Personally Speaking: Assisted Outpatient Treatment Saved My Life
By Eric Smith
Hear Eric Smith read his story:
I was a teenager when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. What happened next was almost 15 years of failed medications, multiple hospitalizations and unnecessary interactions with police, FBI and Secret Service.
My mental illness affected every part of my life. Suffering from paranoia and rapid cycling bipolar disorder symptoms I dropped out of high school. My relationships disintegrated. I was given every kind of medication that could be given to a person with mental illness: antidepressants, SSRIs, anti-psychotics—nothing worked. So, I self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, and eventually decided to enter rehab.
I was arrested for a nonviolent offense in 2009 and was sent to jail. I was held there for 30 days while in the worst state of mind I have ever experienced. The few medications they had in the jail were medicines that I had already tried without any lasting success.
I was making the guards and inmates nervous, so they moved me to a sparse cell with one bed, one sink and one toilet. I was only allowed to see my parents once during that entire ordeal, through a thick glass window.
Eventually, I was transferred from the jail to a hospital and then I got to go into an Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) program. The AOT program offered an innovative solution to the problems born from my mental illness. It gave me a team—a judge, a social worker, a psychiatrist, a nurse and others—to support me.
Treatment Advocacy Center · Assisted Outpatient Treatment Saved My Life by Eric Smith
It was the first time in my struggle with my mental illness that I was able to look towards the future. I lived in a group home that, while it wasn’t perfect, ensured that someone was holding me accountable 24/7.
I was able to stabilize and went home to live with my parents, but in 2011 my psych meds stopped working and I had to be hospitalized again. This would be my third and final hospitalization. A psychiatrist looked at the long list of medications that I had tried and that had failed. Doctors had prescribed me everything—except clozapine. So, she put me on a low dose of clozapine and two weeks later, my delusions and hallucinations went away. I went from taking five to eight medications per day, to just needing one psychiatric medication. Clozapine is still working for me, almost a decade later.
I went through another 12-month AOT program after that hospitalization and was able to turn my life around. I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology from the University of Texas at San Antonio and I am now a graduate student training to become a professional advocate and mental health expert.
I want to pinch myself when I think about how far I have come. I was a high school dropout who is now in graduate school.
Looking back, I know that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the help of AOT and my treatment team. AOT saved me from the criminal justice system and from insanity.
AOT saved my life.
It’s been a long journey since my initial diagnoses when I was a teenager. My life is so different from what my parents feared it would be in those early years. I’ve received glowing letters from my professors and graduated in the top 10% of my class. I’ve been able to go to Washington, D.C. to meet with a member of the congressional mental health caucus to champion additional support for AOT. I’ve spoken to Senator Kamala Harris’ deputy chief of staff and have communicated with Senator Cory Booker and his policy team about AOT and SMI. I’ve also worked closely with the Treatment Advocacy Center as a consultant on a white paper about AOT and traveled with the organization to national conferences to tell my story.
AOT allowed me to find my calling in policy advocacy. Being an advocate is a lot of work, but it doesn’t feel like work—it feels like home. I’m doing what I was meant to do. I want to make sure the story I lived and the horrible things my family had to go through because of my mental illness weren’t all for nothing.
If you take anything away from my journey, it should be that serious mental illness is not something that can be solved by the criminal justice system. Civil court proceedings and programs like AOT are the best ways to help people.
Eric Smith is a mental health advocate, public speaker on matters of mental illness, and graduate student.