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AthenaSurrenders -> RE: Kidnapped boy rescued! (2/5/2013 11:23:27 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kalikshama
quote:
want to point out this man was a veteran. There is a VA medical services facility locally. I do not profess to know the state of health care for veterans, but health care was available AND easily accessible to this individual, unlike many in this area with no insurance(myself being one of those).
My brother is mentally ill and at times my mother has spent 20 hours a week case managing for him. She has a Master's in Social Work. She knew his medication level was off and asked his therapist to send him to the hospital to get a blood level. (She has permission to discuss my brother.) Instead, the therapist sent my brother a letter asking him to call his old psychiatrist and have them fax an order to the hospital. My brother called...the fax number, didn't get through (of course) and gave up. The therapist did not follow up with my mother.
Last week, the police found my brother "patrolling" in the cemetery with a baseball bat. They took him to the hospital, where he finally got his blood level tested. He was also involuntarily committed to another hospital. My mother requested that she be there at the discharge meeting and asked the psychiatrist what my brother's level was. He didn't know - he hadn't looked at the test results. If my mother hadn't been there my brother would have been released without getting his medication increased to the proper level.
His previous psychiatrist also dropped the ball last fall, but this is getting long so I won't get into that.
Anyway, I'm a veteran, and there's even more red tape involved in getting care from the VA. Once I had to follow up every few weeks for MONTHS to get a test. Sometimes I haven't been able to get through on the phone and have dropped by the office or faxed messages. At one office, none of the messages I left over a two year period were ever returned. People with some sorts of mental illnesses or disabilities just can't navigate the system on their own.
Thank goodness for your mother.
I've only had limited exposure to the mental health systems here, but I have to admit many of our systems fall prey to a similar problem - the people who need to access them are not capable of fighting their way through the complicated bureaucracy to get there, so unless they have someone sticking up for them, vulnerable people often miss out on what they need. Even more frustrating, these people are sometimes dismissed as not being cooperative or compliant, making it doubly hard for them to get help in the future.
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