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May
23, 2006
Save the Date: June 2nd, 12:00 noon, Capital Region Rally for Timothy’s Law in Saratoga Springs. For more information, or to get involved with this event, contact Mary Jean Coleman at 518-899-0021 or mjcoleman@afsp.org. The flyer advertising this event is available at www.timothyslaw.org/flyerSAR.pdf. IN THE NEWS: Time
for Parity for Mentally Ill - Senate Should Act, as Assembly Has Does anybody really doubt that mental illness is real? That bipolar disorders, depression and simply chronic anxiety can threaten the livelihood and even the lives of those afflicted? That, if untreated, these illnesses can destroy families and can drain businesses? Doubters are captives of old and uninformed biases. The same for those who don't believe that mental illnesses can be treated. But false assumptions and fallacies like those have kept the New York State Senate from approving an effective bill to improve access to mental health care. It's called Timothy's Law, after a boy who hanged himself after his parents couldn't get him care. Timothy O'Clair's mother and father believe, with much reason, that the cap on their mental health coverage limited what they could do to save their son. They were forced to put him in foster care so he could qualify - too late - for state-paid services. At the heart of the problem is a lack of "parity" for mental health care. Unlike 35 other states, New York allows insurers to limit coverage and charge higher co-pays to treat mental disabilities and substance abuse problems. These restrictions don't apply to most medical care. There's every reason not to cover mental illness differently than heart disease or cancer. The cost to the nation of untreated disorders has been estimated at more than $40 billion. Despite concerns of opponents, including some businesses, studies show that parity would boost insurance premiums about $15 a year. That's well worth it, for everyone. The Assembly has passed a parity bill four times. The Senate Republican leadership has balked, choosing to support a version of a parity bill that excludes too many disorders. It's time for the Senate majority to pass the real deal. Honoring
His Dead Son In Legal Fight. By
Michael Rehak For Tom O’Clair, publicly sharing one of the most tragic stories a parent could ever tell has become almost routine. O’Clair’s burly frame doesn’t budge when he takes the podium. He doesn’t weep. He rarely pauses between words and has probably told the same story many times in countless rooms across the state in front of multitudes of strangers. On an easel next to O’Clair stand two enlarged photos. One shows a young boy smiling toward the camera sitting on a bicycle. Above it rests a picture of Timothy Michael O’Clair’s tombstone. It reads that he was 12 years old. As the boy’s father spoke recently at Zucker Hillside Hospital in New Hyde Park, it marked what would have been Timothy’s 18th birthday. Timothy’s teachers identified his mental illness when he was 8 years old. He received treatment early on and for nine months, his parents gave up custody of the youngest of three sons after Timothy’s first suicide attempt failed on a tree outside the family’s home. On a branch that could be seen from the O’Clair’s kitchen, Timothy climbed as he often did in the past, but this time he had a rope and a much different purpose than to explore from above. It was Timothy’s mother who climbed the tree that day to save her son, but soon after, she wouldn’t be that lucky. After being placed in foster care to deal with his illness, Timothy came home on his mother’s birthday. His parents thought he would be cured. “For the first three weeks, he was a little boy we haven’t seen in years,” said O’Clair. Then, depression, anger and a refusal to take his prescribed medication again haunted the O’Clair family. “Timothy reached a level, a threshold, that he had come to so many times before and decided not to cross,” said O’Clair. On March 16, 2001, just six weeks after coming home, Timothy was discovered by his mother hanged in his bedroom closet. “It was that day that I will remember stronger than any other day in my life,” said O’Clair. According to O’Clair, that day may not have ever occurred had his insurance provider covered the costs of mental health treatment. As a New York State Thruway Authority mechanic, O’Clair’s policy covered 20 therapy visits per year. Timothy needed more. With rising co-pays and used-up coverage, eventually, Timothy’s medical treatment became just too much for the O’Clair family to handle. If the boy’s father had been a state elected official, the treatment costs would have been covered. In March, Timothy’s Law passed for the fourth consecutive time in the State Assembly. It requires that mental illnesses and chemical dependency disorders are covered under health insurance policies the same as other physical illnesses. A parity bill in the State Senate has been introduced, but lobby groups like the Timothy’s Law Coalition, are not in favor of it because it excludes business that employ of 50 or fewer people. Members said it also does not deal with chemical dependency. According to the Timothy’s Law Coalition, medical professionals should determine how often patients need to be treated, not the insurance provider. So far 35 states have agreed and have passed similar legislation. A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers study estimated that the passage of Timothy’s Law would only increase premiums by $1.26 per insured person per month. According to the Surgeon General, 21 percent of children aged 9 to 17 have a mental or addictive disorder. Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death for New Yorkers aged 15 to 24. Some 1,300 residents take their lives every year. Despite the statistics, none could ever give O’Clair his son’s life back. Shortly after speaking at Zucker Hillside, O’Clair gathered his belongings and headed to a Long Island fund-raiser to retell the experience again on his son’s birthday. Mental
Health Garden Dedicated.
By Ned P. Rauch SARANAC LAKE — A half-dozen golden shovels dug into the grass near Lake Colby Saturday, breaking ground for what will be a community garden grown to fight the stigmas clinging to mental illness. The Garden of Change's three large, raised, handicap-accessible planters and two information podiums will cover a 48-foot-by 25-foot plot of village-owned land near the Lake Colby beach house. It will be open to the public, a place where organizers envision people — whether they have a mental illness or not — getting their hands dirty together. "Just garden and grow together," Kathy Fadden, project director for the Franklin County Mental Health Association, said after the groundbreaking ceremony. "People who have a diagnosis are just like other people, they're not labels." The garden is part of the Community Mental Health Promotion Project and is sponsored by the Mental Health Association and the Tri-Lakes Center for Independence. Businesses and local governments contributed funds, in-kind services and materials to the effort. Mayor Tom Michael said the project has the village's support. Fadden has been working on it for four years. She said the garden, which she hopes will open in July, will be unique in Franklin County, perhaps even in the state. It will be one of the few public places aimed at raising awareness of mental illnesses — pretty much everyone encounters mental illness, either personally or through a friend or family member, she said — and erasing the prejudices. "There's so much stigmatizing out there in everyday life," Fadden said. "How many times have you said, 'That person's crazy,' without thinking if he really has a mental illness?" She said the garden would be a place where "people can just be people," working together in the open. "We're going to show our community we're not our diagnosis, we're not our disability, we're just people," she said. Stigmatization is not just social; it's institutional, too, with insurance policies providing less coverage for mental illnesses than they would for physical injuries or sicknesses. Tom O'Clair and his family fought for the passage of Timothy's Law, which seeks to resolve that discrepancy, after his 12-year-old son, Timothy, who was diagnosed with several mental illnesses, killed himself. At the reception following the groundbreaking, he said the garden would show people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness that they can focus, they can work hard, and that through that work, "something good will come." "Whenever you bring a community together, you knock down stigmas," he said. "It breaks down walls." Mental
Health Chief Faults State Plans. By
Diana Ladden HUDSON- Michael G. O'Leary, director of Columbia County Mental Health Services, had plenty to say at a May 5 public hearing in Kingston held by the state Office of Mental Health-much of critical of state programs. Dr. O'Leary deplored the state initiative to place violent sexual predators under the auspices of the Office of Mental Health and championed a topic he felt had been left out of the plan-addressing the needs of individuals with dual diagnoses, which the Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders defines as a term for patients who have both mental health and substance abuse disorders. The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports an estimated 10 million people in this country will have a combination of at least one mental health disorder and one substance abuse disorder in any 12-month period. Dr. O'Leary's testified that his department's data shows that "the most seriously impaired individuals presenting at our mental health clinic, residential programs and case management services, have both mental illness and substance abuse problems." He said that at present neither the mental health nor the substance abuse programs are equipped to address the needs of these individuals "because of bureaucratic and systemic issues." Dr. O'Leary urged the state to investigate conflicting agency regulations and facilitate communication among these agencies. While praising the state's initiative to prevent suicide, Dr. O'Leary said that the difficulty in preventing suicides is two-fold: the stigma of a mental health diagnosis and the capacity of the present systems to reach those who need help. To prevent suicides, the state plan calls for "reshaping the service delivery system," an issue Dr, O'Leary sees as key in both improved and increased outreach. Last year, Dr. O'Leary told The Independent that mental health professionals knew many of the ways to treat those with mental health disorders but that the difficulty is getting the right treatment to the correct individuals: "We know what to do, the problem is getting it done," he said. Dr. O'Leary said this week that a recurrent theme during testimony at the hearing was the need for housing. He wants to see the state Office of Mental Heath "explore a system of care similar to that of the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities," which can provide life-long care when needed. As for housing for people with mental health diagnoses, Dr. O'Leary said that state law prohibits discrimination against individuals with developmental disabilities and mental health diagnoses. And in his experience, "Time after time, it has been borne out that those neighbors who misunderstand what such a residence really is become the most supportive neighbors as time goes on." Dr. O'Leary and his department have put a good deal of thought and energy into neutralizing the stigma of a mental health diagnosis. Among other things, the stigma blocks individuals from recognizing that they have a mental health disorder and discourages them from seeking help. The prevalence of both pharmaceutical ads on TV and in print has helped to alleviate the shame of a mental health diagnosis by demonstrating how common they are. But Dr. O'Leary said that progress might be destroyed by the state initiative to put violent sexual offenders under the auspices of the Office of Mental Health when their prison sentences are completed. According to Dr. O'Leary, this costly initiative, called civil confinement, is "politically derived" and has been "forced on the state." People are worried, he said, that when individuals incarcerated for felony level sex abuse are released, all control over them is lost. "I think they looked all around for a criminal law to use to control, but all they could find was mental hygiene legislation. Most of these individuals never even used a diminished mental capacity defense when convicted. They entered the system as competent," said Dr. O'Leary. Michael Seereiter, director of public policy for the Mental Health Association for New York State, agrees, saying that people with psychiatric disabilities "are 12 times more likely than the general population to be victims of violence." Placing violent sex offenders in psychiatric facilities with those who have serious mental health needs puts the patients for whom the facility was created at increased risk. He wants the Department of Corrections to provide facilities for the violent sex offenders. Mr. Seereiter also fears civil confinement would divert mental health resources from patients with mental health diagnoses. He says it will cost $200,000 per year for each sex offender housed in a psychiatric facility as opposed to $40,000 per year to house someone in prison. Like Dr. O'Leary, Mr. Seeteiter says associating sexual offenders with people with serious mental illness "perpetuates unfounded myths about people with mental illnesses being violent and dangerous." The
next article is the second in a series of six regarding suicide
in the Glens Falls Post Star. This article features Pam Webb,
who has become actively involved with the fight for Timothy’s
Law. Pamela Webb sits near her son Patrick's gravestone in Queensbury's Pineview cemetery recently. She visits the gravesite every other day on her lunch break from work. Patrick took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot a year ago in April, and his family and friends are still dealing with the tragedy. GLENS FALLS -- A familiar phone call awakened Pamela Webb after 1 a.m. on a Friday last April. It was her son, Patrick, 22, asking for a ride home from the Irish Pub. She didn't mind; they had an understanding that if Patrick had been drinking, she'd rather he call and wake her up than drive himself home. Pamela was tired as she headed out the door. When Patrick got in the car, she could tell he was drunk. On the way home, they talked about his night, as usual, but this time the conversation turned into an argument. He had been drinking more than usual lately, and she was concerned. She told him he was going to have to get up for work in the morning, no matter how he felt. She told him he needed help with his drinking. "I know where I can get help," he said. Fifteen minutes later, he killed himself. Pamela and her husband, Paul, were downstairs in their Glens Falls home when they heard the gunshot upstairs, followed by the screams of their daughter, Paula, 29, whose bedroom was across the hall from Patrick's. As Pamela and Paul started up the stairs, they ran into Paula. She told them Patrick had shot himself. Pamela went back down and called 911 from the living room phone. The dispatcher asked if Patrick was still alive. "No, he's dead," Paul called down from upstairs. Pamela watched from her best friend's window a couple of doors down as Patrick's body, enclosed in a black plastic bag, was carried out of the house on a stretcher. "I wanted to run out of the house and hug him and say, 'I'm so sorry I did this to you,' " Pamela recalled. Later that morning, Pamela's husband hugged her tight and said, "Pam, we've never hurt like this." They stayed in a hotel the first few nights. A friend called a cleaning service to remove anything stained with blood from Patrick's bedroom. No one has touched the room since. After a few days, the Webbs moved into a camper parked in front of the house. When they moved back inside, about a month later, Paula couldn't bear to go back to her upstairs bedroom; she slept on the couch. She soon moved out entirely. Since the suicide, life has all but come to a halt. "We don't have any fun anymore," Pamela said. They won't go to the restaurants they used to eat at as a family. They don't see movies they know Patrick would have liked. "One day, I'm noticing, all the radios are off," she said. They won't listen to country music -- Patrick's favorite -- for fear of coming across a song that reminds them of him. Pamela has thought about suicide. They all have, she said. "I worry about all three of us. I know where my mind's wandering." Only the knowledge of the misery suicide leaves in its wake prevents her from "joining" her son. Around the six-month anniversary of Patrick's suicide, Pamela had a breakdown. Her suicidal feelings overwhelmed her. She told her therapist, "I can understand now why people kill their families and then themselves." The therapist sent her to Four Winds Hospital. While she was there, a young man who had been suicidal was moved by seeing how devastated Pamela was. "I never knew the effect my death would have had on my mother," he told her. She hopes that sharing her story now will help others considering suicide recognize the wreckage they would leave behind. Talking about Patrick is one way Pamela copes. Paul handles his grief differently; he doesn't want to talk to anyone. "My husband says he gets his counseling at the cemetery," Pamela said. He visits Patrick's grave every day. Pamela visits nearly every other day. "I just sit there and imagine what he's doing in glory," she said. A few days after Easter, Pamela went to the cemetery on her lunch break. It was one of the first beautiful days of spring, the sun shining and a breeze carrying puffy clouds through the sky. Groups of power walkers on their lunch breaks passed nearby. "I'd rather see it gloomy and rainy," she said, "because this would be a day he would thoroughly enjoy." She laid her hand gently on Patrick's dark granite gravestone. "It's all I have left of him." The gravestone is etched with a tranquil scene of a deer in the wild, because Patrick loved the outdoors. He took every opportunity to fish, raft or hunt -- anything that took him into the wilderness. Patrick bought a black-powder gun at the beginning of his last hunting season. The rest of the family's guns were locked downstairs but, without his parents' knowledge, he kept the rifle in his room. It was the gun he used to kill himself. On the gravestone is a saying Patrick often used: "Kins and friends are everything." The base of the stone is crowded with knickknacks left by family and friends -- a glow-in-the-dark angel, a plastic toy shaped like the character Patrick on the SpongeBob SquarePants show and a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels. Someone, Pamela doesn't know who, leaves a rose on Patrick's grave every week. A spiral-bound notebook in a plastic bag also sits on the grave, so friends and family members can write messages and memories, as in a guest book at a wedding. "I'm never going to be a grandma. I'm never going to his wedding," she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. A few days after the cemetery visit, on April 28, Pamela wrote in an e-mail, "Today is a year for Patrick and the pain is awful ...The heartbreak, the what ifs, the I can't go on. Patrick is at peace, but the ones he left behind, even after a year, have no peace except knowing he is without pain." But what pain was he feeling? He left no note, no indications he was considering suicide. In the endless loop of "whys" and "what ifs" swirling through Pamela's mind, all she can come up with is that the alcohol made the decision, not her Patrick. "I wish I was with him that night, just so I could understand what happened," she said. About a year before his death, Patrick had started working with his father, installing fire sprinkler systems. Before that, he worked at Finch, Pruyn for a while, but neither job was what he really wanted to do. He was frustrated that he was still living at home. "He just wanted to start his life," Pamela said. At one point, he considered joining the military. His nickname had once been Combat Pat, because he wore camouflage so frequently. "When the war broke out, I cried and begged him not to go," she said. He listened. But when a friend of Patrick's died in the war, it weighed on him. He wondered why the friend, who had children, had died instead of him. There were other disappointments, like his separation from a girlfriend less than a year before his suicide. But Pamela thought he was coping. She figured he was going through normal growing pains in the transition to adulthood. He seemed frustrated, maybe, but not depressed -- and certainly not suicidal. He was still the same fun-loving Pat, the guy who made people laugh and never held a grudge. She knows, logically, she is not to blame, but convincing herself is a lost cause. "In my mind, it's, 'How can you be so close to your child and not know he wants to die?' " she said. "The counselors say, if he had wanted us to know, we would have known." Looking back, the only clue was the increase in his drinking in the months before his death. Even so, he didn't seem like a "drowning his sorrow" drinker, according to a childhood friend of Patrick's, Katherine Breault, 23. He was a fun-loving guy who liked to have a good time and hang out with friends -- and nearly everyone was his friend. More than 300 people attended his funeral. As an example of the kind of person he was, Pamela pointed to his last Christmas, when a friend with two little girls was unable to afford presents. Patrick gave the family his paycheck. After Patrick's death, some friends carried a jug from bar to bar on South Street to collect money for the gravestone. The owners of the Irish Pub chipped in the remainder of the cost, Pamela said. After the funeral and burial, on May 1, family and friends went to the bar to have a few drinks in his honor. Breault, who had known Patrick since they were both preschoolers, bridled at the idea of him being remembered as a drinker. "I hate that people are having a drink to celebrate his life," she said. "He wasn't just about that, and if that's all you think he was, you didn't know him well enough. I'm not saying people who went out with him don't have a right to be upset. It's just, I don't want his memory to be just that." Breault's family has lived on the same street as the Webbs for years; it was her parents' house that Pamela went to the night of the suicide. They were more like siblings than friends, she said. As children, Katherine and Patrick would build clubhouses, play Army or search for salamanders. They grew apart as they got older, but they still liked to talk about those memories when they saw each other. "Who am I going to talk about these things with now? There's nobody," she said. The last time she saw Patrick, she was in her car. She knew he wanted to show her the old Jeep he had just bought, but, because she was in a hurry, she didn't stop. "I thought, 'Oh, I'll talk to him later,' " she said. Now, she dislikes going to her parents' house, because seeing the Webbs' house and Patrick's family is painful. In particular, Paul Webb, whom she described as a "manly man," seems broken. "To see him hurting, it's hard for me to take," she said. Katherine wishes Patrick had thought for even a moment about what he was doing and how many people loved him. "If he had just waited until morning, he would have seen it," she said. "He's not a selfish person, but, I hate to say it, suicide is a selfish thing." She, herself, attempted suicide twice as a teenager. "I didn't care about anyone else," she said. "When you're in it, you think it's never going to end." Katherine now has two children, and is engaged to a man who makes her happy. As she was talking, her older daughter, Skylar, 4, returned from getting a popsicle with her grandmother. Her lips and tongue were stained blue. Katherine laughed. "See, these are the things I would have missed," she said. |
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