Personally Speaking: Breaking the cycle for my siblings
By Molly Vencel
Working at the Treatment Advocacy Center often feels like the hand of fate.
I started an internship with Treatment Advocacy Center’s Office of Research and Public Affairs at the beginning of this 
year as part of a class I was taking at Georgetown University, where I am currently finishing my final semester as an undergraduate.
One of the most fulfilling parts of working on the research team is helping to educate family members and people living with severe mental illness about the treatment options, the barriers and the solutions to accessing treatment.
However, it only took an initial phone call with Director of Research Elizabeth Hancq to realize my personal connections to Treatment Advocacy Center’s mission ran much deeper.
As Hancq explained the intersections of severe mental illness and incarceration and the criminalization of mental illness, I was reminded of recent experiences with my own family.
Only weeks earlier, my relatives had failed to show up to drug screenings and mental health evaluations ordered by the court and were facing repercussions. Although I spend my days reading articles and looking at data points, I see the people and struggles I know in lines on the graphs I analyze.
Originally, I choose to intern at Treatment Advocacy Center at the suggestion of a faculty member after I expressed an academic interest in mental health. Like many of my colleagues at TAC, I was drawn to a career in mental health after seeing first-hand accounts of mental illness in my friends and family.
Until I was 20, this mostly meant people battling depression and anxiety, which were managed with access to medication and therapy paid for by private health insurance. While I understood the importance of mental health, I hadn’t yet seen the fractured, inadequate system that leads to incarceration, homelessness and preventable deaths.
My view of mental health began to change after I graduated from high school. Soon after I moved from southern Indiana to Washington, D.C. to start college, my dad and his husband became parents all over again. A family friend’s daughter, who had been struggling with opioid use, had recently given birth to a little girl, and it was unlikely the baby would be allowed to go home with her mother.
My parents stepped in to give a safe home to the new baby, and they began navigating foster care and open adoptions. Two years later, the situation repeated itself with close relatives, and two more babies joined the family.
Although I have been able to sit in on heartwarming moments between my siblings and their birth parents during visits, I have often had a more disturbing view of each child’s birth parents cycling through 72-hour holds, jail, prison and the streets.
Starting with that first phone call, my experience at TAC has taught me that the cycling was not solely the result of drug use, an epidemic of sorts in my rural hometown.
The intertwining of severe mental illness and substance use disorders has resulted in an even larger burden on both the birth parents and the people trying to help them. It has prevented my relatives from understanding court orders and requests from the department of child services, it has led to countless emergency room trips, and it has caused each birth parent to spend considerable time in jail and prison. With each of these comes, cancelled or postponed visits and lost time with my three younger siblings.
For that reason, I have chosen to focus my research at on studying co-occurring severe mental illness and substance use disorders. In doing so, I‘ve come to better understand the role severe mental illness played in my life.
Severe mental illness has contributed to my siblings’ birth parents’ struggle to navigate the mental health system--each of them still stuck in the revolving door, held there by their struggles with substance use.
While I look at National Survey on Drug Use and Health data that estimates only 11% of people with co-occurring disorders received treatment this past year, I know the face of the other 89%. Without treatment and support, it can be difficult for their birth parents to have meaningful interactions that benefit both the parents and the children.
Although I often feel helpless watching my family battle the system, working at Treatment Advocacy Center allows me to feel hope. I may not be able to change the day-to-day outcomes for my adoptive relatives, but I can support research that helps to change the system entirely. Increasing access to treatment for co-occurring severe mental illness and substance use disorders is essential to this.
When my siblings grow up, I hope the work of TAC will contribute to ensuring that their birth parents are able to be meaningful parts of their lives.
Molly Vencel is a research intern at Treatment Advocacy Center.