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- Category: Uncategorized
- Tags: First Episode / Early Onset, Recovery with Treatment, Youth / Adolescent
After 16 years of medications that worked for a few months and then failed, clozapine changed everything. A firsthand case for trying it sooner.
- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Medicaid & Insurance
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Homelessness, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): CA
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.
After 7 years, 20+ hospitalizations, and repeated discharges as 'not sick enough,' a mother finds the treatment no doctor offered: Clozaril.
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?
- Category: Involuntary Commitment Barriers, Medicaid & Insurance
- Tags: Recovery with Treatment, Violence or Threat Toward Family or Caregiver
- Location(s): IL
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
- Category: Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Family Inclusion (HIPAA)
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Law Exists Not Enforced, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): OH
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
- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Jail or Prison, Involuntary Commitment Barriers, No Bed, No Placement, Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Homelessness, Incarceration, Recovery with Treatment, Severe Deterioration, Violence or Threat Toward Family or Caregiver, Violence or Threat Toward Others
- Location(s): WA
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
- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Early Psychosis Intervention, Family Inclusion (HIPAA), Involuntary Commitment Barriers, Jail Instead of Hospital, Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Co-Occurring Substance Use, Death, First Episode / Early Onset, Incarceration, Severe Deterioration, Violence or Threat Toward Family or Caregiver, Violence or Threat Toward Others
- Location(s): AL
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.
- Category: Crisis Response, Denied Treatment in Custody, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Involuntary Commitment Barriers, Jail Instead of Hospital, Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Homelessness, Incarceration, Intellectual or Developmental Disability, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): FL
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.
- Category: Crisis Response, Denied Treatment in a Facility, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Family Inclusion (HIPAA), Involuntary Commitment Barriers
- Tags: Co-Occurring Substance Use, Death, Homelessness, Severe Deterioration, Suicide or Attempt
- Location(s): CA, San Diego
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.
When police declare a home too dangerous to enter but not dangerous enough for psychiatric treatment, families are left with one path to care: arrest.
- Category: Crisis Response, Involuntary Commitment Barriers
- Tags: Abuse in a Facility or Jail, Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): MI
Too much to type..." isn't the end of the story. It's what families write when the failures have become too many to recount.
- Category: Crisis Response, Denied Treatment in Custody, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Jail or Prison, Involuntary Commitment Barriers, Jail Instead of Hospital, No Bed, No Placement
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Co-Occurring Substance Use, Homelessness, Incarceration, Law Exists Not Enforced, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): CA, San Diego
This mom documented her son's untreated psychosis asking authorities for help. Instead they jailed and released 8 times in 10 months, never providing a mental evaluation.
- Category: Categorically Excluded, Crisis Response, Custody or Rights Surrendered for Care, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Jail or Prison, Jail Instead of Hospital
- Tags: Co-Occurring Substance Use, Homelessness, Incarceration, Severe Deterioration, Violence or Threat Toward Others, Youth / Adolescent
- Location(s): AL
Signs appeared at age two. The next twenty-five years were spent begging every system that touched her son for help. Instead were a litany of diagnoses, medication changes, and shackles.
- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): NC
For over 30 years, Tammy Willoughby's family has watched a loved one cycle through emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, brief stabilization, discharge, and relapse — over and over again. She created Beyond Stabilization to change that.
- Category: Crisis Response, Early Psychosis Intervention
- Tags: First Episode / Early Onset, Recovery with Treatment
- Location(s): MA
Lissa knew something was wrong from childhood — but no one listened. She wasn't diagnosed until age 34. "My mind felt like a tornado of incoherent thoughts," she says. Today, through medication, counseling, faith, and
- Category: Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Hospital, Family Inclusion (HIPAA)
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Youth / Adolescent
- Location(s): WA
A mother begged to be part of her daughter's care team. The hospital said no. Twenty-four hours after discharge, she was calling every hospital in the area trying to find her. This is what family
- Category: Denied Treatment in Custody, Family Inclusion (HIPAA), Jail Instead of Hospital
- Tags: Incarceration, Suicide or Attempt
- Location(s): KS
A Kansas family watched their loved one cycle through crisis, arrest, and custody, while mental health history they provided went unintegrated, and a suicide attempt occurred behind bars instead of inside a treatment setting.
- Category: Crisis Response, Family Inclusion (HIPAA), Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Co-Occurring Substance Use, Homelessness, Severe Deterioration
- Location(s): CA, San Diego
Families see the changes first. They make the calls. They're the last ones standing when the system walks away. This contributor is asking lawmakers to include them, not exclude them.
- Category: Crisis Response, Involuntary Commitment Barriers
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Co-Occurring Substance Use, Incarceration, Violence or Threat Toward Family or Caregiver
- Location(s): NC
"Earlier that day I had called and asked for help and no one would help me. That's what it led to. He has suffocated me, put a knife to my mom's throat. No charges were
- Category: Competency Limbo, Crisis Response, Denied Treatment in Custody, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Jail or Prison, Involuntary Commitment Barriers, Jail Instead of Hospital, Refusal Treated as Capacity
- Tags: Anosognosia / Lack of Insight, Homelessness, Incarceration, Severe Deterioration, Violence or Threat Toward Others
- Location(s): TX
After repeatedly begging for mental illness care for her son in psychosis, one mother says her pleas were redirected to law enforcement, where an attempted 72-hour hold became jail, homelessness, a gun purchase, a 19-hour
- Category: Crisis Response, Discharged Without a Safe Plan — Residential Facility, Family Inclusion (HIPAA), Voluntary Care Unavailable
- Tags: Death, Severe Deterioration, Suicide or Attempt
- Location(s): MO
Her son went to his PROS program seeking help on his last day. She was given three different accounts from staff about what happened next. Two hours later, he was gone.
"We release people in psychosis all the time — he has to go,” a social worker said, reflecting a system that normalized untreated discharge despite acknowledged danger and incapacity.
This woman lives in the gap the system pretends doesn’t exist - sick enough to lose everything, never ‘sick enough’ to get care. Her life shows what happens when treatment is optional, but consequences are