Lost in darkness
MANY WAIT NEARLY A DECADE FOR TREATMENT
Chapter 2
Tracy Love suffered from mental illness for 20
years before getting help.
The delay led to frequent panic attacks,
drinking and drug use, abusive relationships, three suicide attempts and a
felony conviction.
After Love's first suicide attempt 30 years
ago, her parents told her to "stop feeling sorry for yourself and snap out
of it," she says.
"It was only after I started to get
better that I came to find out there is mental illness in my family," says
Love, 52, who lives near Rochester, N.Y. "Nobody ever talked about
it."
“'If someone had listened to me
the way that psychiatrist listened to me in jail. I think maybe my illness
wouldn't have gotten that far.'”
TRACY LOVE
Doctors failed to diagnose Love's mental
illness, even after that suicide attempt sent her to the hospital. She finally
found help in the unlikeliest of places — jail — where Love was incarcerated
after stabbing an abusive boyfriend.
A jail psychiatrist, who interviewed her after
the arrest, was the first person to diagnose her with major depression and
post-traumatic stress disorder, says Love, who credits that doctor with
changing her life. The incident cost Love dearly. She lost her job and custody
of her 10-year-old son for three years. Although Love has turned her life
around and works on a contract basis in mental health, she says her felony
record has kept her from finding a permanent job.
"If someone had listened to me the way
that psychiatrist listened to me in jail," Love says, "I think maybe
my illness wouldn't have gotten that far."
Tracy Love knew her whole life that something was wrong, but
she didn’t get the help she needed until she went to jail.
On average, people with mental illness wait
nearly a decade to get treatment after symptoms first appear, according to the
National Institute of Mental Health.
Nearly 40% of adults with serious mental
illness received no treatment in the previous year, according to the 2012
National Survey on Drug Use and Health, produced by the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. Among adults with any mental illness,
60% were untreated. Though some people with mental illness don't realize
they're sick, others simply can't find help.
It's common for mentally ill patients — who go
to the hospital in search of treatment for a psychiatric crisis — to languish
for weeks in emergency rooms, says Robert Pierattini, a professor at the
University of Vermont College of Medicine and chair of psychiatry at
Fletcher-Allen Healthcare in Burlington.
In November, the son of Virginia state Sen.
Creigh Deeds, a former gubernatorial candidate, was released from an emergency
room because staff there couldn't find a psychiatric bed. Hours later, he
stabbed his father, then fatally shot himself. The senator survived and has
become an advocate for changing mental health laws.
"If this were cancer, we'd be talking
about giving patients the very best treatments," Pierattini says. In
mental health, "a peculiarity in the funding formula is deciding how we
treat patients."
Funding is so poor and services are so hard to
find that many patients can get help only after they've become psychotic,
Manderscheid says.
That's akin to treating diabetes only after
someone needs a leg amputated, Kennedy says.
Keris Myrick, who has schizoaffective disorder
and obsessive-compulsive disorder, says she has experienced the problem
firsthand.
Myrick is the former CEO of a non-profit group
that tries to bridge these gaps by providing overnight crisis care to patients
who need urgent help. These programs are few and far between.
"You go to a hospital and say, 'I'm on
the verge of a breakdown.' The hospital will say, 'You're not sick
enough,'" says Myrick, former president of the National Alliance on Mental
Illness "I said, 'What do you mean I'm not sick enough? I'm trying not to
get sick.'"
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