peteearley.com

Dr. James Hayes, a member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness board of directors, told me when I asked why Mary Giliberti abruptly resigned last month as NAMI’s CEO. Ms. Giliberti’s resignation also has renewed questions about the effectiveness of NAMI’s board. Are four truncated face-to-face board meetings a year enough for members to jell or give the board much of an institutional history? Given Ms. Giliberti’s popularity and success, I imagine NAMI’s board will be asked what steps it will be taking to prevent the new CEO from being “burned out.”

I’ve been involved with clinical training and education of mental health professionals for 24 years, in academic psychiatry and social work. Throughout my career, I’ve always promoted the use of evidence-based practices that focus on engagement and recovery for people living with severe mental illness. It is not the same as the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s Family to Family program. Our state legislators privatized the system in the mid-2000s, fragmenting it, and making it nearly impossible for new providers to make the business model work, especially for outpatient clinics – the primary care of mental health.

The Washington Post, which broke this story,  quoted a longtime CIA historian, who retired in 2016, objecting to her name being approved and a star representing her being added to the wall: Abdelsayed’s inclusion violates the agency’s own criteria — and her star “must absolutely come off the wall. We can never know for sure why she chose to end her life, but former CIA director John Brennan, who made the decision to include her star on the wall, told The Post that he believed her death was “a direct result of her work and her dedication in a very difficult overseas environment. The conversation about whether Abdelsayed deserves a star perpetuates a fear and insecurity that many veterans carry with them: that experiencing the effects of trauma is somehow unheroic or not a natural result from enemy actions or hazardous conditions. Twenty veterans and service members die by suicide a day, and more than half of them have diagnosed mental-health injuries…

(Photo by Young Kwak/INLANDER) (5-12-19) Justine Murray told me after she’d learned her son, Ethan, had been fatally shot that she would use his death to advocate for better police training and mental health care services. I posted a powerful video of her earlier this month that was recorded shortly after she was informed that her 25 year-old son had been killed by a Spokane County Sheriff’s deputy. Articles about the death of Thomas Silverstein, major character in my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison. My two blogs – announcing Silverstein’s death and the federal prison systems complaints about it – led to the New York Times, Denver Post and Westword all publishing obituaries about how he was held under “no human contact” for more than three decades.