Envisioning a Better Future for Those Living with Mental Illness and Their Families

well I'm at Stanford on the CEO of open healing center and Institute and well we have 20-something people registered for tonight but I think the Astros pulled few of them away so thank you for being here and now we're gonna talk tonight about really kind of some of the problems in the mental healthcare system in general and then some of the things that we're doing here at the hope and healing Center and attempt to try to overcome some of those really kind of looking new ways to conceptualize how mental healthcare might be delivered and how it might be accessed and so I'll talk about some of those things as we go through most of the statistics that I'll talk about tonight are pretty disturbing because our mental health care system what we call a system really isn't very functional because it really was never set up to be functional so so to begin with let me just kind of give you a story that we start out with a lot of times here that has initially you may think nothing to do with what we do today in mental health care but I think has a lot to do with the idea of you know an impossible situation in which your community can come together and really make a difference so Dymphna was a 7th century Irish princess she was 14 years old and her father was a pagan Irish King and her mother was had to become a Christian and then became ill and died and then her father went into a deep depression after her mother's death and was unable to really rule so they thought perhaps if they were to find someone in Ireland for him to marry he would come out of his depression so they searched across Ireland but they were unable to find anyone as beautiful as his mother or as her mother but the King thought well Dymphna is is beautiful so I will marry her and so she thought that was a problem because she was a Christian herself and she didn't think it was right for her to marry her own father but her father insisted so she and her priest and a few other supporters left Ireland for the European mainland where they then settled in E Belgium okay and her father then began to send out troops to look for her it took him about a year but they finally found her and then her father went to Belgium to bring her back and insisted that she come back and marry him at which time she she said no he said if you don't come back and marry me I'll kill your priest and she said I'm not coming back and so she chopped he chopped off the priests head and then said if you you know you got to come back with me here I'm gonna kill you she said no so he chopped off her head and then left him there left their bodies there and the people of giel felt buried them in a cave nearby and no one really thought much of it until the 13th century when some excavation uncovered the bodies and suddenly it was said that a number of people in the area that had mental illness epilepsy were healed and so there was some thought that perhaps the body of Dymphna the relics of Dymphna had some miraculous power about them and so they built a small shrine there associated with a catholic church that was there and people began to bring their mentally ill loved ones to Kiel Belgium so imagine for a minute you are a farmer and you know and it's 1260 ad and you live in Europe and you've got a schizophrenic son you know what do you do with your schizophrenic son there is no treatment there's really no medicine period everybody just thinks he's evil or something wrong with him or he has a demon or you know you're an outcast he's an outcast will you put him in a cart you take him to heal Belgium in the hopes that he'll be healed and then if he isn't miraculously healed you leave him there and that's what most people started doing is leaving there mainly a loved ones there and so hundreds of people were being left there maybe even thousands at times and so the church was overrun they weren't really able to care for them effectively so the people of the town began to take these individuals into their homes again these are untreated mentally ill individuals take them into their homes that care for them and they refer to them as boarders and that process has continued from the 13th century to right now in eel Belgium today there are between 250 and 300 individuals that live in homes of local residents and are cared for by them now today is incorporated into the traditional psychiatric system that they have there but that's continued on non-stop since the 13th century those individuals live their entire lives if they want with those families sometimes it's a short period of time sometimes it's a lifetime there are stories of children growing up and just thinking of the individual living with them as an uncle or friend of the family they work with the family they work on farms a part of the community but it's an incredible story of how I really which you would think of as an impossible situation with male health it was really overcome by a combination of faith and community and you know you might ask yourself oh and this is that's a church of st. Dymphna in heal Belgium today she her relics are there and then there's a there's a shrine to Thimphu here in the u.s. somewhere or some of her relics are also good but that church is not the original Church because the original Church burned down and the 1500s and then that church was built on top of it so but you know you might ask yourself how's that related to today well the reality is well we have a lot of good resources for the mentally ill we don't do much of a better job okay the truth and we'll go through and we'll look at some of that one out of every five Americans at a given year will meet criteria for mental illness about 44 million individuals a smaller number will have serious mental illness was still a very significant number of individuals and you know about hat about half of all chronic mental health conditions are in place by the age of 14 with 75 percent be in place by 24 so in that 14 to 24 year age onset period that's that's where most illnesses are going to kind of come on they can come on younger some can many can come out older but that's that prime age of onset and if you look at that in the context of say other illnesses you see that mental illness early and if you add these three together you barely have more individuals that are affected then with just mental illness and so what we often talk about heart disease diabetes cancer while those are certainly significant issues that we should be concerned with together they are about what we're doing with no illness yet we never have conversations about mental illness like we have about heart disease diabetes and cancer effect when you go home tonight you'll probably see a commercial about heart disease diabetes cancer I mean there it's just commonplace you virtually you know the only commercial you ever see about mental illness is a commercial for the direct marketing of pharmaceuticals you know trying to tell you that you should go ask your primary care physician for this or that or whatever but you'll see you know the American Heart Association or a discussion or something about diabetes prevention you just don't see the same kind of conversation so it's a significant problem it's at epidemic levels it's absolutely destroying our culture in our society it affects our criminal justice system if you look at our prison and jail population 64 percent of jail inmates are struggling with a mental health problem 56 percent of state prisons and 44 percent of federal prisons I mean this is just overwhelming and really unconscionable if you think about it I mean 64 percent of jail inmates are struggling with mental illness and then you know 44 states there's more people in that state in a prison or a jail and there aren't psychiatric facilities and so it's you know we really moved individuals when we D institutionalize we moved them from asylums which were not good places I'm not saying that they were good places but these large state hospitals that we think of as asylums we moved them into jails and prisons we move them into homelessness a large percentage of homeless have serious mental health problems and this is you know when it's interesting about this statistic right here is you know 30 percent have serious mental illness that's not including substance use if you included since you'd be well over half but this is just schizophrenia bipolar disorder severe depression PTSD these are serious mental health problems and that's five times more than the general population so you know if you want to know where a lot of mentally ill individuals are today the last place you go and look is in hospital because that's where you rarely will find them if you look at a comparison early 60s when deinstitutionalization had really just begun and say you know 2003 you can see the change in where where people are living you so you can see a much larger number of homeless you can see a much smaller number of mental hospitals because basically we shut most of them down and you can see a much larger increase in prisons and then this gray area here what you find here and in the in our century here you find that 75% of those individuals are being cared for by family member and in that gray area right there so there really is no place for someone like mental illness to live if they need ongoing mental health treatment there was a in the institutionalization the institutionalization days the thought was that there really weren't people that needed to be treated in hospitals for a long period of time there also was a thought in the early 60s that perhaps if enough social engineering was done in schools and with parents that mental illness could be rid from our society there would be no more mental illness the sixth early 60s mid almost was still not understood to be biological there wasn't really even it wasn't even thought I mean I in in 1963 there were still individuals who would argue that schizophrenia was just a choice that people made because they wanted to have a break from reality to deal with psychic stressors they were dealing with and so again there's not a complete or even understand that we'd have today maybe I would never say we have a complete understanding now but I'm just a different understanding and all of that was kind of wound up into the fact that we had these horrible instant whooshes that weren't serving their purpose and so we decided well we would shut them down and that probably was a good idea and then if you read some of the literature from the time thought was well we'll move these individuals back into the community and then we will treat them in the community we'll set up a set of community mental health centers federally run community mental health centers which was a great idea they just never funded them and they never said any of them up but they did set down the hospitals and so everybody had to go somewhere so they went to jail and they went onto the streets and then they went to live with their families and that's where we are today and that's and it's a it's a disturbing situation because in the United States today a majority of people with serious mental illness receive no treatment and again I I say that and I have said that so many times in presentations that I've made all over the country and I don't think people really fully appreciate what what I'm saying because you know I'm not saying that that we have a problem and we're you know we're working it through and we're struggling I'm literally saying that we have a completely dysfunctional it doesn't even work even the way it's set up a majority of the people with schizophrenia bipolar disorder depression receive no treat and so you know if if that was cancer the only difference would be we'd have dead bodies laying everywhere and with our mental illness we never equate the suicides and occur we never really fully appreciate that you do die from mental illness and so you know it's it's pretty disturbing to imagine that a supposed system exists and then a majority of the constituents that that system is supposed to care for literally receive no treatment that it's not able to to help them and that goes across obviously all ethnicities you can see there's some variability Asians asian-americans are the worst and Asians are the best but even if you look at those that you know this percentage here you know obviously we're saying you know some 60% or so are getting treated if you look at that sixty even the National Institutes of Health will tell you that the estimate suggests that only 15% of the individuals that are actually treated this group over here that only 15% of them even received the minimally adequate treatment for their illness so what happens is that a subset about 25% they receive some treatment but it's not minimally adequate so they might get some medication but not enough medication for what they need or they might have gone to therapy but not enough therapy to to alleviate their symptoms and so only about 15% of individuals are receiving the minimally adequate treatment so again imagine that in the context of any other chronic condition like diabetes or heart disease if only 15 percent of people with diabetes ever received a minimally adequate treatment you'd have people all over the place losing feet going blind and dying it would be horrible but with mental illness we never have this conversation that I mean we we argue and talk about things that are really kind of meaningless in the context of this because our criminal justice system's been overwhelmed or it's affecting our educational system it's affecting our economy we spend billions of dollars every year on trying to deal with the effects of this so if you look at children for instance they're even worse off because yeah up to the age of 18 it's estimated that children will about 50 for almost 50% of children will experience some type of mental health problem where about 22% of those will have a severe impairment but of that only 7% of children will ever receive any treatment ever have a mental health actual treatment office visit for that and that's just unbelievable to even imagine I mean think about how often children go for ear infections but only 7% of all the children that would that have a health problem even those that are very seriously impairing would ever receive an office visit no schools all most teachers are almost uncomplete leon trained to deal with male healthpro they're supposed to either oh that is done from epidemiology studies by the government no go out and they go out and take random samples of the population yeah so it's it's that's government data there so this other stuff here all this is the the the CDC's does hew they do huge epidemiology studies of the population every few years to determine what percentage of the population shows certain diseases or disorders and then they also check to see how many of those individuals actually they care where do they get care all that data is available on the websites so it's a some dude the diagnosis since some of the epidemiology studies the epidemiologist actually does the diagnosis and in some of the studies it's whether you were diagnosed with one so they're looking for people that were diagnosed so it varies now what are some of the barriers you might ask for why are these people not getting care do they just not go get care do they you know what happens and you know really it's kind of what I like I call the three aids accessibility affordability and acceptability accessibility you know some people literally don't have transportation to get to care there are very few facilities and there are far too few mental health care providers if you call a mental health care provider today and you're a new patient it can be weeks to months before you can get in I mean sometimes the wait is is really verging on the ridiculous I mean it can be months before you can get in as a new client and most people unfortunately engage the mental healthcare system when they're in crisis they don't recognize the problems coming and then go get help they're in crisis and now they're telling you it's going to be six to eight weeks before you can get in affordability the limited resources no insurance or mental health coverage I mean even if you have resources so for instance you have insurance insurance often pays very very little a lot of the people we see here at the center have insurance but they've been unable to engage care just because time frame it Just's too long then you see somebody or their insurance pays so little that it just really doesn't really mean anything we do have a parity law that was signed in to effect it had virtually no effect no change at all male health and physical health illnesses are supposed to be treated the same by insurance companies I have seen no change at all since the law was signed into effect and then acceptability a lot of people will tell you I don't want to go talk to anybody because I'm afraid people are going to know that I'm ill not all people think I'm crazy you know then they'll label me and they'll treat me differently or they may just you know it within the particular cultural view like for instance asian-americans are the least likely to access care and it's an honors of Honor based culture and you know there's a shame brought on the family when an individual connects with a mental health care provider so they don't want that shame to be brought under the family so all of these have to be overcome in some sense to be able to adequately get care to one another I would say you know this is probably the one that is probably easiest to overcome believe it or not I think this is a little this is harder to overcome building facilities and things like that and I don't know that that necessarily is the answer I think affordability we're gonna talk about some of this in a minute is the easiest overcome I think obviously education will take care a lot of this I mean in education and it can be done in a very straightforward manner I mean I have a son in the sixth grade now but I remember when I was going through his fifth grade science book with him you know I mean they're doing like life sciences and there's a chapter on or there's a discussion of all types of systems of the body you know in their science book but virtually no discussion of the brain there's discussions cancer and diabetes and dysfunctions of different organs but no mention of mental health problems what if every 5th grade child in the United States had a component on mental illness and the brain in the fifth grade by the time they become an adult that would mental illness would just we look at as a normal illness right it was just something you learned about whereas now they just don't really learn about so there's a lot of things we can do I think overcome some of these things on the education side but some of these other issues are a little bit more difficult so what does the system quote-unquote look like now it's really a disjointed set of resources it's not really a system it you know if you think about a system you think about an entry point and then movement in a particular direction perhaps and so you know right now most mentally ill individuals live with their family and so it's the family that tends to engage resources and assist but you know we have professional mental health care providers out there we have acute psychiatric hospitalization and that's another thing that most people don't understand is that virtually all hospitalization for psychiatry is acute care which means that it's crisis care you're in crisis if you're suicidal or you become delusional to the point you can't care for yourself you can be placed in a psychiatric facility and you the average stay in the US is eight days that's how long and so you know they're gonna give you medication to stabilize you and then they're gonna release you as quickly as they can because it's an acute care facility it's not like if you went there because you had you know some kind of you have pancreatitis and they're gonna treat that and when you went in you had it and when you come out you don't have it anymore this is just stabilization so you know that's what this is for and then we have some supportive services you certainly hear about support groups and things like that and we have some community residential services so for instance here in the US and here in Houston there's a great place called a mental health co-op which is uh which is it's a house kind of down in the Montrose area and I think about 14 min lee illinois lived there they have a program for them and they can live there for their whole lives but they have a program that are cared for you know there's taught skills and and really a new kind of life skills things like that so it's a great program but there's those almost don't exist I mean they're just really and they're very expensive they tend to be but there's also places like The Gathering Place the there's also st. joseph´s house which are club houses for people with mental illness kind of day programs where they can go but again those in all of Houston there's two of those you know for everyone that's Milione Houston and so so some of these exist but they're very disconnected and the way the system works now is usually you engage it in crisis and you try to see a mental health care provider or you engage at this end where you're hospitalized and then you're put back on and really this is the system back and forth and back and forth there's no clear entry point it's difficult to access as you've seen from the day the majority of people don't access it there's no true continuum these things are disconnected oftentimes it's said of our mental healthcare system that the best outcome is stability not and think about that if you were if you were mentally ill would you want someone to say well we're shooting for stability and that's that sounds horrible I mean I would want to shoot for recovery I would want to shoot for a quality of life that is you know gives me joy and fulfillment but those things are never discussed in the context it this is very costly because the recipients are the the readmission rates are unbelievable for people with serious mental illness within a span of even 30 day readmission rates can just be through the roof so it's really pretty usually what you get with a person say has bipolar disorder or schizophrenia particular to psychotic disorders like schizophrenia you'll have several months of stability and then a crash and you're hospitalized months of stability crash hospitals and this is just a cycle that will continue year after year after year with no hope of breaking it a very limited family involvement particularly since HIPAA was put into place in 96 families have been almost completely pushed out because we are very concerned about our own personal autonomy and privacy HIPAA was HIPAA was put in place mostly for cancer and AIDS so your employer wouldn't find out that you've had those and then they would take your insurance away from me or whatever but nobody ever thought about how that affected mental health and the way it affects mental health is like this you can be fully delusional I mean you literally could tell me that you were Jesus and then also tell me but I don't want to be treated and then you get you get to not be treated and there's nothing your family can do about it you can be delusional and your mother drives you your 30 year old individual who's delusional and your mother drives you to the psychiatrist to get to get for a follow-up and you say I don't want you to go in the back with me mom and then the doctor doesn't let her come in the back and then when you come out and your mother asks you well did your doctor what did the doctor say I don't want to tell you and then mother turns to the doctor and says well what did you tell I can't tell you they're an adult they didn't sign a release of information for well did you change their medicine I can't tell you and so again I I think you have to understand the context there I'm not just talking about someone gets to make your own decisions I'm talking about someone that everyone would agree is completely delusional and has no grip on reality that person gets to make their own decisions and so families have been pushed almost completely out that's why here unfortunately a lot of times we are helping families connect with lawyers to be able to get guardianship over their adult children because without without that there is no care for the enemy the child will be you know the adult child become homeless so you know it can be pretty disturbing and then very high rates of repeat hospitalization so this is kind of a mess and it's really worse than I'm describing it to tell you the truth you know every day we work with families here they're trying to get to care I mean simple things like the number of psychiatric hospitals that will discharge someone and not give them a referral I mean that would seem like an obvious right I mean if you were discharged you would think that they would want you to continue your care but very few of the psychiatric hospitals provide any kind of outpatient care so they don't they when they discharge you there's they're done they don't have anything for you to do so there's no there's no referral to give you so it's a in you know it's just a really you know the the fact that I only know of one Hospital in the commune one psychiatric hospital or community that will allow you or if you had you previously were being seen by a mental health care provider in the community and then you had a crisis to have to be hospitalized I only know one hospital that will allow your mental healthcare provider from the community to actually come see you while you're in the hospital they start all over they start all over the new meds and everything and then you get kind of so it's it's not like you know it's not like cancer it's not like MD Anderson where everybody goes oh it's just unbelievable you know and you can come from Waco with your records and they fix everything up for you and you go back to Waco and your oncologist there has this incredible thing to do now that they've laid out there's just it's just not like that and it should be it really should be so how is this all connected back to the whole giel thing well this is you know one of the connections our deal is a great story as I said of where faith and community come together to overcome an impossible problem but in our modern era what we find is that individuals with psychological distress these people struggling with these mental health problems they are more likely to go to a clergy than they are a mental health care provider or a physician first and that goes for anyone in the general population this is again something that was found at some of those large epidemiology studies when people are struggling they will engage a faith community a clergy member now they tend to not know that they have a mental health care problem they just know they're having a problem and but that gives us an opportunity if we know where people are more likely to go first when they first start having one of these problems then that should be the front door to the mental health care system we should be able to move them on and unfortunately a very small number of pastors 10 percent or less ever make a mental health referral they just don't recognize what's really sitting in front of them and so that's something that we're going to talk about that we've looked at but what in psychology and psychiatry what we refer to that is we refer to clergy as gatekeepers that they are the front of the gatekeeper police officers are gatekeepers nurses or gatekeepers you mentioned teachers teachers are thought to be kqs the problem with all of that is and there's just enormous amounts of literature written on this model where gatekeepers recognize that a problem and then they refer those individuals to professional care the problem is is almost no training is given no training at all was given to clergy I know that for a fact because I did a study of the 249 accredited seminaries in North America and not one of them offers a course where mental illness is discussed teachers are not really trained to recognize mental health care problems although their experience allows them to do some but they don't have really over training on that police officers are getting better today just because of the massive amounts of mental health calls they have to make the Harris County Sheriff's Department is real model for the country they have an incredible training program for their for the sheriff's deputies and then you know it's just a lot of these gatekeepers really were never given any clear trinny and then even on top of that when they're given training oftentimes the trainee is to help them recognize the problem but nothing on what they're supposed to do with the person once they record so so I'm a you know I'm a teacher I recognized that the child might have a mental health care problem I have a few options I can talk to the school counselor I can talk to the parent but again I'm limited in what I can I'm so removed from getting the child to care that sometimes it's very difficult same thing with a clergy I teach a clergy had a recognized a mental health care problem unless he or she has connections with mental health care providers in the community the person that's in distress is the last person that should be in charge of trying to get to care someone has to help them get to care and so so that's been another one of the problems so now churches are ready or involved in mental health care they just don't know it churches often have prison ministries or jail ministries and I've already told you that 64% of jail inmates have a mental health problem that seal way hotter than general population which is like 7% homeless about 30% of the homeless as I said you know addicts today you're looking at around 43 kind of mid percents of people with addictions also have an underlying mental healthcare problem when I was in graduate school that was probably in the 20s it's gone I mean the the dynamic of or the context or around substance uses trained changed so dramatically over the last ten to twenty years it's really just unreal yeah opioids have really made up you know really changed the face of that and kind of designer kind of cheap drugs like cush and things like that opioid I mean again this is an unbelievable statistic opioid overdose is the leading cause of death for adults 50 at younger United States I mean that's just an unreal it's more than accidents there's almost never been anything more than accidents but if you're 50 and younger that's the leading cause of death in the u.s. now so yeah that's a real problem I think you're gonna obviously they've tightened up a lot on the prescriptions now for that but at this point there's so much of it out there it's just hard to imagine you right well I was just looking just yesterday I was looking at one of our clients who had she had typed out all her meds for one of the clinicians and we were going through some of medication looking you know and she's on a bunch of antipsychotics and stuff like that but you know here's a doctor that gave her gave her an opioid for her neck here's another doctor that given her opioid for her knee and you know I'm like does this doctor know about that doctor know about that I know know about each other you know so so I mean it's just you know it's just it's just pharmacy pharmacy pharmacy and so it can be rolling yeah I love medication medication is tremendous to be very effective miraculous it just has to be done correctly and then you know human trafficking which is very hot topic in faith canoes now over 70% of those women are found to have significant at long-term post-traumatic stress issues as a result of their trauma and then natural disasters the primary responder to for relief in relation to natural disasters like tsunamis earthquakes are Christian organizations and up to 35 percent of a population after a natural disaster can show long-term post-traumatic stress issues so I mean in a sense you know churches congregations fellowships that are already involved in mental health care it's just that most the time they don't recognize that they they're working with these populations that are extremely high in mental health problems plus we know people are more likely to go to them first when they have male health problems but you find very very few that it really ever given any thought to that or recognize that or have training in that so what are we looking to do here at the hope and healing center well one of the things that we need is a continuum of care we don't have that in mental health care and I see a continuum of care what I mean is I mean a process in which you haven't there's an entry there's a wide entry so it picks up as many people as possible in one in that everybody knows how you connect to the system and then as people move through the system fewer and fewer people keep moving people are and if you you get you begin to receive treatment or care and then some people don't need anymore that's enough and then if you were in fewer till ultimately only a very small amount of those are ever going to make it to hospitalization so what are we doing so as we know most people are living with their family or cared for by a family member so we also know that people are more likely to go to a faith community or connect with a clergy as an entry point so we've started with faith communities and I'm going to talk to you about that so we have a program where we equip faith communities to be a real front door to the mental health care system and I'll talk about that in a minute a school systems would be will be the next one that we focus and then large businesses but we've begun with faith communities and their goal is to have hundreds of faith communities across the Houston area over the next five years and then we need to we have to connect these together not that disjointed mess I showed you a minute ago so supportive services affordability is a tremendous problem here and so you know if it's expensive to go see a psychiatrist if you have no insurance you have to pay cash but are there services that can be offered by people that have kind of a minimal level of training that might be low costs or no cost well of course we know that and they're called support groups and peer delivered services we've been doing it for years just kind of on the side here and there and the research which I'll show you in a second shows it's tremendously effective I mean if you if you know nothing more than a a AAA is tremendously effective for people that are it's free it's led by people that have shared life experience and so we need to put those in place and what we need to do is we need to put those in place where people go first so these supportive services say peer counselors or coaches support groups they need to be at the places that people connect with the system so if I walk in to a congregation and a pastor recognizes that I have a mental healthcare problem he or she can say hey I want to make a referral for you too some professional care that I'll talk about in a second but hey we also have a support prepare to be great for you be really helpful and you can connect with that Thursday night it cost nothing just show up you know and so now and these can be tremendously therapeutic or we have somebody here at the congregation who's a peer counselor and she can see you once a week for the next six weeks for no cost it's just part of what we do here and so we have begun setting these up once these are trained and then we already have our professional care out there so the hope is we have a large net here people come in they make contact they're recognized they are moved into supportive services along with their families their families are getting care to some are referred on to professional care and those individuals receive the professional care they need v-tach psychology or therapies gayatri and then setup day programs places where people might be able to stay like the mill health co-op somebody might be able to stay three or four months instead of going into acute hospitalization they might be able to be in more of a residential situation and so if we can do this so right now we are working on these two parts of our continuum for the city and this is a citywide project that we're involved in we're working in collaboration with some of the larger hospitals to Memorial Hermann crisis clinics are involved with us as our is Methodist Hospital which is one of our major collaborators and trying to develop a continuum of care I want very few people here I want lots of people down here and then it varies in the middle but what you have is a clear point of entry it's easily accessible it promotes independence in the individual it doesn't just say hey you're mentally ill the best you are going to get stability and then what stability means is that you're not a problem that's what that means it doesn't mean that you ever go out and enjoy your life it means that you're very quiet and you don't cause a problem so it promotes independence we have a program here that we use with all of our with all of our clients called thrive and it teaches them skills and tools so they can become more independent and manage their illness and will work with people that are the sickest of the six schizophrenic bipolar with deluge I mean we work with people that are very ill that other people have given up on and we have a tremendous success long-term promotes long term support no or low cost all of this on the front end is no cost and then the rest then you have you have more resources to worry about this integrates the family into care because once a when an individual connects here family are also put into these support groups and then hopefully we see a reduction here so what we're doing now is we develop this continuum we've begun working on this we're in talks right now for the development of recovery homes we're working with Methodists and Memorial Hermann which are involved in acute psychiatric hospitalization and professional care and so the goal over the next five years is to be able to develop a continuum of care here in Houston that we then can begin to monitor and see if we can show a measurable increase in access and a reduction in hospitalization and so that's the goal right now and and what we're doing and the way we're doing that is with faith communities school districts peer deliver services and then kind of kind of cutting-edge kind of ways to think about you know integrating people into the community as opposed to putting them to institution so now what the data shows us is that individuals who work with peers peer counselors mental health coaches things like that support groups that that that causes them to it reduces her hospitalization or days spent inpatient and all of these things have been demonstrated with enormous number of pupil studies even our own studies with the support group material that we've developed and that we are putting into these faith communities we find this is for our living grace group which is for individuals who have serious mental illness we see a significant reduction in depression anxiety symptoms we see it a significant increase in individuals spiritual growth this again is all peer led and these are people with serious mental illness when I first started putting these together probably ten years ago when I very first started developing these before we started doing all the work on them you know I was told well you can't mix diagnosis together you can't have people that lack insight in support groups you this will never work well I mean there's this is in over a hundred churches seventeen states around the country seven its differ seven different countries this is our trauma group this is data actually that we use with peers in Libya during the revolution so we had significant reductions of PTSD clinical symptoms PTSD checklist score reductions but again led by people with no more training than what we gave them prior to them beginning a group there's a curriculum that they use which is based on cognitive behavior therapy so we have a we have something very standard for them to use but it's delivered by a peer it doesn't require them to to really use any resources at all so so this is what we're doing this is our program we will go into a faith community we will offer an initial four hour training for the clergy and the staff which we call mental health 101 that teaches the clergy and the staff or whatever people within that congregation or a group they want us to train what we call the four R's how to recognize the mental healthcare problem how to make a proper referral and then what we have done is we have clinicians here that are continually of vetting individuals in the community providers so we've already vetted a large network of providers across the community so you don't have to go find people to refer to we've already found them we know what insurances they take we know which people work on a sliding scale we know which people do pro bono work we know all of that kind of work ahead of time so we have that database that we've developed and you can work within that and so how to recognize refer how to relate to somebody in distress and then how to set up restorative programs within your faith community that will offer some therapeutic aspect to these people and that would be our support groups or support groups from anyone we'll hook you up with nationalise for the mentally ill or what used to be DVS a which is remind now or fresh hope or whoever you want to come in and have a support group or we can train your people to run support you also have access to our clinicians here that can help you with referrals or answer questions or you can always refer here we offer 40 support groups a week as well as individual services for people that have serious mental illness we also do a lot of mental health care planning all of our services are free so people come last year we serve individuals from 191 different zip codes and so you know we we see very ill people from all over their community that are referred here we also will take somebody from your congregation and train them to be a mental health coach we have a training next week and we think we have individuals from 8 different churches that will be there and will train them they'll know how to do support groups they'll know how to work through the curriculum they'll know how to oversee a mental health oriented ministry at the church that offer services and so that person will go back and be a point person at that church that person will also be our point person there to provide data for us to show that this is being effective and then finally we have a website called a mental health gateway which is a online platform that has it basically as a drop down menu it has all the lots of different mental illnesses and you click on a middle illness and there's a video there that has a mental health care provider a clergy that's worked with someone with that problem as someone who's been impacted by that mental healthcare problem they talk about you know it from a scientific perspective from a kind of experiential aspect and also how faith community had helped that person and then there's information that you can read about the about that there's a set of databases where you can put your zip code in and it'll show you say all the mental health facilities in the area around that zip code or I'll show you all the providers that are near that area and then there's some downloadable resources and we have on that website right now you also can contact our mental health coaches through their of we have I always forget one so let's see if I can remember them now depressive disorders anxiety disorders schizophrenia bipolar disorder OCD eating disorder substance abuse borderline personality disorder were filming dementia right now and ADHD I forgot is that all okay I thought I forgot one so that's all of them right now we're our hope is to add three modules every year so so that right that amount that I just mentioned there covers the majority of what you run into but all that information is there and available and it's set up specifically to to support the faith communities once they've been trained and brought online so this is our our first set of front doors and then as we finish out a large mass of churches we'll be moving into our school systems we've already had a couple of school systems contact us they're very interested in having us you know they've heard about what we're doing the faith communities and they want us to come train their administrators and teachers and in essence this program is set up for them also and so we even have some teen versions of the support groups that are being piloted that we should be able to offer by the time and I know remind already actually already has a team version so there are teen versions of those so again it's all about setting up a continuum of care and most of what I talked about so far has been no cost or low cost to the individual who's trying to access care you know the one of the primary things people will tell you about fixing the mental healthcare systems well we don't have enough mental health care providers well we don't we're never gonna have enough you're just not going to convince enough people to go to school for as long as I went to school and get paid what you get paid for being a male helper insurance as a pain it's a Memorial Hermann I am at one of the former CEOs I'm having lunches on the former CEOs and I said why did some moral Herrmann have no psychiatric meds and he said because there's no money in psychiatry I mean that's just how it is it's not that he wants to make money he wants to just break even and you can't even break even because there's just no money in it and then minitor for instance which is a wonderful psychiatric hospital here they don't take insurance and the reason they'll tell you they don't take insurance is because they know that someone with a psychiatric condition that needs to be hospitalized needs to be treated for more than eight days and so they want to treat you for three to four months so that they can really help you begin to move forward but if they took insurance they can only treat you for an average eight days so you know I won't even tell you how much it is to go to miniature for a month you know it's in their tens of thousands of tens of tens and tens of thousands of dollars but that's not their fault they're just trying they have to they have to make money to be able to do what they do and they want to treat people the way they should be treated and that is how people should be treated you should be able to stay for three to four months you know when you're in a crisis like that not dumped back on your family after a very short period of time where you're boosted full meds and then this is what this kind of looks like for us right now and all the zip codes that you see a little red dot we and even that one way out there is kind of a weird it's a church way out and Prairie View contacted us and had us come out there but we are working with congregations and all of these zip codes right now a training minim and getting the support group set up and getting their mental health coach coaches trained some of them already have their support groups set up but over time our expectation is that you know you'll be able to zoom in on any one of these zip codes and you'll have five six churches in every zip code that will have been trained you have to train every Church and every church doesn't have to do everything it's it's it's not about that what it is it's about it's about every faith community doing something so if you do nothing nothing more than let us come out and do the Train Aesir is the best part and I got an email this morning from a pastor that I just did a training right down here just last Thursday he said this has been the most incredible thing I cannot believe you guys come out to the churches that do this for free it's all free we do it for free and so we'll come to you and we'll do it for free he says I've never had the response from my staff that I have seen after they had this train and so you know it it's what they deal with every day but no one ever kind of helped him understand that that's what they deal with every day so it's going very well hopefully as I said at the same time we're developing a broad network of faith communities that are front doors we will also continue to develop our network of providers so ultimately the goal is one day if you're over here in zip code 77063 right there and you call the hope and healing center which is right around in there somewhere and you say that's where I am we will be able you don't have to come here to get your service we'll be able to say okay well there is there are three faith communities near you that we have mental health coaches at and support groups you can go to any of those and that and we also have a set of providers already vetted in that area you'll be able to get all your mental health care right there in that area and so right in your neighborhood will be everything that you need and then at least half of it will be for no cost and so that's the goal that's all that's going to take time you know the goal right now is five years to get the faith communities online and maybe out to another eight years to get some of the recovery homes online but you know we have we have all the time in the world I guess so it's really bad right now so that's what we're doing I will be happy to answer any questions you might have around that

Channel: Hope and Healing Center & Institute

Views: 4,811

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Id: mnqoBsXdN4k

Length: 52min 1sec (3121 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020