People with Psychiatric Disabilities Must Have Significant Input on Their Own Lives
Kathy Flaherty discusses the importance of centering the voices of people with lived experience of the mental health system.
By Maddie Walsh
The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR) is a coalition of advocates and organizations representative of people with mental health diagnoses. The overarching priority of NCMHR is to advocate for a recovery-focused mental health system that prevents crisis, protects rights, and promotes social justice, wellness, economic empowerment, and social inclusion.
In an interview with Northwestern Law Center for Racial and Disability Justice’s summer intern, Maddie Walsh, Flaherty talks about her involvement in mental health advocacy and the importance of centering the voices of people with lived experience in mental health policy decisions.
What led you to be a part of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery?
This past July, I was invited by one of the board members, Latosha, to join the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery in Washington, DC for their Hill Days. Latosha is someone I know from her time living in Connecticut. Prior to Hill Days, she contacted me and other folks living in Connecticut to see if we would like to join NCMHR’s efforts in DC. I was super excited to join and officially became an NCMHR member.
What is the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery?
The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, which I have been a part of for a couple months, is a national organization designed by people with firsthand lived experience of the mental health system for people with firsthand lived experience of the mental health system. The goal of NCMHR is to ensure that we have a voice when policy makers make decisions. For me, joining a group with people all over the country who look at the system the same way I do — as someone who has been through it, not in it, and not always by personal choice — means that we firsthand see the problems that exist in the system and how things can change to better support people in their recovery without taking choice and autonomy away from them.
What other organizations are you involved in & what is your role?
I am the Executive Director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which is a nonprofit legal aid organization that provides legal representation to people who are eligible for mental health services from the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction services. I am a lawyer and a psychiatric survivor. I have been a long-time member of the Keep the Promise Coalition, which is a coalition that began after the Olmsted decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a group of people with lived experience, professionals, and other mental health advocates who have joined together for the last 25 years to advocate for a community-based system of care and real community integration. This is something that we’ve been working on in Connecticut and at the national level. I believe what we’re trying to say, since so many people with psychiatric disabilities do not always have the best outcomes when it comes to interacting with law enforcement, is that there is a better way to interact with people in crisis than to call 911 and have cops show up with tasers, guns, and the mentality of having to control situations. Instead, we must ask ourselves the following questions. How can we respond to people in a way that supports them and connects them to services that they want to engage with? What are better ways of responding?
According to sinsinvalid.org, at least half of people that are killed by police have psychiatric disabilities. How can this narrative change?
In Connecticut, there are some organizations that include peer responders who have mental health training AND firsthand lived experience of being in crisis themselves. Sometimes people feel like they must resolve crisis situations quickly, which in turn drives escalation. Peer responder models are more successful. There are places like the Gerstein Crisis Centre in Toronto, which has been responding to people in crisis without cops for about thirty years. They spend time with the person as they need or want. It serves as a way to de-escalate things and not rely on forcing people to go to the emergency room, into a psychiatric ward, or to jail when they’re in crisis and just need that support. So, I think one of the ways that can help change the narrative is to share our stories of those experiences and why it didn’t help us. I also think that in different places, some projects are demonstrating that you can do things differently and don’t need to rely on cops for safety. The more we can get to that and remove cops from crisis situations, I think the better off we will be.
Is there any legislation being proposed now or passed recently that you think is good for people with mental health conditions and disabilities? Any that you think is bad for people with mental health conditions and disabilities?
What’s interesting is there are some things pending at the national level that we supported and talked to Senators and Representatives about in Washington, DC in July. One of them is a bill that Senator Tim Kaine put forward that would provide support for peer support, which I think is important. I believe that when you have bills that reflect input from the community — meaning people that are most impacted by something and are actually going to experience the effects, good or bad, of the proposed legislation — then the community itself must have significant input. When looking at issues within the mental health area, policy makers too often listen to people who feel the second round of effects, not the first round of effects. More specifically, they listen to family members, or to clinicians, or even law enforcement. And the solutions that these groups of people come up with are significantly different than those of us who feel the impact of that law.
Unfortunately, several bills being proposed are bad and I think we are seeing them come out in the Senate level right now. Massachusetts is considering a bill on what they call critical care services in the community, but what we call involuntary outpatient commitment. Although I don’t currently live in Massachusetts, I did live there when I went to college and law school, so I’ve submitted testimony against that bill. We have had similar proposals in Connecticut many times over the last few decades. Fortunately, we’ve been able to beat them every time.
There are bad policies and procedures happening in New York City and California. In New York City, the mayor has proposed a way to make it easier for people to be forced into a hospital and to be stuck in those hospitals longer. In California, CARE courts have become an involuntary system. All these examples are bad on their state levels, and I believe they are examples of ways our current laws and existing systems deprive people of autonomy. We need to figure out a way to change these things so we’re not forcing people into psychiatric hospitals and keeping them locked up any longer than they need to be there.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I think one important step is understanding and demonstrating how advocacy at the local, state, and national level can make a difference and people can ensure that their perspective is acknowledged. People with lived experience really need to have a seat at the table. It’s one thing for people, like policy makers and organizations, to say that they’re inclusive, but they really need to demonstrate that. I believe it really comes back to the very basic quote, “Nothing About Us Without Us”. We need to make sure that we’re inclusive in our advocacy as well. NCMHR is really paying attention to the intersection of race and disability, which is super important because, traditionally, the mental health advocacy community has tended to be very White. You can’t remove the impact of white supremacy and the impact of systemic racism on all these systems. When looking at our forensic mental health system, people of color — especially Black men — are significantly overrepresented because it’s an overlay with the criminal legal system. It is critical to pay attention to these issues, so our advocacy is as effective as it needs to be. Developing partnerships across the disability community, and across areas of advocacy will make things better.
This blog post was written by the Center for Racial and Disability Justice’s summer intern, Maddie Walsh.
The Northwestern Pritzker Law Center for Racial and Disability Justice (CRDJ) is a first-of-its-kind center dedicated to promoting justice for people of color, people with disabilities, and individuals at the intersection of race and disability.
Learn more about CRDJ by visiting the Center for Racial and Disability Justice webpage.
