(April 7, 2015) Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, Marla Pope’s daughter has been through the commitment process three times in the last eight months (“Can outpatient commitment help the mentally ill? One county thinks so,” the Associated Press, April 5). 
“I’d like you to know I’m a kabbalistic rabbi and I’ve been committed three times because of a misdiagnosis,” Pope’s daughter told the behavioral health unit at her most recent commitment hearing in Huntsville, Alabama.
But this time, Pope wants the state to consider assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) as a way to keep her daughter stable.
Without someone monitoring her treatment, Pope says her daughter stops taking her medication and inevitably begins to break down.
Outpatient commitment works because it forces the state to provide treatment for patients, Kathryn Cohen, legislative and policy counsel for the Treatment Advocacy Center told the Associated Press.
In fact, AOT is working effectively in some counties in Alabama, like Mobile County, which sent 57 percent of its patients with severe mental illness to outpatient commitment last year. But in other parts of the state it AOT is not used frequently enough – sending too many people with serious mental illness through the revolving door.
The law should be better implemented across all of Alabama, Cohen said. It needs to be used more regularly so that people like Pope’s daughter can have the cushion of an outpatient plan when they leave the hospital.
Read about Alabama in our report, "Mental Health Commitment Laws: A Survey of the States," which analyzes the quality and use of laws each state has enacted to meet the needs of people with severe mental illness who cannot recognize their own need for treatment, trapping them in a vicious cycle of homelessness, incarceration, repeated hospitalization and other ills.
Find out why counties in Alabama have no more excuses for denying court-ordered outpatient treatment to the most severely ill in the study “Considerations for Demonstrating the Cost Effectiveness of AOT Services.”
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