Redesigning Services For Parents in Crisis

Stuck In Time

piccwcbi — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:44:02 +0000

Got Lee Gutkind’s book Stuck In Time in the mail today. The subtitle is “The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness”. That pretty sums up my experience as well. I haven’t even cracked the book open yet as the trauma we’ve experienced is pretty fresh even though our son has not lived in our home for two years now.

We drove up to Evergreen Colorado (attachment center of the universe) last week-end just to go ice skating with our youngest daughter on the lake just outside of town. As we drove up 285 I didn’t even have to ask my wife about and post traumatic stress building up. All I said was “so…. As we turned off the exit off 285 to head toward Evergreen. All she said was yes, I feel it too. A road, a sign, a certain phrase and now in this case an entire town can set us back to our most turbulent and nightmarish days.

Not having read the book – I realize my entire family is Stuck In Time, a time of terrible moral conflict, a time deep sadness, of anger. A time we have yet to emerge from.

Maybe I’ll start the book this evening. Not really great bed time reading however.

Money To Fertilize This Grass Roots Project

piccwcbi — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:32:53 +0000

I’m writing up a Letter of Inquiry which is a pre-application process to obtain a mental health grant from George Soro’s Open Society Institute. The best way to get this project completed is to see if I can swing a leave of absence so I can out my full effort into the change that I want to see happen. Not sure how much can be done 30 minutes a day.

Getting Started

piccwcbi — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:34:34 +0000

Here’s the premise of this blog. I want to make change. Not small change but big, big change to a big, big, complex jaugernaut of a system. It’s a system that I’ve been pulled into not because I wanted to, but because I had to for the safety of my family and for the love of my son who desperately needs services more than he needs a family.

I’m driven to make this change or at least attempt to make change, a good change not only for my son but for all the children and their families in the United States who are or will be on the same path I am on right now.

I need the help of a lot of people. I realize I can’t do this alone and in fact I plan on making this a collaborative and very “transparent” endevour.

Most people know very little about the U.S. Mental Health Care System. It’s an uncomfortable subject in a country that has made an art form of comfort.

Many professioanls within the system know just their area of influence but little else other than perhaps a few contacts up and down the chain of command or chain of data flow but that’s about it.

So, I poked around the Internet and found a paper called Relinquishing Custody To Obtain Necessary Treatment . They mention an author, Lee Gutkind, who has eloquently documented the issues in a book entitled Stuck In Time, which chronicles the lives of three Pennsylvania youths with serious emotional disturbances.

I ordered the book and then wrote to Lee about this effort. So, let the education about this system begin!

Lee wrote back, by the way, stating that the system has gotten worse since he wrote the book in 1996 and he wished me luck…