication that she still on and that was eighteen years of up and it actually brought her back to me within three weeks here she had been sick for about three years and within three weeks she was my sweet wonderful lori again and you know that it was a miracle and sometimes that happens but it takes a good six weeks to find out of the medication going to work and the people didn't have that time then with insurance and sometimes with but it's getting more or better mental health parity because she was even surprised when she learned somebody came to her and said actually we're not covered for this that is so that is something that we're like you said legislation is taken up and we're working on it i feel pretty optimistic that it will go through probably sooner than later it will become law where more treatment is available for longer periods of time that's more focused on the client rather than whims of an insurance company so people really don't realize that when you're mentally ill and you don't really realize that you do act a little of them is making sure that police are properly trained in identifying when somebody is engaged in tensional criminal behavior and some type of i don't want to call it criminal behavior because the intense not there but you know abnormal behavior that is not you know intentional it's just because the byproduct of some type of mental illness or just confusion or just not really recognizing social norms so that's something i'm trying to work with with my own on my police department trying to get them funds from d m me so they can pay over time so that their police officers can get training in you know recognizing when something they're dealing with somebody who is scared and has a mental illness as opposed to somebody who's being just combative because they disrespect the police and the law so that's one thing there's all different types of homelessness so there's no one way to address homelessness that's one of the two biggest issues i deal with as a state rep with constituent services that i put in the most amount of time on you know people call me up they say going to be out of a place to stay tonight sometimes they have substance abuse problems alcohol problems i consider substance abuse and addiction a mental illness or a mental health issue anyway and the other just by way of passing his license to carry people calling me up all the time their firearms permit is backed up and the state level so but the fine you know one of the things the house just did which is to put he was last week or newsweek before we added another twenty million dollars for emergency housing and heating that's extremely important because when i when people call me up  say i need a place to stay dealing with one family right now that is a mother father and son with a seven year old son who has autism and really severe case of it as well but where does this family go with he got evicted from their house because of health code violations their landlord pays for some of the rent you know if not some of the rescues me some of their hotel stays but other times they don't but they're running out of money so then after work when that happens if it's a family unit as opposed to an individual that's when i have to call d h cd department community and housing development staff got a family do you guys have any hotels open that you can pay for what are you  d for the hotels making sure that just emergency housing so we take a family and put in a hotel overnight and sometimes they will be there for a few days sometimes couple weeks until we can get them something more long term stable housing so in the after all that long ramble there's different reasons for people going homeless and one person just you know dealing with right now working with he just came out of prison after three and a half years he's got a real serious substance abuse issue and his home housing issues are completely different than the family that i'm working with and the reasons for them being homeless are completely different and what their options are available to them are very different but the if there is one common denominator for all of this it's funding and i always like to say we can afford anything we can't afford everything and what we decide to spend our money on is a reflection of our priorities and so if we have the funding you know  if homelessness is a priority of ours as is mental illness mental health mental health treatment then we'll have the money available for substance abuse and addiction as is is a mental health i believe i a lot of people who are mentally ill go to drugs just to get rid of their symptoms and i can see where they would be homeless because you know there's no money they have their way but that could be like eight hundred dollars a month and you really can't live on eight hundred dollars a month and my my daughter gets a hundred dollars a month and my daughter lives with me and i you know support my daughter but a lot of families can't do there are a lot of families who are so traumatized that they can't take in their kids  lot of kids that don't take their medication you know the family is definitely not going to get into that so it's hard all round until they get more  research one money for research and wore one medication that say because a lot of people take them it's because of the side effect and i don't know if you people out there realize that the side effects are your body and you're just shaking all over and that's a lifelong i actually interviewed a girl for an article i wrote for the huffington post and it was i think i titled the article living perfectly normal living with a mental illness  she found that it was without without the without her medical treatment you know her prescription for lithium she was just do a completely different person you know she's also mother of two or three i forgot how many has two older ones they know that she's living with bipolar disorder and so she's educating them and but they're working very successfully together as a family unit that's ok well unfortunately have to close and is there anything you want to say before we wrap it up i certainly think the most important thing is that we continue to do public education public awareness decreasing the mental illness stigma and increasing awareness and letting people know that you know there are people that they can go to there is no shame it's no different than having diabetes you know cancer you know we don't you know we don't look to people when they're you know when you have cancer as somebody who lot of people and hopefully they'll be more funding for these innocent vulnerable people so we're going to say goodbye for now will be back in a couple weeks and