No more consumer-survivor rejection of prescription medications (and the medical model of disability) without cognizance and activism supporting Medicare for All as a universal buy-in additional health insurance choice to individuals, not a requirement to enroll,
and demanding an end to private insurer and taxpayer greed that cuts funding and doctor networks to improve individual mental health that improves long term outcomes if the individual receives LTSS, delivered in HCBS, after progressive public budgets overcome the austerity of the waiting list.
Stephanie Mencimer took 8 years from 2003 until the publication of her 2011 Mother Jones article
about Jared Loughner, killer of child Christina Green, born on Sept. 11, 2001, Federal Judge John Roll and wounded ex-AZCD8 (AZCD2 after 2012 election cycle redistricting seat held by R-Martha McSally 2014-18) Democratic member Gabrielle ‘Gabby’ Giffords among other victims, for Mencimer to make the connection to shifting money, from paying for institutions and their drugs and devices, prescribed by doctors financed by profit-greedy insurance companies managed 'one size fits all for efficiency' care.
For-profit and nonprofit private insurance companies, if they buy into the growing consensus that health care is a human right, must have their contracted benefits follow the person as payment for person-centered, community services instead of the consumer/survivor ‘community’ receiving some leadership of peer-run programs without the money following the person, including persons never institutionalized, from the institutional model to the community-based, person-centered model. Human medical needs aren't a total production cost divided into unit cost ‘widgets’ in b-school economics classes
as a way of developing social safety net (health and human, social services) budgets at all government levels. The Judge David Bazelon Center throughout its history ignores the role of money except to close institutions not keep people who are out of them, but at risk of placement if they lose a job, housing or have another life transition, included in community.
Fuller Torrey in this 1998 Brain Storm article (reprinted from the Washington D.C. City Paper) called out managed care 'one size fits all for efficiency for profit' practice of medicine and even United Health Care CEO Bill McGuire’s $6.1 million 1 year ($1 Billion in UHC CEO career) salary.
Over the course of two hours, Torrey rails against federal funding schemes for mental health care and attacks civil liberties lawyers for preventing sick people from getting well. He takes some potshots at John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who bills insurance companies for psychotherapy treatment for people who've been abducted by aliens. He skewers "mangled care" companies for paying CEOs multimillion-dollar salaries at the same time that they deprive the mentally ill of treatment. After noting that in 1994 William McGuire, CEO of United Healthcare, received $6.1 million in compensation, Torrey says, "If any of you think William McGuire is going to give back $1 million to open a clubhouse [a successful day program for the mentally ill], see me afterward and I'll give you a prescription for Haldol."
Peer (consumer-survivor) advocates were fighting to end stigmatizing language in a 2003 article (The Sick and The Dead by Stephanie Mencimer) while safety net, publicly funded, inclusive, community-based services to one population (people with SPMI/mental illness and substance abuse disorders) were being devastated as similar services to another population (people with ID/DD formerly known as MR/mental retardation before 'Rosa's Law' rewrote federal laws) were cut to a lesser extent.
Peer consumer-survivor advocates erased (ignored) the fiscally intersectional questions of whether a person living with mental illness was receiving treatment or not
Untreated serious mental illness is a huge risk factor for violent crime, particularly among those released from mental hospitals. A 1992 study by Dr. Henry Steadman, now the chair of the national advisory board of the Center for Mental Health Services & Criminal Justice Research, found that 27 percent of released patients reported having engaged in at least one violent act within four months of being discharged. Those findings mirror older research suggesting that discharged patients had arrest rates for violent crimes 10 times that of the general population. Another study, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2002, found that about 14 percent of adults with severe mental illness (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) had been violent within the previous year. Not surprisingly, then, 16 percent of jail inmates are estimated to be mentally ill, according to the Justice Department—some 300,000 people, or four times the number who are in mental hospitals today in the United States.
, and how to pay for adequate treatment if the individual could not, in their 2003 protest letters. Autistic 'self-advocates' still ignore the same fiscally intersectional question 'who pays the costs' of 'autistic community' goals of inclusion and acceptance if individual autistics cannot pay the costs.
The MacArthur Foundation study, quoted by 2003 mental health advocates in their letters,
may have also left out the distinction between treated and untreated, and implications for law and budget policy in assuring access to high quality, community based, treatment, in measuring the risk of person living with mental illness committing a violent crime.
The demands of one of the 2003 anti-stigmatizing language protest letters for more funding for better quality independent living services for individuals living with mental illness,
signed by American Association of People with Disabilities AAPD President and CEO Andrew Imperato in 2003
were completely ignored by 2007.
The ARC and Special Olympics (Disability Policy Collaboration) in their no 'r-word' campaign that led to Rosa's Law
rewriting the text of all federal law to replace "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability," after passing laws in states, also were less inclusive in their rhetoric than in the demands for money to pay the costs that their constituencies could not. Shameful exclusion by the intellectual/developmental disability and physical disability self-advocate operated community-based organizations that is less cross-disability than their inclusive rhetoric makes them appear.
Self help and actualization movement
that informs the consumer-survivor and self-advocate movements are inadequate replacements for inadequately-funded systemic change that, if the budgets are democratically made more fiscally liberal, will do the most good for the most people with disabilities at the most equitable (as individuals need help) pace.
Critics of the self-help and positive psychology movements like this book are a needed corrective to prevent positive psychology from legitimizing regressively worse income and wealth inequality by helping 99% of people accept declining living standards and busier lives working harder (not ‘smarter’) for less income.
Failures of the self help and positive psychology that has informed the I/DD and SPMI/consumer-survivor disability rights movements are still documented by what in 2018 is called a 'depression crisis' shown by self-medication with addictive substances from alcohol to opioids and other issues the '12 step' movement has, for almost 90 years since the book "My name is Bill W." was published, attempted to solve with supported (individual-sponsored) abstinence.
