I’m the mother of someone who suffers from schizoaffective disorder. Schizoaffective disorder is a condition related to schizophrenia, and it has described by the American Psychiatric Association as a chronic brain disorder. I am also the coordinator and co-chair of the Steering Committee for the National Shattering Silence Coalition.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been giving testimony in favor of various bills aimed at strengthening Maine’s progressive treatment program and lowering the threshold at which someone suffering from a serious brain disorder (serious mental illness) can be hospitalized. The arguments against these bills brought by the Attorney General’s Office and Disability Rights Maine are misguided and without legal merit.

Michael Gray, legislative and policy counsel for the Treatment Advocacy Center, told the Judiciary Committee that “L.D. 785, which would apply a psychiatric deterioration standard to inpatient commitment criteria in Maine, is a good bill that will help people with severe mental illness. It is a reasonable exercise of the Legislature’s parens patriae authority and would not violate due process. No decision by any federal court, including the United States Supreme Court, indicates that passage of LD 785 would pose a violation of due process. Furthermore, nearly half of the states already have a psychiatric deterioration standard in their criteria for inpatient commitment, some for many years, and several of those have withstood judicial scrutiny.”

It’s cruel and negligent to deny early intervention and treatment to those suffering from chronic brain disorders based on some misguided notion that we are somehow violating their civil rights. We don’t leave people with dementia to die in our streets. By not providing mechanisms within our statutes to get someone the help they need, we are dooming them to homelessness, incarceration or death – not to mention the loss of brain cells that occurs every time they are left untreated, destroying any hope of recovery. We are also dooming their family members to a life of constant chaos, suffering and unfathomable sorrow, moving from one crisis to the next in our efforts to save our loved ones’ lives.

We are also putting family members and the general public at risk. Twenty-nine percent of all family homicides in 2013 were perpetrated by someone with untreated serious brain disorders, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. Roughly one-third of mass killings are associated with serious brain disorders, the National Council for Behavioral Health has estimated.

The #CostOfNotCaring for these individuals far exceeds the cost of caring. Stop standing in the way of passage of any bill that would provide for the treatment of these illnesses based upon the fact that a fiscal note must be attached.

Each psychiatric readmission costs on average $7,500, and non-adherence has been found to be the No. 1 risk factor for it. Mental illnesses account for nearly 20 percent of all Medicaid readmissions. A study of administrative claims in 19 states, including Maine, found that Medicaid patients had more than 75,000 mental health readmissions within 30 days in one year. Nearly 25 percent of Medicare patients with psychoses were readmitted within one month of discharge, according to federal researchers.

By creating a partnership between the individual and the mental health system, assisted outpatient treatment greatly increases medication adherence, reduces costs from hospital readmission and other revolving-door circumstances and promotes recovery in individuals. People enrolled in assisted outpatient treatment, like Maine’s progressive treatment program, are four times less likely to commit a violent crime, researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health have found, and they’re half as likely to be victimized, according to a Duke University study. “Extensive research shows that assisted outpatient treatment reduces homelessness, arrest, incarceration and hospitalization by 70 percent or so and cuts costs to taxpayers by 50 percent,” DJ Jaffe, executive director of the media and policy clearinghouse Mental Illness Policy Org, wrote in a 2019 op-ed for the medical and science news website Stat.

It’s time to do what’s fiscally responsible and will save lives. Pass L.D. 1090: Resolve, To Equitably Fund Legal Fees for Progressive Treatment Programs, thus allowing more of the people who could benefit from this program to access it.

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