March 18, 2021
Xavier Becerra
Secretary
US Department of Health and Human Services
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Ave. SW
Washington, D.C. 20201
RE: Appointment of HHS Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use
Dear Secretary General Becerra,
Congratulations on being selected Secretary of Health and Human Services. We are excited about the future of healthcare in America under your leadership. The national dialogue on mental illness is of critical importance and has been largely stagnant since the Kennedy Administration. We are advocates for people living with the symptoms of severe and disabling brain diseases, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and we are writing to you about the appointment of the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use.
Please support recommendations by the Treatment Advocacy Center to appoint an Assistant Secretary who will ensure that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) prioritizes the needs of people with severe mental illness consistent with Congress’ intent in creating the position as part of the 21st Century Cures Act. That legislation passed with wide bipartisan support, was signed into law by President Obama in December of 2016, and has multiple sections that recognize the importance of prioritizing treatment of severe mental illness (SMI), not the least of which was the creation of the Assistant Secretary position.
Thank you for your vote for this piece of landmark legislation as a member of the House of Representatives. We appreciate that you understand the importance of prioritizing serious mental illness within the Department of Health and Human Services. We ask you to further prioritize this urgent and underserved need as Secretary.
Critical to the survival and well-being of people who suffer from SMI is removing policy barriers to psychiatric treatment and care. Like diseases that cause dementia in elderly people, schizophrenia and other serious psychiatric disorders often impair the ability for a person to self-manage. About half of the time, the most serious mental illness conditions include a symptom that disables a person’s ability to “see” the illness itself (anosognosia), rendering them unable to initiate their own care.
Members of our grassroots organizations and coalitions have close relatives with SMI and know first-hand what happens when a person cannot understand their illness or know how to care for it within a system that has wrongly prioritized choice and self-determination for individuals who lack the ability to make rational decisions. Our loved ones have been incarcerated and discarded into homelessness. Many have died from suicide or medical complications caused by poor care.
If we are to build a mental health system that encompasses an appropriate inclusionary continuum of coordinated psychiatric treatment and care, we must commit appropriate attention and resources to patients who are the most severely impacted. In the past, an errant popular belief that “everyone can recover” from SMI has directed scarce resources away from this critically ill population and focused almost entirely on individuals with the capacity to self-manage. The result includes the alarming reality that 1 of 10 individuals in a mental illness crisis goes to jail instead of a hospital.
Our families are counting on the Biden Administration to adjust past inequities and move forward with unity around 21st Century science that embraces evidence-based practices for lifesaving care. We recognize and support the many organizations working to build a functional system of treatment and care for people living with severe mental illnesses. Nevertheless, there is much more that needs to be done. Severe mental illness is the humanitarian crisis of our times.
Historically, the tragic stories of families like ours have been excluded from policy decisions. We are united firmly that this cannot continue. The horrific circumstances of people who suffer immeasurable harm because of a system of “care” that punishes and neglects them instead of providing access to evidence-based treatment is unconscionable. We can do so much better as a civilized society. You have power to begin correcting these errors by appointing an Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use who understands the history and current problems with SMI treatment in America and will listen to people with real life experiences.
With respect and hope for collaboration.
Janet Hays
Print a copy of the letter
Co-signed:
Leslie Carpenter
Serious Brain Disorders Advocate
lcarpenter@iamentalhealth.com
https://iamentalhealth.com/
Jerri Clark
MOMI – Mothers of the Mentally Ill
jerri.clark@momi-wa.org
Jeanne A. Gore
Coordinator & Co-Chair, Steering Committee – NSSC coordinator@nationalshatteringsilencecoalition.org http://www.nationalshatteringsilencecoalition.org
The National Shattering Silence Coalition speaks out about federal, state, and local policies that impact adults and children living with serious brain disorders (SBD), commonly referred to as “serious mental illness”, and advocates for change
Robert S. Laitman, MD,
Board of Directors: Schizophrenia and Related Disorders Alliance of America
(SARDAA)
Board member: National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI – New York).
Author: “MEANINGFUL RECOVERY from Schizophrenia and Serious Mental Illness with Clozapine: Hope & Help”
Teresa Pasquini
SMI Advocate for Housing That Heals https://hth.ttinet.com/Housing_That_Heals_2020.pdf
tcpasquini@gmail.com
Laura Pogliano
Schizophrenia and Related Disorders Alliance of America (SARDAA)
State Chapter Lead (MD)
Laura.pogliano@sardaa.org
Joshua N. Mozell
President, Association for the Chronically Mentally Ill (ACMI), AZ jmozell@frglaw.com
Kathy Day
President, Pro Caregiver Consultants
Kathy@procaregiverconsultants.org
Dede Ranahan
Author, “Tomorrow Was Yesterday – Explosive First-Person Indictments of the US Mental Health System — Mothers Across the Nation Tell It Like It is” | with 64 Co- Authors (Amazon)
www.soonerthantomorrow.com
dederanahan@gmail.com
Lauren Rettagliata
Housing That Heals
https://hth.ttinet.com/Housing_That_Heals_2020.pdf
rettagliata@gmail.com
Eric Smith
Consultant and Mental Health Advocate
My elderly parents have great difficulty helping my sister, im asking for you to provide a space of opportunity that will grant us with lasting results with the much needed help we need.
Appoint an assistant secretary who will ensure that SAMHSA prioritizes the needs of people with Severe Mental Illness.
This is by far the most needy population to get attention.
Outstanding letter, thank you for composing such an important document, and to all the courageous SMI advocates who signed on. As a mom with a SMI adult child, I am indebted to you all!!
This action is long overdue. We need serous reform to severe mental illness as family members who
are their caregivers and most often keeping them off the streets and out of harm’s way.
As a family member, I strongly support the request made in the letter.
Serious mental illnesses have been taking a back seat for too long and we need reform as
pointed out to SAMSHA.
Ingrid
Thank you on behalf of our loved ones/family members with SMI who suffer due to broken or underfunded or archaic policies.
As the mother of a disabled veteran suffering with PTSD and paranoid schizophrenia, I witness on a daily basis the toll that a serious mental illness have on the individual and family members. Families are left to watch their loved one deteriorate and suffer without being able to obtain adequate medical intervention in a timely manner due to current mental health policies. As a family member, I wholeheartedly support the requests put forth in this letter.
As a family member I have experienced first hand the inadequacies of the mental health system in America. The suffering and stigma needs to turn a positive corner. Thank you
As a parent of an adult child with SMI, the frustration and sadness with the current inadequacies of our system and the irreparable damage to those suffering from SMI is devastating. I support the above request. Thank you.
I’m the parent of a 35 year old woman suffering with bi-polar disorder and am unable to assist in any way to get her help or work with any doctors as she doesn’t believe she needs any help. Our family hands are tied and the medical community can’t assist us in anyway.
Cuz knowing what the serious mental illness should be imprisoned the hardest person to escape is their own mind
The son of my best friend came down with severe bi-polar and schizophrenia in his early 20s. He lost his father to pancreatic cancer a few years ago and has been in a state hospital in NYC ever since. The conditions are 19th century. To move him to a private institution is about 70k a year.
Surely a more humane situation should be provided by the state. Prison with shock treatment is not an answer to mental instability, but is it is what the state provides. A 19th century solution to 21rst century problem is failure at its best. And you have failed.
What an unfortunate situation! We advocate FOR a full streamlined continuum of coordinated psychiatric treatment and care for people living with untreated and under-treated serious mental illnesses. We advocate AGAINST abuse, neglect or any kind of discrimination and mistreatment anywhere and everywhere it turns up. Your best friend’s son deserves good quality support and services commensurate to need.
The letter says it exactly how I’d say it. I will print and mail it ASAP as is suggested. I know we can do better. It’s too late for me to help my own 32 year old daughter. My last attempt in 2018, I could have helped her if I had support for me to help her so she could help herself. That wasn’t in place. This is why I know we can do better. We must.
Please support recommendations by Treatment Advocacy Center.
If we can send space ships to other planets and the moon, surely we can invest in the human lives that are at stake here and now in this world. People are suffering and need support. This is where we as a society should invest our resources.
As the mother of an adult son who has had SMI along with substance abuse issues for over 20 years the points in this letter touch on all the issues we have faced. HIPAA laws and unwillingness by providers to even seek out family support were the most damaging roadblocks. Getting involved in NAMI educated me and gave me a voice but even having my son interdicted didn’t pave the way for my involvement with his care providers. Most didn’t even know what interdiction was and honestly most didn’t want family involvement. Their solution is dispensing multiple medications without even knowing his history. I support your efforts and hope new policies can help those that have no insight into their disease.
The system keeps doing the same thing over and over again with no results. It is madness to keep doing the same thing and getting no results. People living with serious mental illness need care and are human beings. Closing the hospitals for the mentally ill was not the answer.
We need hospital beds, with recovery in mind and programs to help people stay out of the hospital.
We would not put a cancer person out on the street and hope they would get better.
Our brain is the most important part of our health, without a brain we would be a vegetable. No one asks to live with a mental health disorder, please find resources to help people living with a mental health disorder.
STOP THE SITGMA AGAINST MENTAL ILLNESS.
Secretary Xavier Becerra,
Congratulations on your appointment. It is extremely important that you assign an assistant to help him help change the lives of people with serious mental illness many of whom are filling our jails and living on the streets in squalor I am being ignored. All mental illness needs attention but currently it seems that those with the more self- manageable conditions are getting attention and those with serious mental illness who can’t even care for them self because of lack of treatment and especially when substance-abuse is involved, keeps getting ignored. I have a 38-year-old son was serious mental illness. Fortunately he has never gotten involved with drugs or alcohol. However, his treatments have never been successful even after six or seven hospitalizations. We live in Texas and there is no continuum of care. When he gets discharged he has left to his own demise, with I want supportive assistance or enforcement to take his medications. What happens is that within months or days he is back in the hospital or in a jail. If we are to build a mental health system that encompasses an appropriate inclusionary continuum of coordinated psychiatric treatment and care, we must commit appropriate attention and resources to patients who are the most severely impacted. In the past, an errant popular belief that “everyone can recover” from SMI has directed scarce resources away from this critically ill population and focused almost entirely on individuals with the capacity to self-manage.
Please make treating serious mental illness A top priority and you will not only help those individuals but will markedly reduce your jail populations and homeless situations that is getting out of hand in the United States.
Thank you.
I’m printing, adding a personal letter with our story and sending. THANK YOU for composing this important and powerful letter, and including guidance!
I am the mother of a 44 year old son with a very serious mental illness as well as a total lack of insight into his illness. My hope is that someone in government will care enough about my son so he will have continuing appropriate care after my husband and I are no longer here. There are millions just like him in the USA and as a nation that has largely forgotten about this most vulnerable population I urge you to select an assistant secretary that will prioritize those with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and severe bipolar disorder.