1. Mark the Date: Wednesday, May 21: Depression Documentary: NAMI and Jane Pauley PBS stations
   
2. Re-Thinking the Protective Treatment of those Destabilized by Mental Illness
   
   
3. VETEREAN SPECIAL The truth, services, and options for our veterans - NAMI-San Francisco recognizes that many of our veterans who are returning from active duty face a second war at home, confronting profound mental health problems that challenge their lives and the lives of their families.
   
   
4. Honoring Passing of One of NAMI SMC's Founders, Fran Hoffman
   
   
5. In Diabetes, a Complex of Causes
   
   
6. Stanford Bipolar Disorder Clinic Studies
   

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Mark the Date: Wednesday, May 21: Depression Documentary: NAMI and Jane Pauley

Don't miss NAMI medical director Ken Duckworth discussing depression as part of a panel of experts moderated by broadcast journalist Jane Pauley on TAKE ONE STEP: Caring for Depression, with Jane Pauley.

The program will immediately follow the national premiere of the PBS documentary, DEPRESSION: Out of the Shadows, on Wednesday, May 21 at 9:00 p.m. (ET). Check local PBS station listings.

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Re-Thinking the Protective Treatment of those Destabilized by Mental Illness
 
A Symposium Sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law, UCLA, The Commonwealth Club of California, and The San Francisco Foundation
Berkeley and  Los Angeles , May 27, 2008
 
 
Registration and other information is available at the website: www.mentalhealthlawsymposium.com
 
Please help us by passing on this invitation to NAMI activists, family members, consumers, and policy leaders and urge them to join us for this day of re-thinking protective treatment of those destabilized by mental illness. Surely we can do better. We must. We will!

Pete Earley, a finalist - one of two - for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 2007 will be opening up the symposium with a presentation based on his book CRAZY: A Father's Search Through  America 's Mental Health Madness.
Dr. Pete Whybrow is another great speaker who will be presenting, and panelists include Judge Stephen Manley of the Mental Health Court in Santa Clara County, Judge Mary Morgan of the Behavioral Health Court in San Francisco, and Carla Jacobs, founding and current Board Member of Treatment Advocacy Center, and Volunteer and former NAMI board member; as well as many other issue experts from the legal and medical field to help us examine what is not working and how we can change the system.
 
The following outlines our purpose for holding the symposium - to improve public policy:
 
Four decades after the enactment of Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS) the goal of restoring lives and preventing unnecessary incarceration remains incomplete. How do we move forward?
 
Please join us for a one-day Symposium on Emerging Pathways of Legal and Clinical Innovation video-conferenced between the UC Berkeley, School of  Law , and the  Health  Sciences  Center at UCLA.  May 27, 2008.
 
Introduction
 
Forty years ago, in 1967, the California legislature enacted the sweeping Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) law designed to revolutionize the objectives, means, and procedures through which the state (and private actors using its authority) can intervene to treat those destabilized by serious mental illness.   The law, which bears the names of its leading legislative sponsors, came into effect in 1969 and largely became the template on which most other states transformed their approach.  Its most visible achievement would be the massive shrinkage of state hospitalization of people with mental illness, but the changes it inspired in the criminal and civil governance of those with severe mental illness extended far beyond deinstitutionalization.
 
In the spring of 2008, four decades after that pivotal moment, we plan to gather a group of legal and clinical experts, some academics, some in practice, most who have devoted considerable effort to studying or reforming practice in California, including at Berkeley and UCLA, to discuss the legal and clinical innovations taking place today around interventions for those with severe mental illness and to assess what opportunities seem to be emerging to renew and reinvigorate the governance framework established by LPS.
 
Our goal is not to outline or debate a path forward, but rather to stimulate the kind of re-imagining of the possibilities for both treating and protecting the rights of those destabilized by mental illness that renewal and reinvigoration of LPS will require.   In one fully packed day we aspire to document and begin to digest the recent record of innovation and insight from the practice field that could provide the intellectual and practical resources for that renewal.  First among those is a strikingly broad consensus that those destabilized by severe mental illness too often find themselves in the worst possible legal and medical situation, subject to coercive state power in the form either of jail or prison sentences with none of the normative obligation to treat or the clinical expertise to assess that the old custodial system provided.
 
The  California lawmakers who enacted LPS outlined goals to change the way government administered, protected, and provided services to people with mental illness that would win broad support.   The law was designed to "end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of mentally disordered persons," "protect public safety," and "protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts."
 
Great moments of policy reframing inevitably produce a collective memory of what problems required the reform.  These memories can harden into myths that block re-evaluation and further reform.  LPS was enacted against abusive legal and clinical realities, including a broken state public hospital system, and broad judicial discretion to confine people in mental hospitals with little clinical guidance or legal protection.  This background has changed radically from that time in ways both expected and unexpected.  The shrinkage of the population committed to public hospitals was anticipated, but the dramatic increase in those destabilized by mental illness among the chronically homeless and in jails and prisons was an unanticipated result of the reform.
 
Virtually nobody anticipated in 1969 that most of the innovative efforts to integrate clinical and legal expertise under flexible and individualized judicial authority would take place inside the criminal justice process.  Ironically, just as LPS was limiting the power of judges as mental health decision makers, the transformation of our nation's courts and the legal culture toward individual rights was already under way.   Furthermore, LPS itself helped crystallize strong legal advocacy movements.  Among these was the development of the civil rights bar, including advocates for persons with mental illness and their families.  It also often barred family members of those suffering from mentally ill from the process and at times has served as a barrier to treatment for the mentally ill.  Recognizing these unintended results, invisible within the LPS framework, provides leverage for realizing new, better informed ways of ensuring protection and treatment for persons destabilized by severe mental illness at times when they lack the insight to protect themselves or others from harm.
 
The symposium will be digitally recorded and made available on a website for video streaming and podcasting.   We intend to publicize the website to increase access of the proceedings to a much broader audience of stakeholders, in hopes that this symposium will stimulate discussions of what kinds of renewal and reinvigoration efforts can most effectively leverage emerging forms of innovation, both legal and clinical, to better protect and serve people with mental illness.  
 
I hope we will see many advocates there to help us develop a new pathway forward. As a concerned parent and advocate, as well as a leader in anti-poverty efforts, I will see you there!
 
Carol
Carol Lamont
Program Officer,  Community Development
The San Francisco Foundation
225 Bush Street, Suite 500
San Francisco, CA 94104
415-733-8522

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NAMI-San Francisco recognizes that many of our veterans who are returning from active duty face a second war at home, confronting profound mental health problems that challenge their lives and the lives of their families.

Consider these grim statistics:

Almost 1 in 3 veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq confront mental health problems.

In 2006, the suicide rate in the Army reached its highest level in 26 years.

Approximately 30% of veterans treated in the Veterans health system suffer from depressive symptoms, two to three times the rate of the general population.

More Vietnam veterans have now died from suicide than were killed directly during the war in the 1960s and 70s.

Approximately 40% of homeless veterans have mental illnesses. Approximately 57% of this group are African American or Hispanic veterans.

(click here to continue to the expanded Veterans special)

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In Diabetes, a Complex of Causes

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