In a recently published book, Breakdown: A Clinician's Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry, Treatment Advocacy Center supporter and Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, Lynn Nanos, offers first-hand insights into a mental health treatment system pushed past the brink. In it, she details systemic dysfunction in hospitals that prematurely release patients with serious mental illnesses without outpatient follow-up. Predictably, those patients end up homeless, jailed, harming others, or even dead.
Using vignettes based on real interactions with patients, their families, police officers, and other mental health providers, Breakdown shares Nanos' passion for helping people, many of whom are unable to request help themselves. She also helps open an important dialogue about our mental health treatment system – one that we hope will spur interest in improving care for individuals with severe mental illnesses, in Massachussets and across the country.
Nanos is in her eleventh year as a full-time mobile emergency psychiatric clinician in Massachusetts. She received a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University and worked as an inpatient psychiatric social worker. Her book Breakdown: A Clinician's Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry is now available via Amazon.
Earlier in the year, Nanos shared this blog post about discrimination against people with serious mental illnesses and their disparate access to treatment.
For more information about Nanos' book, visit her website https://lynnnanos.com/ or email her at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.