Clozapine Should Have Been Tried Earlier
After 16 years of medications that worked for a few months and then failed, clozapine changed everything. A firsthand case for trying it sooner.
“I worry daily if he’s alive and eating.”
Discharged homeless one week after a long-acting injection, with no safety plan. Now he refuses medication, and his mother travels monthly to keep him safe.
The ‘Miracle of Ordinary’ Cost Us Seven Years of Systemic Failure.
After 7 years, 20+ hospitalizations, and repeated discharges as ‘not sick enough,’ a mother finds the treatment no doctor offered: Clozaril.
What does it take to change the law to get help BEFORE danger?
It’s been a little over a year since they buried their son. The system asks to wait until a person is dangerous enough. He got dangerous enough. The law hasn’t changed. What does it take?
One Pill Between Us and the Cliff
A mother gives her son his pill by hand every night, and sold her home to keep going. Then he turns violent, she calls the police on the person she loves most, and gets told to wait for bruises. That’s not protection. That’s a system deciding a mother’s warning doesn’t count until it’s too late to matter.
They Called It Her New Baseline
A legal guardian warned that her mother wasn’t stable enough to go home. The facility discharged her anyway — actively psychotic, alone in a taxi with no keys, no phone, no shoes — and called it her “new baseline.”
Spencer’s Story
A Family’s Journey Through Psychosis, Homelessness, and the Behavioral Health System. Read a mother’s account of her child’s year on the street while lost in psychosis. She wants her pain to prevent others’ pain, her experiences to inform policymakers, advocates, or anyone else interested in systems change.
Policy Failure: River Reed Hammett’s Story
The River Act is not about taking rights away.
It is about protecting the right to be well.
It is about protecting the right to be safe.
It is about treatment before tragedy.
His “Rights” Were Cited. Actual Care Was Denied.
Anosognosia left him unable to see his schizophrenia. The system saw it — and still released him from a hold to a shelter, then to jail.
The Same Behavior That Hospitalized Her, Killed Her
Ashley Goldfarb’s family begged the county hospital to hold her. Doctors discharged the 25-year-old within a day, deciding she’d sobered up and wasn’t “gravely disabled enough.” Ten days later, she died running into traffic.