just how problems is mental illness in our society maybe an even bigger question is what do we do about that well we're going to find out with christine lindquist of the of namur you want to win them is right here in just a moment christine welcome thank you thank you so much for ha me now me the national alliance on mental illness i am the executive director of the greater so seattle affiliate which is a founding affiliate of the national alliance on mental illness so what is the national alliance what is it do well  primary concerns are education advocacy support in referral for individuals with serious mental illness and their family members and we're going to be sure to get the the web site up on the screen several times because there's a lot of resources that are on it here's a statistic right on the front page of that scared me one in four americans wanted for americans will face mental illness this year that's right that's right also well mental illness is a lot more prevalent than we think it is and we're talking serious mental illness schizophrenia schizoaffective disorder bipolar disorder major depression these are these are disorders that really impact our lives well yeah but i mean as a as a parent i mean if i've got a teenager i've got depression and i'm not and i'm not being flippant or funny here and it happens it's a tough part of life right well is that what we're talking about we're talking about something a lot more serious than that when an individual develops a serious mental illness like major depression their their moods become extremely difficult for them to manage and they lose the ability to care for themselves they lose the ability to interact appropriately their thoughts are disrupted so it's not just like i'm feeling a little bad today now we here in seattle and that's were you know the show is is in seattle i think we are are more attuned to this because of what recently happened with insta wiki and we're going to show some clips a little bit later from an interview that we did here on public exposure with the instead wants to wiki talking about it so this is something that you kind of deal with on a daily basis that we should do ok let's go where the mission the mission of naomi's greater seattle is to address the needs of individuals with mental illness and their families throughout because the public education information and referral and self help support groups try to ask this question if someone has a mental illness are they going to be coming to you for help the we hope that they will unfortunately a lot of people don't know that we that we exist where we're a small nonprofit but hopefully they will come to us and hopefully their family members will come to us to we know that there was number one best predictor of positive outcomes for individuals with serious mental illness is family support and one of the things that we focus on is education and support for family members who are primary caregivers to individuals with mental illness so then in reality the families are more likely to come to you than the person him herself well both we do provide services for individuals affected by mental illness either personally or as a family member or loved one we were talking a little bit before the show in the past p t s d was called shell shock  and it was treated almost like comic relief and movies it's not that way anymore right i think that i think that as a culture we're becoming a lot more in tune to how how our language affects the individuals who are living with the disorder we're making fun of so i think that there's a greater understanding that like using the term psycho is just it's not appropriate and it's not a it's not a good punch line and i think we have a few years ago it was called going postal i think exactly what they're on the website we are asking more about a specific mental illness and there's anxiety disorders that i know people with a anxiety disorders or at least what i think it is right are they dangerous no they are not dangerous not any more dangerous than someone with diabetes or high blood pressure so what can i do is a family member to help someone with an anxiety disorder well first of all i think you would become really educated about what anxiety disorder looks like and how it it's affecting your loved one and how you can support them and i can do that through me you certainly can you name me dot org by the way just want to make sure that we talk about that right and then you would also perhaps wish to see some support for yourself and for your family and that's the other thing that we focus on well and also autism autism spectrum disorders i don't think autism was a mental illness isn't well there's a there's some debate about that whether autism is a mental illness or more of a learning disorder and there is great information about autism at nemi dot org and that's our our national that website we as a greater center we don't focus on autism and that's mostly because we feel that there are other resources we don't want to duplicate services locally and there are other service local resources for autism and so we focus more on major mental illnesses like schizophrenia schizoaffective disorder bipolar disorder and major  depression and all and there are so many more of these that we could talk about individually and i'm not going to do that instead i want to go to your national convention that you recently held we got something from the national convention because i went through it and something i found really interesting it was ninety nine faces a photo documentary basically a photo essay to fight stigma and there were thirty three with schizophrenia from youth thirty three with bipolar and thirty three people who love them absolutely what it is i will i would say that there would probably be more like one hundred twenty who love them i guess my question is is especially in light of what happened here in seattle that was a circumstance where there was a dangerous person but apparently it wasn't known that he was dangerous is that i mean he's not the only one i see well there are certainly a lot of individuals who are living with serious mental illness who are not getting treatment that they need for various reasons maybe they are choosing not to seek treatment maybe they have sought treatment and it hasn't been successful for them or maybe they have sought treatment and they have developed very very unpleasant and sometimes even fatal side effects to the treatment so mental illness is unfortunately it's a brain disorder for which there is no cure and treatment for it is so difficult well on the part of your treatment services you talk about medications and you talk about some specific medications that a doctor may prescribe when when someone a family member comes to you and says i'm very very concerned about my nephew and and my nephew is willing to come in and talk to you refer them to a psychiatrist if you think that's appropriate or what do you do well usually we talk to them about what their options are as far as seeking treatment depending on a lot of it depends on what the resources are and how they are covered like what their insurance is and we don't actually refer to specific providers but we might be able to refer them like to the array of publicly funded mental health  is focused on changing behaviors so looking at how we how we change how we interact with others and how that affects how they interact with us all right and  mean and just this is something that actually is kind of scary to me because i can't see anything good about someone who's mentally ill being in jail well that's that's an excellent observation jail is the worst place to receive mental health care and yet that's where most people receive it jail diversion basically is finding solutions for individuals who are arrested for like arrested in the middle of a psychiatric crisis and instead of taking them to jail taking them to a therapeutic center in which they can obtain the treatment that they need and actually ins in seattle we're very lucky to have it's a crisis diversion center it's called the crisis solutions cent be run by the downtown emergency service center and it's opening just this next month just this next month it is the reason that i say it that way is that for this the parents of the ins to wiki they didn't have that resource available to him and i guess even with that how do you know how can you tell if your son or daughter who's an adult by that time it's going to be dangerous well you can't always tell and that's why this situation is so incredibly difficult is sometimes there are specific signs like an individual might actually state that they that they want to hurt other  individuals but sometimes they don't i think that it's very very important for us to understand that people with a mental illness are not any more dangerous than anyone else in the community so that's a that's definitely stereotype  don't in any way want to perpetuate but but if if for example you had a loved one and they had a serious mental illness and they were not willing to seek treatment and they were saying that they wanted to hurt themselves or hurt someone else you would definitely want to take action and i'm not saying that walter still recchi didn't act appropriately because i think that the the size of this problem is so huge and unless you're a parent who has tried to navigate the system for your child it's almost impossible to understand how difficult it is you know i don't know any parent that hasn't at one point or another had queen or questioned their child sanity or maybe their own sanity but at some point time it goes beyond that's right beyond that to them and the difficulty for a parent is you may lose them forever that's right what a what a horrible thing to be afraid of so what do do you well i think it's important to know that you don't always have control of the situation that always or ever well hopefully sometimes you do but but you know i think that what i see every day are parents and other family members who are incredibly concerned about their loved one and dedicated to the wellbeing of their loved one and they will do anything to try to help that individual work toward recovery and it's not always possible or it's not always possible right now so then i mean not always possible is something that a parent's not going to accept right it's very very difficult for parents sometimes they have to step back sometimes they have to try to enlist the help of other family members sometimes they have to take some time and obtain some other support for themselves so that maybe they can hear some other solutions that work for other families and i want to get into your education services but i want to give you a real split a specific stereotype sixteen year old daughter she's doing well in school but she's got an eighteen year old boyfriend the eighteen year old boyfriend dumps are and she's depressed and you think ok well she's this is a part of life she's got to get through this six months later she's still incredibly depressed her grades are going down you're afraid that she's getting into into substances if you're arguing a lot i think that every single person watching has probably heard that theory stereotype and may know that very thing but a six month period of time with severe depression at least from a parent standpoint that is pretty serious isn't oh yes and i think that most of us experience that ourselves we've experienced those incredible highs and lows of of adolescence and early adulthood and that's why it's so difficult to diagnose mental illness because it comes on the symptoms emerge when people are are already in the throes of all these other changes in their lives so so when how would you know if a loved one might be might be in danger  i think it would go from from depression to other things like self mutilation you know maybe suicide attempts maybe fixations on other things that were outside what they what they might normally talk about and i'm not saying that this is easy to to sort of self diagnose and it shouldn't be self diagnosed but there is a change in behavior when an individual develops a mental illness from  even even in our culture the level of of moods switch that we associate with with the teenage years and early adulthood now are we talking about a mental illness that's a chemical imbalance or  a sort or are we talking about something that is induced by bad things that happen in life well mental illnesses are arch are brought on by changes in our brain we know that the biological disorders that affect mood and functioning and ability to to use our brains or is there a magic tested the human genome project project or can we go and get tested  prone to there is research related to the genetics of mental illness specifically specifically right now there's some research at the university of washington around schizophrenia and genetics but there aren't there is not a test and there's not a cure it's it's an incredibly difficult series of disorders let me give you another stereotype and then more and more in today's world we probably know this thirty two year old emancipat son was doing well at his job was up early mobile and then all of a sudden the economy gets his job the economy gets his company and he's out he's out of work he looks for work a year and a half later he still doesn't have it he's feeling worse and worse about himself he says mom dad i want to move back home and he said absolutely we would love to have you back home at same point time has two children he and his wife have split and he is neglecting his children right now that's not a mental illness as well it might be that he's developing severe depression and would definitely want to seek some some treatment for that well depression is reason then that people go from feeling very bad to suicide attempts but oftentimes in family situations is it not true that people in that circumstance will lash out at the loved ones the ones who are closest to them there were absolutely trends were homicides and suicides happened together right well that that can take place yes and that's why it's so difficult for families as well that's why families need support and education that's  specific to them well from society standpoint we need more than support absolutely we need early intervention there we know we need a  reliable care that's not dependent on our health on our health coverage we need to know that we're going to have safe housing and that we'll get the medication that we that works best for us and not just maybe a generic that is  cheapest to provide and also individuals with mental illness what and we all need to be able to balance our health like have the opportunity just sleep regular hours and exercising and eat well yeah but if you're a family member and you're trying to do everything you can to protect this person from him or herself you know getting sleep if if someone who is is not getting sleep inside the family typically every nobody else can sleep either you know really like it and it's like a newborn baby or a thirty two year old who has returned home as an incredibly depressed and is watching watching movies until four o'clock in the morning i mean i don't think that anything that i said in that stereotype is out of the realm of reality i don't think it is either you know let's go to some of the seattle's education programs in our own voice what does that mean in our own voice is an amazing program that we offer through many greater seattle in which individuals who are have a serious and persistent mental illness go into community groups like schools and churches and all kinds of different settings in pairs and they present their story of what it's like to live with mental illness and the idea behind in our own voice is that it breaks down the stereotypes of what it is to be mentally ill what it is to manage your illness what it is to try to build and maintain relationships what the dark days look like and what people's hopes for the future are should we be scared of those with mental illness absolutely not why not because they instill work it was someone we should have been a family a family family the family is a wonderful twelve week program and it's offered to family members of individuals with serious mental illness taught by family members and it's offered for free it's two and a half hours for twelve weeks and it covers things like how do you how do you care for your loved one and care for yourself how do you develop good ways to communicate with someone who's having a difficult time communicating how do you set boundaries what are your local resources how do you advocate ok well so let's go to some of the answers then what are some of the answers of how you set boundaries how do you care for the loved one and yourself at the same time well you have to decide what your limitations are and i think a lot of it is realizing that you can't you can't always make all the changes that you want to make especially if you have in most cases an individual who has been diagnosed with a serious mental illness is of legal age and they get to make choices for themselves like whether or not they want to seek treatment and so some of it is coming to the place where you realize i i don't i don't get to determine what this person's life looks like and  their life might not look the way that i had envisioned for them it might be something better but it but it might not it might look very different if you're a parent of an adult child you're still looking at your adult child as if he or she were a real child and that you still could make decisions and so when you can't make decisions for them that makes it even more difficult it's incredibly difficult especially if they live in your own roof absolutely i can't i can't overstate how difficult it is for parents of children with mental illness and then again we look at society and societies we know what society's role in all of this or do they have absolutely i think that as a caring society we have to look at what we do for the individuals among us who are the most vulnerable and people who are living with mental illness particularly those who don't have advocates who are homeless who are without a  family they absolutely need to be taken care of peer to peer peer to peer is a program for individuals living with mental illness taught by individuals living with mental illness it's a ten week program offered free of charge and  and it helps people develop wellness plans and support circles and ways to keep them selves healthy and we've talked about a lot of the education programs and seem like they're just  going right to right to the problem in the past we here on public exposure as i said earlier interview wants to work either to a case father he talked about some things that what i want to do is i want to go to a couple of clips right now and those clips are going to talk to talk about some of the things that he went through right so let's go to those clips right now one of the first things i learned that there is a support network for parents of those children se accessed through the greenwood community center there are some had never heard of before that i think he my in these meetings these meetings they came by because i talk to my friends about my issues and they say i know about this they're not something i found on the side of a boss or saw a public service on t v they're not being pushed in front of this christine it sounded to me like waltz to where he was saying that she  did find resources out there to help it but it was too late right that's definitely a problem so how does how does society deal with that how do we let him know that there isn't there that there is a resource out there that there's a resource in green where there's a resource and they are beach etc etc well hopefully we spread the word of our local resources such as such as the greater seattle and all of the other great non profits around that that do provide support and education and treatment for individuals it's really difficult though i think that you know particularly for nonprofits like ours that operate with you know tight tiny budgets and very small staff outreach is it's incredibly hard and having to deal with huge massive problems that we don't know how to deal with our society in general absolutely i guess you've been in this field now for quite some time as a result of being in this field have you seen changes or that is there a light at the end of the tunnel for those of us who don't understand mental illness or maybe i should ask does anybody understand until i think there are people who do understand mental illness and i think there is a light at the end of the tunnel and i think that in king county particularly we are so lucky we have resources that a lot of other communities don't have we have an amazing leadership at the county level and we're going to put those up on the screen too by the way some of the resource and some phone contact numbers and web sites as well  have we have the mid plan which is the one tenth of one percent sales tax that goes to mental illness and drug dependency programming we have drug court we have veterans corps mental health court these are all things that a lot of other  have something that did bother me though and we're going to put these up on the screen to it's the mental health chemical abuse and dependency services from king county actually we're going to put three straight graphics up full of text and you have to hunt like crazy to find a phone number that's debts definitely a problem you know if i'm needing this service if i as a parent i'm willing to call up or if there's anybody willing to call up and say i need some help i need a phone number great big huge big massive it's rarely in the face and i can't miss it yeah i beg definitely a problem yes so is there anybody trying to hide anything or is there is there a stigma inside is there or the stigma still exist with mental illness like oh they absolutely still exist i think we just have to look at our use of language to understand how how difficult it is for people living with mental illness how much they have to  hide but yes i don't think that king county is trying to hide their resources i think that they have excellent resources and i would encourage anyone who is interested in finding out more about the king county resources to go to their website but i agree that when you need the number you just need the number wants to work evaded the number he didn't know if he didn't know he needed the number how does society prevent the next working from killing six people well i think that if any if any parent does have those questions about their about their son or daughter or if anybody has a question about somebody in their lives or if if and and get wrap yourself around what is out there because there are resources there is support there are there is education and there's also treatment you know really tough job don't you i do have a very hard job h there and do it every day well i think that it's very important yeah it is very important all right i wish we had more time but we will we don't mental illness is something that is important to certainly probably your family and to all of us and society because of the impact that mental illness can have on all of us we strongly encourage you to go to the website debbie debbie debbie dot nnamdi dot org an am i dead org and we've got other resources up on the screen we're seeing right here next