(April 9, 2013) Following the massacre at Sandy Hook, Brown University is tonight hosting a public health policy discussion centering on mental health. Doris A. Fuller, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center presented about access to mental health treatment, and how society treats and manages people with severe mental illness in order to prevent future tragedies.
“There is an association between violence and the most severe mental illnesses when they are not treated,” Doris Fuller said. “I’m talking about the ones in which factors such as paranoia or command hallucinations are present. Chiefly diseases with psychotic features because those are the symptoms that alter reality and make irrational acts seem perfectly logical.”
The executive addressed the stigma associated with severe mental illness, and to discuss laws that enable treatment. “The solution to both the violence and the stigma that we promote at the Treatment Advocacy Center is advocating for laws that eliminate barriers to treatment,” she continued. “Mandated treatment in the community, or assisted outpatient treatment, reduces violence, suicide, homelessness, arrest, incarceration and quite a few other consequences of non-treatment.”
She was joined by Dr. Richard Alan Friedman, director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College and Jeffrey Swanson a professor of psychiatry at Duke University.
Read more about the discussion.
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