(Jan. 7, 2015) Sue Sanders’s husband “was the type of mentally ill person who plunged through the badly frayed social safety net and hit rock bottom, again and again,” she writes in the Washington Post.
“We met when I was 19 and he was 20. We were together 18 years, the last five of those spent with him ping-ponging on and off his medications. While on them, he was the kind, funny man I’d fallen for; off, he was a stranger plagued by paranoia who rarely slept and occasionally disappeared for days at a time,” she says (“Mental illness turned my ex-husband into someone I didn’t recognize. Still, his death left me reeling,” Jan. 7).
The one thing that made a difference?
Kendra’s Law – New York’s statewide assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) program.
“The one thing that seemed to work for Mike was New York’s Kendra’s Law, a court-ordered program where he was forced to regularly see a psychiatrist,” she writes. “He took his meds, and if he went off them the doctor noticed before he fell too far. The program stabilized him.”
He stopped taking his meds when he left the program.
“(H)is mother told me they were taking him off the program because he was doing so well. He was doing so well because he was in the program, monitored and on his meds. This seemed cruel.”
Sanders’ ex-husband died of pancreatic cancer before his mother “could figure out what to do next.”
Sanders says she and her husbands’ friends are mourning not only “the man he was ‘before,’ but also years of enormous potential cut short — not just from cancer but from severe, untreated mental illness.”
Too many people could write the same story. Treatment works. The Treatment Advocacy Center works to eliminate barriers to treatment so there are fewer stories like this to tell.
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