rolling 5270s

goals for suicide sept: suicide prevention

realistic ideal: advancing mental health care

this vm is from someone who’s been on rolling involuntary psych holds since may 30, 2024 (102 days, currently on a 5270-30 day hold). 

she’s been struggling w mental and reproductive health issues for 10+ years and has constantly sought treatment with a variety of providers in a variety of levels of care. she has private insurance, access to good care, and has knowledge around the care she needs. she has a brilliant mind. she’s reading the bhagavad gita. she needs help.

for the last 102 days, her every single day has been filled with pressure to take an endless variety of meds and pressure to decide where shes’s going next. she’s been refused admission, elevated, booted, shuffled, and forced through a series of hearings for her freedom. she’s in a mental health crisis. she has no income. she has no housing. her window of tolerance doesn’t exist and she’s constantly being triggered with pressure to make major, life impacting decisions while being told/shown/living the fact that appropriate care doesn’t exist for her.

staff at the facilities she’s in/admissions coordinators of potential facilities she’s considering don’t understand why she struggles with angry outbursts. they’re constantly changing the rules on her and there’s no consistency. it is the definition of insanity. for a mind in crisis, it is fatal.

mental health care creates treatment resistance through inappropriate/bad care. 

changing mental health care needs to happen from an individual treatment standpoint. 

empowering sales teams fills beds. it does not necessarily get people into appropriate care.

people get into appropriate care when:

1. the individual is accurately diagnosed by a practicing, licensed medical professional in good standing

2. the individual understands their diagnosis and appropriate care for that diagnosis

3. the individual is aware of and encouraged to advocate for their personal treatment needs (ex: anti-meds, hard pass on dance therapy)

4. the provider/facility is aware of what diagnoses they, themselves, can capably and reliably treat

5. the provider/facility is skilled at delivering the care they provide

6. safety/trust exists

if any one of these 6 things doesn’t happen, care is negatively impacted and individual outcomes suffer.

mental health isn’t some toddler’s shape sorting toy done wholesale on a 8a-5p schedule. mental health is 24/7 common sense. it’s a pause for evaluation and decision making, not throwing a blanket over the masses w hopes everyone shuts up, warms up, or stops existing all together. this mental health crisis is real and we’re forcing complex lives into a limited number of non-fitting, pre-cut holes. 

wo expensive initiatives or long term solutions, how can the mental health industry change so patients can efficiently find appropriate care?

1. the language of the industry needs to be standardized. insurance companies, providers and individuals need to speak the same language to communicate effectively.

2. information on providers/facilities needs to be factual and validated; not self reported ideations on en vogue 3rd party websites. if professional sports leagues drafted athletes from how good the athlete said they are, the league would fall apart and people would get hurt. this is actively happening in mental health. are we too proud to be factual about what we do? there’s room for everyone.

3. this information needs to be easily accessible by all (especially the individual).

4. education, self awareness, communication, and understanding around mental health must evolve.

if you work in mental health, stop working and start thinking about what you, yourself, can personally touch today to change this epidemic of inappropriate care being force fed to primary mental health patients.

mental health is complicated to diagnose and harder to endure. sometimes appropriate mental health treatment is validating an unseeable, ununderstandable, and unknown diagnosis. appropriate care can be as simple as providing a safe place for an individual to start wrapping their arms around the reality of a diagnosis and providing support to find accommodations that need to be made to allow the individual to live in their life. it’s not always journaling and numbing with medication. it’s not fuckjng yoga.

if the mental health care industry replaced luncheons, symposiums, acronyms, and non-value added positions with mirrors, the entire industry would improve. stop the poser show and put up your facts in stats: how many elevations did you have in the last month/6mo/12mo? how many salaried primary therapists do you have per bed? how many individual therapy sessions do you offer/wk? what’s the avg length of employment at your practice/facility? how many of your patients/clients were new last year? how many of your patients/clients have been with you for 1 yr? 2-5yr? 5+yr? what are their diagnoses? 

these are questions i ask on behalf of my clients and educate my clients to ask. facts lead to well informed decisions. facts expose the realities of care. if you do it, show it, then take pride in what you do.

my life landed me w ptsd and in suicide. i spend every moment of every day free-soloing out of it. someone else will avoid the same climb if we make mental healthcare an industry built on a structurally sound foundation of transparency and facts then give individuals tools to ascend.

stop saying, start doing.

thank you to the speaker for offering her voice and story for the evolution of mental health.

#suicide #suicideawareness #suicideprevention #mentalhealthadvocacy #theantidoterecovery