NAMI Michigan

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Listen to the audio recording from Kalamazoo Public Radio!

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Legislators of the State of Michigan:

My name is Larry Ackerman and I live in Lansing.  I am Office and Consumer Programs Coordinator for NAMI Michigan.

Minimizing access to quality mental health medications is simply not worth the savings.

If someone is telling you that you will save money by restricting access to a certain set of psychiatric medications—in favor of other, older drugs that cost less, they are saying that a restrictive formulary is the right thing to do.

I’m here to tell you why this strategy is poor planning and bad medicine.

I know what I’m speaking of.  I am a person with a schizophrenia-related disorder.  I have been in treatment since 1977—thirty-two years!

I was on those cheaper first-generation anti-psychotics from 1977 to 1996.  Those drugs were for me a living Hell.

For SIXTEEN YEARS I endured—a side effect of those drugs called tardive dyskinesia.  It developed slowly and it was a painful movement disorder.

For SIXTEEN YEARS I could not hold my head straight.

For SIXTEEN YEARS my neck muscles were in constant spasm.

I could not drive a shopping cart through a grocery store.

I had constant boils and sores—infections from my cervical collar.

I lived for much of those years in subsidized housing.  I couldn’t work.

My wife and I lived on welfare and food stamps.

For about twenty years I endured stomach and intestinal upset that was a side effect of those drugs.

I took twelve antacids every night because of gastric reflux.

I took drugs daily for ulcerative colitis.

Then in 1996, I was switched to an atypical anti-psychotic medicine.

In only thirteen months, all of the horrible side effects vanished.

They are gone; the memories are only a horrible nightmare now.

I went to graduate school where I studied counseling.

I gave lectures in psychopathology and I counseled men in domestic violence classes.

I earned a 3.81 Grade Point Average in graduate school.

I lectured on the “Recovery Paradigm” at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Convention in Chicago.

In 1999 I moved to Michigan to work for the National Schizophrenia Foundation.  For three years I worked on their Prison Project, teaching leadership skills to convicted felons in maximum-security prisons.

I lectured at the SAMHSA National Convention in Virginia.

I know the Hell of using those old drugs.  It’s like using the old cancer meds on your sick mother today.

You would not use the oldest drugs on your mother if she got cancer or Alzheimer’s.

You would not tolerate such an obscenity against your loved one.

Mental Health drugs have evolved over time, resulting in less side effects.

BREATHE!

I work for NAMI Michigan’s main Office.

Every day I talk to families and consumers in crisis because they cannot get adequate care.

They are already not able to get the medicine they need.

The result is sometimes suicide and attempted suicide.

The result is expensive re-hospitalization.

The result is often months of delay in untreated psychosis.

The result is sometimes jail or prison time—at terrible expense.

The results are sometimes horrible tragedy, from untreated mental illness.

This is my Office Statistics Sheet for June 2009.  Here is another for this month: July 1st to 20th, 2009.

My colleague, Sherri Solomon gets just as many as I do.

It would seem like wisdom to cut off ones’ foot when caught in a trap.

It would seem like wisdom to silence the messenger.

It would seem like good strategy to plan to cut some services to a small and relatively un-organized minority.  But each of these folks has families and they are not a minority.

The cost of inappropriately funding mental health services affects the patient, their family and the economy of their community.

But you will pay with every ounce of the pound of flesh nearest our loved one’s hearts.

The Costs include:

• lost productivity,
• physical disability from side effects,
• broken homes and domestic violence,
• lost jobs and job benefits,
• children on welfare and food stamps,
• disability payments,
• homelessness,
• jail time and prison time for otherwise innocent mentally ill who are desperately self-medicating with street drugs.

The Answer is simply to look elsewhere for a way out of the trap.

You have got to look elsewhere.

The personal costs of minimizing the problem are simply catastrophic.

Thank you.