- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Early Psychosis Intervention
- Tag(s): First Episode / Early Onset, Violence or Threat Toward Family or Caregiver
- Location(s): UNK
Why do we have to wait for the tragedy to occur before intervening? Gravely Disabled should be the standard. We have politicians from both sides flinging words like ‘crazy’ and ‘monsters’ when what we are seeing is Sickness.
The brain is an organ that can be diseased like any other organ. I would say the most vital. It controls every function of our bodies. So instead of erecting barriers to access and treatment, we should take the monies earmarked for our most gravely disabled away from the fake agencies that have wasted millions on the worried well and invest it where it would do the most good on the tortured souls that have been abandoned to the streets, jails and morgues.
It’s so easy to steal from our sickest isn’t it ?
That doesn’t mean it should be allowed to continue. Get rid of the IMD Exclusion, which denies the longer-term care that loved ones need but can’t access between the ages of 24 to 64. Coincidentally the ages that these illnesses emerge.
*Each story is shared by someone impacted by untreated SMI, lightly edited for clarity, never for meaning.
THE ASK
The author’s message for legislators:
Stop waiting for preventable deaths. End the IMD Exclusion, fund long-term psychiatric care, and treat severe mental illness like the medical condition it is instead of a moral failure or crime.
share this story:
Read More Stories

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

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

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,
