Good Day to become an Advocate

I was busy but not harried at work today. When I got home, Beth and cut the grass and gone to the movies. Joy had cleaned the kitchen and volunteered to do some grocery shopping. I made a quick but healthy dinner from some fresh Jersey asparagus, rice and eye of the round steaks. Carrots and onions just thrown onto the grilling pan added a little color.

After dinner, Dave felt well enough to go to the movies. He wanted to see Robin Hood. I really just wanted to sit for awhile so I was happy when Beth arrived and decided to join him. She loves movies and she loves to watch them with someone. It is the only time that she is reliably social.

After all we have been through, these little gems of normal life are very precious to us. I have recently had enough energy to start looking at some of these problems from a societal/political viewpoint. That is so hard for us parents of affected children to do because we are so busy putting out fires on a regular basis. Our strength is regularly sapped by the latest crisis.


I emailed my governor and state representatives last night. I asked them not to close anymore mental hospitals. There are many families like mine. There are many families with much harder circumstances. Did you know that we have to wait for the mentally ill person to actually hurt themselves or someone else before getting them committed?  This is often the case. I have seen things that I would not have believed could happen in our country. When a person is sick enough they should have a hospital to go to. This is not the case now. It will get more and more dangerous as time goes on. There are more mentally ill people right now in jail than in mental hospitals because we have closed most of them down. During the Raegan years our mental hospitals were decimated.

I am all for keeping people in the community but when the institutions closed down not even half the amount of community support that is needed was put in place. I know a lot of older women from my NAMI group living with schizophrenic or extremely bipolar grown but disabled chilldren. They do not know what will become of these children when they die. We can do better than this.

I urge you all to write your representatives and even the president. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. I found simple ways to email all of them on google. Then, I just cut and pasted the same basic message over and over again. In 20 minutes I had contacted the governor and three congressmen.


For Barbara,

My daughter is currently taking lamictal (it has helped her the most and is a mood stabelizer), seroquel (antipsychotic) and topomax ( this supposedly helps with bipolar and lowers cocaine craving).