Excerpt from: The New York Times,
September 15, 2002
When Politics Is Personal - (Senator Pete V. Domenici
and the shaping of the US Govt. policies on brain diseases/mental illness).
By Deborah Sontag; Deborah Sontag is a staff writer
for the magazine.
'My daughter Clare, and it's spelled c-l-a-r-e, she's my fourth child
of eight," Senator Pete V. Domenici began reluctantly, his voice
soft and gravelly. "Clare was a beautiful, beautiful girl. Now
she's all grown up, and she's, well, she's struggling. Struggle is
a good word for it."
Domenici had been sitting beside me in an armchair in his Washington
office, chatting about a re-election race that is causing him little
anxiety. But when the conversation shifted to his family, and then
specifically to his 40-year-old daughter, Clare, he rose abruptly
and moved away, putting his solid senatorial desk between us. Sitting
beneath a Navajo wall-hanging from his native New Mexico, he absorbed
himself lining up pens on a yellow legal pad. A 70-year-old Republican,
Domenici is not a soul-bearing, confessional type, and he has zealously
guarded his family's privacy during his nearly three decades in the
Senate. "Personal stuff," as he calls it, makes him squeamish;
he'd rather talk about taxes or nuclear energy or almost any piece
of pending legislation.
With what looked like a nod to himself, however, he continued. "Clare
was a very marvelous gifted athlete," he said. "In her best
year in high school, she was district champion in tennis; she was
a catcher on the baseball team; she was an absolutely outstanding
guard on the basketball team." During her freshman year at Wake
Forest in North Carolina, however, Clare started to lose her zest,
growing "fuzzy" and inordinately indecisive. She would call
home frequently for guidance on simple issues, "like what kind
of potato to have," Domenici said. "She was all out of whack.
Then my wife, Nancy, went down there to help her and ended up bringing
Clare back home. That's when things got really out of hand. Her temperament
totally changed. She became angry, mean. Throwing things at mirrors.
Cussing, swearing. Crying, shrinking into a shell, taking to her bed.
And that started two novice parents down the strange path of having
to believe something we didn't want to believe. And to really believe
it, to acknowledge that Clare was mentally ill, took a long time."
As Domenici exhaled, his assistant tiptoed in to give
him a note, and he asked her hopefully, "Meredith, do I have to
go to an appropriation meeting?" The assistant shook her head,
but Domenici had revealed all he wanted to about Clare for the moment.
So he switched gears and talked, in his distinctively folksy and rambling
way, about how the happenstance of Clare's illness had redirected his
political agenda. If it were not for Clare's struggle with what was
finally diagnosed as atypical schizophrenia, it is improbable that Pete
Domenici, Mr. Fiscal, would have assumed the unlikely role of champion
for the mentally ill. "I don't believe the subject ever would have
come up," he acknowledged.
Domenici had made a name for himself as the Republican Party's budget
expert. He was a gray, pragmatic fiscal and social conservative who
opposed abortion, gun control and same-sex marriage and supported school
vouchers, tax cuts and mandatory three-strikes sentencing. He was no
bleeding heart, no cause-pleader. But Clare's troubles led Pete and
Nancy Domenici into what, 18 years ago, seemed almost like a secret
world inhabited by all those whose lives had been touched and ineluctably
changed by mental illness. "And once I got into it, I wouldn't
have gotten out of it even if somehow Clare would have come out of my
mind," Domenici said. "You get into the world of these dread
diseases -- you hear stories -- they're terrible from the standpoint
of what's happening to these people and what's happening to their families.
Society was just ignoring them, denying them resources."
It is strange to think that government works that way, that the fact
that a senior senator has a mentally ill daughter can spur governmental
action on mental illness. Yet on many issues, politics really is that
personal and lawmaking that arbitrary. "You'd be surprised how
often legislation is directly informed by our lives," Lynn N.
Rivers, a Democratic member of the House from Michigan, says. "In
the field of mental health, I think it's possible that nothing at
all would have been done by Congress if it weren't for legislators
like Domenici who were galvanized by personal experience." Rivers
herself has had very direct personal experience; she is a manic-depressive.
At a committee hearing this spring, after a couple of witnesses suggested
that mental illnesses were not really illnesses, she snapped open
her purse and extracted an amber vial -- the pills that keep her healthy
-- and shook it like a maraca as if to wake them up.
Over a decade ago, when Domenici embraced the issue, mental illness
was not on the national agenda. Americans didn't like to think about
it. Even now, although the subject has come out of the shadows and
Prozac is in many an American medicine cabinet, Americans remain skeptical
and judgmental. Domenici knew that he was growing impassioned about
an issue that many of his colleagues would consider marginal, even
distasteful, and that he needed colleagues who had been shaken personally,
too.
He ended up joining forces with a quite liberal Democratic senator,
Paul Wellstone, whose older brother had grappled with severe mental
illness for many years. Together the "odd couple," in Wellstone's
words, nurtured bipartisan alliances with former Senator Alan Simpson,
whose niece committed suicide, and Senator Harry Reid, whose father
killed himself, and Tipper Gore, who has suffered depression, and
Representative Marge Roukema, whose husband is a psychiatrist, and
Representative Patrick Kennedy, who has also battled depression, and
Senator Edward Kennedy, Patrick's influential father, and Rivers.
"There has been a personal, crystallizing experience in each
of our lives," Wellstone says. "You almost wish it didn't
have to work that way, that all of us would care deeply anyway about
people who were vulnerable and not getting the care they need. But
this kind of thing happens a lot in politics for fully human reasons."
For 10 long years, Domenici and Wellstone have focused
their energies on a law that would force health insurers to treat mental
and physical illnesses with full parity. They consider it civil rights
legislation, but insurers and employers -- potent lobby groups who view
it as a costly and unnecessary new mandate -- have largely succeeded
in blocking it. Suddenly this year, however, the two senators feel tantalizingly
close to achieving what once seemed a nearly impossible goal. It is
odd timing, given the political preoccupation with terrorism, corporate
misconduct and Iraq. But perhaps, after "A Beautiful Mind"
won its Academy Awards, this was destined to be the year when the mentally
ill received their due. Or perhaps it is simply because Pete Domenici
has a friend in the White House, and his friend owed him one, and that's
the way the chit system known as government works.
When we talked in his office, I asked Domenici if he kept a picture
of Clare in the extensive gallery of family photos behind his desk.
"Sure," he said. Then he peered over the top of his glasses
and rooted around. "Hmmm," he said. "Well. Hmmm. Well.
I guess I don't have her here, and I'll have to fix that." He handed
me a faded family portrait that looked to be from the 1970's. "That's
her right there," he said, pointing to a wan girl with a faraway
gaze. "I guess she has a little sad look in that one, doesn't she?"
He then ambled over to a display wall adorned with professional artwork
from New Mexico. In one corner hung two childlike watercolors -- a vase
of flowers and a cluster of sea gulls signed "To Dad, From: Clare."
A flicker of a smile crossed Domenici's face. "She's not half bad,"
the senator said.
The Domenicis live in Washington, down the street from
the Ashcrofts and a few blocks from the Senate in a house identifiable
by the red chili peppers -- New Mexico's state vegetable -- dangling
beside their front door. Clare lives by herself in an apartment in Albuquerque,
with two siblings, four aunts, a boyfriend, a case manager, a job coach,
a counselor and a doctor on hand to help her cope. Clare does not have
hallucinations or delusions, which is why her schizophrenia is labeled
atypical. Atypical schizophrenics suffer from losses -- of will and
drive, of the ability to experience joy and pleasure, of cognitive functioning.
Their affect tends to be flat and their thinking irrational at times.
In Clare's case, this produces debilitating anxiety. Clare's younger
sister Paula Domenici, who is a psychologist, described Clare's daily
life as racked by "anguish and hell." Nonetheless, like many
atypical schizophrenics who respond well to the new low-dose antipsychotic
drugs, Clare has found a treatment regime that allows her to be quite
functional when she sticks to it. She works; she drives; she sings in
her church choir; she plays tennis at an Albuquerque tennis club --
and wins," Paula says. But Clare's condition fluctuates. Recently,
she took a leave from her job sorting mail because the stresses of the
mail room were getting to her. "Any little thing can rock the boat,"
Paula says. "She gets very hurt very easily."
The Domenicis have grappled for years with how to balance
their daughter's right to, and need for, privacy against the potential
public good of talking openly about a senator's daughter's mental illness.
"We would ask ourselves, 'Will it do her harm or not?"' Domenici
said. And until now, they have always erred on the side of playing it
safe, since they are not people who like to talk about themselves anyway.
In our first conversation, Domenici squirmed, his eye on his watch.
Subsequently, though, he made the decision to surmount his discomfort
because he thought it might serve his political ends. Besides, it was
his wife who was the really private one.
When I first called Nancy Domenici, who is considered a lay expert on
mental health by many in the field, she said: "Gosh, why me? I'm
not the most hep person on the subject of mental illness." Eventually,
her husband persuaded her to talk. "I didn't want to end up divorced,"
she joked. Still, because she is either protective or overprotective,
she body-blocked the idea of my talking directly to Clare. She said
that Clare was simply too "wobbly" right now.
We chatted at her kitchen counter, sipping tea from
mugs with rose handles beneath a clock that chirps a different birdsong
on every hour. At one point, after the finch cried noon, the phone rang,
and Nancy Domenici let the answering machine pick up. "Hi, Mom,
this is Clare." Clare was calling in to report to her mother that
she would be going to the doctor at 2 p.m. and to her "weigh-in"
at 4. (One side effect of her medication has been a weight gain that
makes Clare look matronly, and it bothers her, her parents said.) Clare's
voice sounded thick around the edges, and it lingered afterward in the
air between us.
In a senate coffee shop, with a cup of Starbucks by
his side, Domenici doodled on his daily press clippings. "Me/Bush,"
he wrote. He told me he had always hoped that the stars would line up
as they now have, with a president in office whom Pete Domenici had
helped elect. "Here's how it worked," Domenici said. "He's
kind of my friend. He gets elected. I know there's one thing I really
want to do above most other things. I wait a few months after he gets
in, and then I request a meeting."
In 1996, Domenici and Wellstone enjoyed their first success after four
years of trying to overcome Congress's reluctance to address the problem
of inequitable and inadequate insurance coverage for mentally ill Americans.
Making a lot of compromises, they won approval for what Domenici now
calls "mental illness coverage lite," a first step. The Clinton
White House helped, and especially Tipper Gore, who a few years later
would disclose her own experience with depression. Newt Gingrich, then
the Republican speaker of the House, didn't actively assist but, after
a visit from Domenici, he didn't block the legislation either -- which
mental-health advocates attribute partly to the fact that Gingrich's
mother suffers from bipolar disorder.
Still, the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 was limited
in nature and in effect. It mandated equal annual and lifetime dollar
limits for mental and physical benefits; lifetime limits for mental-illness
coverage used to be capped at about $125,000, compared with about $1
million -- or sometimes no limit -- for physical disorders. But it allowed
employers to comply with the letter rather than the spirit of the law,
shifting their costs by raising co-payments and deductibles or lowering
limits on hospital days and outpatient visits.
Many states, meanwhile, introduced mental-health parity
laws that go further than the federal government's. But even those states
possess limited ability to regulate self-financed employer health plans,
so Domenici and Wellstone wanted a broad piece of federal legislation
that would set the standard. With the 1996 law due to expire by year's
end anyway, they are pushing to create the first comprehensive mental-health
equitable treatment act.
Mental-health advocates say it will make things infinitely
fairer. Without parity, the middle-class parents of a newly psychotic
19-year-old son, say, might discover they have a 30-day lifetime limit
on psychiatric hospitalization; that limit might be reached before his
illness is even diagnosed, much less treated. They would be left then
with three options: go into debt, forgo treatment or turn to the overburdened
public sector. If their son had been in a serious car accident, they
would face no such predicament.
The Domenici-Wellstone law does make some allowances
for the business community's concerns. It does not mandate coverage
of mental illnesses; it mandates equal treatment of physical and mental
illnesses where such coverage exists. It exempts businesses with less
than 50 employees. It doesn't include substance abuse. But insurers
and employers are tired of Congress's interference, and they do not
see this as a civil rights issue. "There is no right to health
care," says E. Neil Trautwein, director of employment policy for
the National Association of Manufacturers. "If this issue gets
cast that way, it's unfair, and it kind of makes us look like the bad
guys. Our members are already providing voluntary coverage."
Many insurers and employers maintain that the parity
legislation is misguided, that it will end up backfiring and prompting
some providers to drop mental-health coverage entirely. They say that
parity for mental-illness coverage, as designed, will drive up health-care
costs and that the legislation defines mental disorders so broadly that
people with problems like caffeine intoxication or jet lag will abuse
the system.
Recently, however, these opponents have lost ground.
While Domenici had a couple dozen co-sponsors in 1992, when he first
introduced mental-health legislation, he now has 66 senators with him
on this. He has been unsuccessful, however, in reaching across the Hill
and persuading the House leadership to join him, even though a majority
of House members are on record as supportive. And that's why Domenici
paid his visit to the Oval Office in July of last year.
Domenici was pleasantly surprised that Bush took the
issue seriously enough to ask Andrew Card, his chief of staff, to attend.
The senator wasn't certain whether he needed to start at the beginning,
to explain that diseases of the brain are as real as diseases of other
organs and that they are treatable. "I just plain didn't know where
he was on the mental issue," Domenici said. "But I was only
a few sentences into it before he stopped me and said, 'On the issue
of is this a disease, I've already gone up that mountain."'
Dr. Samuel Keith, chairman of the psychiatry department
at the University of New Mexico, participated in a round-table discussion
on mental health with Bush in the spring. The president said that he
had grown up thinking people with mental problems should just read the
Bible and try harder, Keith said. But then, according to Keith, the
president told the round-table participants that a close friend in Texas
who was profoundly depressed went off and got treatment and returned
a transformed man. This opened his eyes, the president said.
The president was also sensitized by the suicide last
year of Heinz Prechter, a Michigan businessman, Domenici said, although
he was not sure whether Bush had told him this or someone else had.
Prechter, who made his fortune after introducing the sunroof in the
United States and was a generous donor to the Republican Party, killed
himself at the end of a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder.
During that meeting at the White House last year, Bush
told Domenici that 2002 would be a better year. In late April of this
year, as promised, Bush flew to New Mexico to stand beside Pete and
Nancy Domenici, endorse "full mental health parity" and pledge
to get federal legislation passed by year's end. Since then, Bush hasn't
put real muscle behind his pledge, and his priorities are clearly elsewhere.
Domenici, though, takes it on faith -- a seasoned politician's faith
-- that the president will make good on his promise. And the mere fact
of Domenici's securing the president's endorsement has forced the law's
longtime opponents to think about compromises.
"Our vast preference is no additional mandates,
but we don't want to be in an antagonistic position with a longtime
friend like Senator Domenici," says Trautwein of the manufacturers'
group. He suggested that the manufacturers would consider a narrower
version of the law that mandated parity for serious brain-based illnesses
like schizophrenia rather than all mental disorders. "We heard
the president, and we can count noses. We don't want to see this issue
rewound and replayed in the next Congress."
When the Domenicis told Clare that she was going to
be part of a magazine article, she didn't have much to say in response.
It has always been difficult for Clare to see her situation clearly,
her sister Paula says: "Sometimes now she'll say she has a mental
illness, which is good. Ten years ago, she wasn't coherent enough in
her thinking to realize she was ill."
Ten years ago was a low point. Clare, who was then still
living in Washington, would find herself driving around in a fog, unsure
of what she was doing or where she was. Eventually, she checked herself
into a psychiatric hospital. It was the first and last time that she
was hospitalized, her mother says, locked in a closed unit with other
mentally ill people, some withdrawn like her and others quite manic
or psychotic. During that time, though, Clare was retested, and the
Domenicis ended up with a clearer understanding of the chronic nature
of her illness and with a better course of medications.
It had been obvious since Clare dropped out of college
that her functioning was abnormal, but her family initially thought
she was in some kind of extended funk. Maybe it was allergies; it couldn't
have been that baseball that struck her in the neck, could it? They
didn't know where to turn. "We were kind of in the dark ages in
terms of being willing to see a specialist," the senator told me.
Eventually, they found their way to specialists and
more specialists. But Clare's symptoms were not clear-cut, making it
hard for doctors to diagnose her condition and thus for some in her
family to accept that she was in the grip of something that she couldn't
snap out of. At a certain point, the senator said, so many years had
gone by that "you gotta acknowledge the behavior is not normal
and it's probably going to be there for a while."
That acknowledgment, he said, was scary. "When
you finally arrive at the conclusion that your child has schizophrenia,
you have thoughts of suicide," he said. "They threaten. You
really don't know if they're going to follow through. In our case, nothing
has happened. But we know friends where something has, and there probably
isn't a hell of a lot of difference between the one who does it and
the one who doesn't."
Some time after Clare's hospitalization, she moved back
to New Mexico. Her family thought that it would be a good idea to get
her out of urban D.C. and at something of a distance from her mother,
on whom she was extremely dependent. Clare lived for a while in a group
home near a state farm in Carlsbad, where she worked as an assistant
sports counselor for the mentally retarded residents of the farm.
For a time, Clare was covered by Medicare, since she
was collecting Social Security disability insurance payments. Medicare's
coverage for mental health is quite skimpy -- only half of treatment
costs and no prescription drugs unless you're hospitalized. When Clare
started working, she was covered by her employer; the H.M.O. authorizes
a limited number of psychiatric visits a year, but Clare's doctor, on
her mother's prodding, keeps reauthorizing visits. Nancy Domenici juggles
the volumes of paperwork, keeps on top of the bureaucracy and pays out
of her pocket for all costs that are not covered. "What if Clare
had no parents?" she asks.
Years ago, a neighbor of the Domenicis told them about
the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. The senator and his wife
went to a meeting in a church basement and discovered a world of parents
dealing with the same issues facing them. "It was a godsend,"
Nancy Domenici says. And for the alliance too. Pete Domenici heard a
lot of depressing stories with bad endings: families going broke, splitting
up; mentally ill children ending up on the streets, in jail or dead.
Bit by bit, the advocates lured Domenici into involvement, a speech
at a convention here, an appropriation there.
It became clear to Domenici that he could do little
about one of the most pressing needs, which is an overhaul of the public
mental-health system, since that is largely the responsibility of state
and local governments. So he focused on what he could get done. He pushed
successfully for increased federal appropriations for research into
brain diseases, threw his weight behind a private research foundation
and backed programs that dealt with housing, public education and the
mentally ill who are homeless. Every once in a while, he told me, someone
would say to him, "Isn't it good for severe mental illnesses that
your daughter got one of them?" He found that distasteful.
Domenici never expected such a protracted battle on
the parity legislation, and he is tiring of it. Wellstone is downright
antsy, anxious about the president's follow-through. "I haven't
seen the evidence yet that the White House will deliver," he said.
"I'm certainly more impatient than Pete." But then they are
kind of different. Wellstone once called Domenici's office, and an assistant
asked him the subject of his call. "I answered: 'Mental health!
What the hell else do we agree on?"' Wellstone said.
Unlike Domenici, Wellstone speaks with the cogent passion
of a defender of the vulnerable and neglected. He fits more closely
the image one might have of a lead advocate for this cause. He traces
his political awakening itself to a visit he paid as a 10-year-old to
a state mental institution where his college-age brother had been hospitalized
after a breakdown. Wellstone's parents had gone deep into debt trying
to sustain his brother in a private clinic once their insurance ran
out, and the public hospital was a snake pit, he says. "My energy
on this issue is fired by tremendous indignation," Wellstone says.
Rivers, similarly, is a natural heroine for the cause.
She graduated from high school pregnant, married her high-school sweetheart
and started her adult life as a mother bedridden by severe depression.
It took her almost a decade after her illness was diagnosed as manic
depression to find a mix of medications that would allow her to be symptom-free.
Eventually, though, she earned a law degree, became active in local
politics and was elected to Congress in 1994 despite acknowledging her
illness. ("You betcha!" she said when a caller to a radio
show, obviously a plant, asked if she had ever been depressed. "And
so have millions of other Americans!") At times, she and her former
husband, a boiler engineer, were spending half their take-home pay on
her barely insured treatment, so she takes the parity issue very personally.
The only possible explanation for employers' and insurers' reluctance
to cover mental illnesses on a par with physical illnesses, she says,
is "ignorance or greed."
Last year, when Rivers learned that she would have to
face Representative John Dingell in a Democratic primary after her district
was redrawn, she was beset by anxiety. But not for political reasons.
"The one thing that frightened me was not running against the dean
of the House, not all the money he was going to have, but this terrible
fear that if I lost, I would lose my health insurance." Rivers
is covered under a federal employees' plan that guarantees full parity
coverage. "I am not smug enough to believe that I am not at risk
of relapse, and my terror is getting sick again without having appropriate
insurance," she said in July. Dingell did indeed beat Rivers in
the August primary, leaving her to face these concerns.
In contrast to Wellstone and Rivers, Domenici can seem
uninspired, even inarticulate, in making his case. He uses euphemisms,
talking about mentally ill people as being "under the shell"
or "coming out from the shell" after treatment. He asks: "Is
a severe schizophrenic 19-year-old who's been catatonic -- they finally
got him out of it but now he's gained weight and weighs 300 pounds because
that's the side effect -- is that less bad than someone with cancer?"
But advocates for the mentally ill believe that Domenici's folksy awkwardness
on the subject of mental illness can be quite effective, precisely because
the subject makes many Americans uncomfortable. And it is, they suggest,
also something of an act. Domenici's expertise is probably unparalleled
on the Hill, they say, and more important, it is his political know-how,
the way he bargains behind closed doors, that counts.
Andrew Sperling, legislative director for the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill, says that Domenici has played a singular
role precisely because he is such an unlikely advocate. "If the
parity legislation had come along as a Kennedy-Wellstone initiative,
it would never have been taken seriously in the Senate. Democrats come
up with mandates on health insurance every day. But when a senior Republican
senator with a fairly conservative voting record comes forward and says
that in this instance the federal government has a responsibility to
set a standard on the marketplace -- it has the flavor of a Nixon in
China."
As year's end approaches, Domenici knows that Clare's law, like Clare
herself, needs to be watched and tended if it is not to be overlooked
or derailed. He hesitantly confided that he expected Clare to marry
in the near future, and it is clear that he is ready for some kind
of ceremony -- the Rose Garden, maybe -- on the legislative front
too. "We've been doing this for a long time," he said, "and
I am older than some people think."
California, US - LAURA'S LAW SIGNED BY
GOVERNOR DAVIS
NEW LAW REFORMS TREATMENT OF SERIOUSLY MENTALLY ILL
GOVERNOR DAVIS SIGNS LAURA'S LAW 9/28/2002
'Laura's Law' Will Allow Court-Ordered Treatment Of Mentally Ill.
By Dan Morain And Carl Ingram, Times Staff Writers
SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation Saturday permitting
authorities to treat severely mentally ill people against their will
if
judges conclude that they cannot care for themselves and are likely
to
become dangerous.
The legislation represents a significant amendment to a state law
that
protects the civil rights of mentally ill people, the 30-year-old
Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. The act helped lead to the emptying of
state hospitals, which once housed more than 30,000 people but now
care for
4,000. All but about 800 of those remaining patients have committed
crimes and were sent to institutions by courts.
The legislation, Assembly Bill 1421, establishes a hearing process
in
which judges will determine whether the person has a history of failing
to comply with treatment and has, within four years, exhibited "serious
violent" behavior against others, or tried to hurt himself or
herself.
The individual could be represented by a public defender or a private
lawyer.
Davis said he expects the measure to help reduce homelessness,
hospitalization and involvement in the criminal justice system.
"This is a critical step in helping the seriously mentally ill,
as well
as their families," Davis said in a statement, predicting that
the bill
would "help end the cycle of hospitalization, quitting treatment
and
relapse."
Davis' decision to sign the bill marked a victory for Assemblywoman
Helen Thomson (D-Davis) in her final year in the lower house. Thomson
tried for five years to win approval of the measure, which was backed
by law enforcement and many family members of the mentally ill. Liberals
in the Legislature, siding with some patients' rights activists, had
blocked its passage until this year.
Thomson called the final version of the bill "Laura's law,"
named for
Laura Wilcox, a 19-year-old woman who worked at a Nevada County mental
health facility and was killed by a man whose mental illness had gone
untreated. It is similar to a New York law adopted in 1999 after a
mentally ill man pushed 32-year-old Kendra Webdale into the path of
a
subway train.
As part of the compromise, counties will have the option of
participating, and would bear the costs. People would be treated in
expanded outpatient programs considered the "least restrictive"
necessary to achieve recovery.
Under current law, people generally can be detained for 72 hours.
In
extreme cases, they can be held for six months. The law provides
parents and other family members of adults who are mentally ill little
or no
opportunity to intervene on the individual's behalf. Thomson's bill
will allow family members to testify at hearings.
"I don't think it will have any impact on the population in
state
hospitals," said Stephen W. Mayberg, director of the state Department
of Mental Health. "Our goal is to treat people not in institutional
settings."
UK law and upcoming injectable drugs to treat schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder
Manufacturers of antipsychotic drugs are set to launch longer-lasting
injectable products which will help combat the problem of poor patient
compliance in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,
says new research from Datamonitor.
These drugs, which include Novartis' Zomaril (iloperidone) and Bristol-Myers
Squibb's Abilitat (aripiprazole), may have an important role if the
UK government's bill to force treatment of community patents is passed,
because they can ensure that the drugs are taken once every two weeks
or possibly monthly, it adds.
However, the study warns that antipsychotic injections are likely
to have mixed success. While they are particularly useful when treating
patients in the acute phase of schizophrenia, the length of efficacy
may be subject to controversy, as administering long-lasting medication
decreases the ability of the patient to influence their own treatment,
which is considered a patient right in most circumstances. In June
2002, the UK government proposed several changes in the treatment
of the mentally ill, one of which will force patients in the community
to undergo treatment without the need to be sectioned. In this situation,
a long-acting antipsychotic would be particularly useful, says Datamonitor,
because patients in the community could visit a health care professional
every two weeks, or possibly every month, and compliance could be
ensured.
A major issue in treating patients who suffer from spells of psychosis
is that, once their health improves, they are allowed into the community.
However, their chances of staying healthy are reduced because they
are not obliged to continue taking medication, says the report, which
adds that the introduction of longer-lasting drugs should increase
patient compliance greatly and, as such, help to reduce this risk.
-
New Book: "Beyond Crazy" by
Julia Nunes and Scott
Simmie, published by McClelland & Stewart. Sept 2002
ISBN 0-7710-8068-9 $34.99 Canadian dollars
********************************************
Toronto Star October 1, 2002
No looking back
By Julia Nunes and Scott Simmie
With the help of her mom, an indomitable young woman tames a terror
from the past
This is a tale of two generations. It's a sad story that leads to
a much happier one. And it begins in 1980, in the small Northern Ontario
city of Sault Ste. Marie. Terry-Lee Marttinen is 16 years old, dating
a young man named John (a pseudonym) when she discovers she's pregnant.
Something equally unexpected is happening to John. His behaviour has
become increasingly bizarre: he's smoking marijuana, dabbling in the
occult. Terry-Lee is scared; she stops seeing him.
Over the next four years, John winds up in and out of hospital. Much
later - too late - doctors determine he's been suffering from schizophrenia.
One summer day in 1984, when his daughter Tara is 3, John succeeds
after several attempts at suicide. He is 22 years old.
About a decade later, another young life is entering those delicate
teen years. And Tara Marttinen is herself beginning to feel different.
To the outside world, nothing is seriously wrong. After all, what
teenager doesn't stay up late or let their grades slip slightly?
Then one day as she sits at her desk in class, he hears, for the first
time ever, a voice in her head. "It was out of the blue. I heard:
'Take off your shoes and sit under your chair.' Really loud, sort
of screaming in my ear."
For the next several months she carries on with her classes, her
meals with her mom, and nights out with friends as if nothing's wrong.
She shares her secret with no one. But late at night, she lies awake
for hours, lost in a jumble of racing thoughts.
At 16, partway through Grade 11, Tara finally "spills the beans"
to her mother. And immediately, Terry-Lee thinks of schizophrenia.
"When she told me she was hearing voices, I knew instantly. Just
instantly. My little back went up and I was instantly fearful."
We meet Terry-Lee and Tara at a cafe in downtown Toronto. It's the
start of a mini-vacation they've been planning for weeks. Together,
they're visiting relatives, taking in the sights, and "shopping,
shopping, shopping."
Mother and daughter have matching blond hair, blue-grey eyes, and
friendly smiles. When one speaks, the other nods; often, they finish
each other's sentences.
"We've been together a long time," Terry-Lee says proudly.
"Just me and her. Being a young single mom, I think Tara and
I have been really close."
Tara nods in agreement. "I actually like hanging out with my
mom. ... It's relaxing to be around someone who understands you."
Tara is wafer-thin with finely carved cheekbones, alabaster skin,
and a small silver hoop through her left eyebrow just above her funky
black eyeglasses.
"We're very lucky," she says. "I'm very lucky."
Tara and Terry-Lee want to share the story of what's made them lucky.
Of how they got from there to here. There was Tara sitting alone in
her room, writing page after page of anguished poetry. Here is Tara
finishing high school with honours, Terry-Lee preparing to send her
off to university. "I'm relieved," Terry-Lee says. "I
was so scared. And now I know it's okay. I have a safe feeling inside."
The one thing Terry-Lee knew when she found out about the voices was
that Tara needed help away from home. "I just made the assumption
that the care wouldn't be any good in the Soo because of Tara's father's
care."
With a phone call to a distant uncle who worked in the mental health
field, Terry-Lee arranged an appointment at a clinic in London, Ont.,
seven hours away by bus. They didn't know it at the time, but what
they'd stumbled into was a leading-edge treatment facility for first-episode
psychosis. Dr. Ashok Malla runs the Prevention and Early Intervention
Program for Psychoses, or PEPP. Soon they were sitting in his office
as he led them through a clinical assessment.
Straight away, Dr. Malla recognized the early signs of psychosis.
Before he'd even diagnosed Tara with schizophrenia, he prescribed
a low dose of an atypical antipsychotic medication. "If we see
symptoms, if they've been there for more than a week, we treat them,"
Dr. Malla says.
Tara was also given a brain scan in a magnetic resonance imaging machine.
"That was the scariest thing," she says. "But I just
had this feeling: After this it's going to be better."
Tara was never hospitalized, never needed to be. Instead, she and
Terry-Lee returned home and went on with their lives.
Slowly, the voices faded away. But other challenges remained. Schoolwork
was harder than it had been, and even hanging out with friends could
be exhausting. "I missed, on average, one day a week out of school.
... I'd be wiped out. There was too much going on."
Tara was tackling head-on the kind of life changes none of her friends
were interested in making. Late-night partying gave way to quieter
activities: jewellery-making, journal-writing, embroidery. The junk
food was tossed - no more Cheez Whiz sandwiches - and replaced with
a high-protein, low-sugar diet bolstered with vitamins. (Terry-Lee
had done the research on
the Internet.)
Twice a year, mother and daughter made the long trip to London for
consultations with Dr. Malla.
If all this sounds simple, it hasn't been, as Tara wrote in a PEPP
newsletter: "I can't for even one day (diverge) from my regimen
of taking my vitamins, going through my day free of over-stimulation,
then taking my medication, and finally, going to bed at a decent hour.
If one of these elements were missing it would have drastic effects
on my performance the next day."
The payoff, however, has been huge. In five years, Tara has never
had a relapse. "I know when something's wrong," she says,
"and when I should rest."
Dr. Malla is thrilled with Tara's progress. "She has a vision
of her life," he says, "of what she wants to do."
What Tara wanted to do, after high school, was go to university. In
Sault Ste. Marie, that meant leaving home. "We're trying to be
realistic," Terry-Lee says. "Do the homework, cover the
bases, and then leap off the cliff."
The homework included choosing university in London, where Dr. Malla
is. Tara worked for a year after high school to save money. She applied
for student loans, and won scholarships to help pay for tuition and
books. And she decided against a room in residence - "too chaotic,
too much going on," says Tara.
Today, the results of all that can be found on a secluded street in
a clean and cozy apartment in an old house. This is Tara's new home,
the start of her new life. "I like living on my own right now,"
she says. "It's very comfortable. It's my own space."
Tara is pacing herself carefully. Taking three classes (English literature,
calculus, psychology) instead of a full course load of five. Keeping
the usual first-year socializing to a minimum. "I'm a loner anyway,"
she says with a self-deprecating laugh.
In her mind's eye, she carries a picture of the future. A four-year
honours degree in psychology completed over five years, including
summer classes and a full course load in the final year. After that,
a career counselling teens with mental health issues. Even further
down the road, she foresees marriage and kids, and perhaps a chance
to be medication-free. "If for some reason my brain's sort-of
levelled out again ... I don't want to be on meds and having kids."
But for now, she's focused on school. She says she's not even looking
for a boyfriend. "I don't want to be with a person who doesn't
respect my illness and understand the importance of it," she
says firmly. "It's a big part of my life. I don't want it to
be, but it is. It's something I have to deal
with, and they would, too, as a result of being with me. ... And I
don't think right now anybody's prepared for that."
Back at the cafe table, Terry-Lee shakes her head, amazed. "She's
wise. She freaks me out. But I understand why she's wise. Tara's spent
more time thinking about the meaning of life than most people do in
a lifetime."
Tara, slightly embarrassed, allows that she has "grown up fast."
But she finishes her thought in a way that reminds us she isn't too
grown-up just yet. "It's like you're sixteen," she says,
"and suddenly feel thirty, you know?"
Because the comment draws laughter from the rest of us at the table,
Tara - ever considerate - adds: "Forty, eighty, whatever. More
like eighty." Then, discreetly, she smiles.
Tara Marttinen is now in her second year of university. This is a condensed
excerpt from the book "Beyond Crazy"
by Julia Nunes and Scott Simmie,
McClelland & Stewart. ISBN 0-7710-8068-9
http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=0771080689
Excerpt from Windsor Star
October 10, 2002
Path of doom starts with homelessness; Squalor 'breaks your heart'
Windsor Star
BYLINE: Veronique Mandal Star Health-Science Reporter
Angela adjusts the grocery bag on her arm, unlocks the door to her
schizophrenic son's bachelor apartment and enters a rat-infested hole.
She cries. "We've complained to the landlord a hundred times but
nothing gets done. It breaks our hearts and we want to take him home
but he wants to make it on his own," says Angela, a Windsor mom.
"He's not good at standing up for himself and his paranoia works
against him because the landlord sees it and treats him like a dog.
It's almost impossible for people like him to get a decent place to
live that they can afford."
Angela's story is repeated thousands of times across Canada, illustrating
the plight of the 25 to 60 per cent of the homeless who have a serious
mental illness.
Their homelessness sets up a vicious cycle of psychotic events leading
to hospitalization or incarceration, discharge to the streets and relapse.
"Without a proper home where they're stable, without someone to
keep an eye on them and an opportunity to have self-worth, they're lost,"
said Wendy Forrest, a mental health court case manager in Toronto. "There
are times when I visit a client and walk away in tears. It breaks your
heart to see where many of them end up."
Canada's largest city has 62,000 on its subsidized housing waiting
list, many of whom are mentally ill.
"There aren't even enough of the rat holes around let alone something
that's fit for human habitation and the people most often stuck on the
streets are the most seriously mentally ill," Forrest said.
The mentally ill, especially those with paranoid schizophrenia, often
prefer the streets to sleeping in a room with a dozen other people and
consider the street safer, she said.
In Windsor, where up to 50 mentally ill people per night are looking
for a bed, Laura Bedard of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario said
many clients live in rest homes. They range from excellent to disgusting.
About 11 private lodging homes house close to 400 residents.
"Some have bathrooms with no doors, some have co-ed bathrooms,
substandard food and sleep two to six in a room," said Bedard.
"We hear awful stories from people."
A major problem for the mentally ill is the way the government pays
their disability pensions. If they are in a hospital or in jail waiting
for a psychiatric assessment longer than 30 days, their pensions are
cut off and they lose their room or apartment. They come out of hospital
or jail and are forced back on the street.
Research yields better meds; Reducing side-effects,
psychotic episodes the goal
Windsor Star
BYLINE: Veronique Mandal Star Health-Science Reporter
Scientists attempting to design brain-shielding drugs for the mentally
ill are inching closer to curing schizophrenia.
"It could be tomorrow but it could also be 20 years from now,"
said Dr. Barry Jones, a researcher with the pharmacutical firm Eli Lilly
in Toronto.
Understanding the path to a cure begins with understanding how drugs
work on the schizophrenic brain. Anti-psychotics block the overproduction
of the chemical dopamine, particularly in the limbic system, an old
part of the brain which causes psychotic symptoms -- voices and paranoid
delusions. Newer drugs also treat more emotional symptoms such as withdrawal
and cognitive dysfunction. And they reduce the debilitating motor side-effects
which can produce Parkinson-like symptoms such as the shakes.
The drugs also block another receptor for a chemical called seratonin
which makes the frontal cortex of the brain more active. In schizophrenia
the frontal cortex is slow and affects emotion and cognitive functioning.
The frontal cortex is the most highly developed part of the brain.
It develops last and is not complete until the mid-20s, when schizophrenia
typically develops.
"This is why schizophrenia could develop in younger children but
is not evident until the late teens," said Jones. "It gives
us our humanity, abstract thought, motivation and decision-making. It's
silent but dramatic. Psychosis is the noisy part."
Because repeated psychotic events destroy grey matter, Jones said it's
important to develop new drugs to prevent it. A chemical in Lilly's
drug olanzapine appears to do that in a small way.
"The aim is a brand new drug to protect the brain from psychosis,"
he said
Once the genetics of schizophrenia are better understood, Jones expects
the next stage to be a cure.
Traditionally, doctors have had difficulty keeping schizophrenics on
their meds. Anti-psychotic drugs cause everything from drooling and
lethargy to gross weight gain and possible links to heart disease and
diabetes.
Many schizophrenics get fed up having to take a dozen or more pills
a day.
McGill University psychiatrist Dr. Howard Margolese, a leading researcher
in the field, said while it's preferable to have patients on fewer medications,
it often takes several to deal with the symptoms.
"All anti-psychotics are effective against the positive symptoms
of schizophrenia but we have to use an anti-depressant if the person
is depressed and anti-anxiety medication if they're agitated and sometimes
they need a drug to counteract the side-effects," said Margolese.
A study in the British Medical Journal said the average annual cost
of keeping a person on anti-psychotics in Canada is $4,500. The average
cost to hospitalize that person is $39,000.
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Early
Schizophrenia Screening Test 
