Update: Food for Thought. 

Mental Health Reform- Long Overdue. 

RE: I have thus far found Mr. ToersBlijn's contributions to the discourse specific to Arizona's shortsighted and graphically inept behavioral health care system very enlightening, and directly relevant to my work as it stands. Thus, as per Mr. ToersBlijn's express permission, I offer my own feedback, as follows.  This is a partial aspect of my response in this context. 

My further comments in red, below.

Mental Health Reforms ~ Long Overdue
By Carl R. ToersBijns

Arizona lawmakers should heed the warning of the recent Newtown shooting and take immediate proactive steps to avoid such a mass shooting by a mentally ill person in our schools or other public places. The solution to this problem is multi-fold but we must be convinced by now that those persons identified to be mentally disabled or ill must receive better treatment and this process must be addressed in a most effective and expedient manner.

While hospitalized at ASH, and after my discharge, I directed a number of very straightforward, civilly expressed and well worded requests to several Phoenix area law makers, and even to Tucson based representatives who I felt should take an interest because I am a Pima County voter (Tucson), lawmakers whose names I will leave aside for now. I did this, for example, in direct relation to the unreported Jesus Rincon Murietta escape and the consequent murder of April Mott, as well as in relation to concerns I had (and still have) about the Phoenix police departments' unwillingness to respond to good faith reports of staff physically abusing patients (inc. me on one very specific occasion), all of which I was able to document. However, short of one or two form letters from these particular members of the Arizona senate and house, each of whom did nothing other than divert the matter towards someone else, I heard nothing nor received any support at all. (PJ Reed)  

This should be identified as a two step healing process and will require legislative reforms in order for the process to be effective and applied to those severely mentally ill persons that live in our communities and prisons, yes prisons.

This is an excellent point. Nothing short of legislative reform flowing directly from legitimate information provided from CONSUMERS and other state citizens who have full experience in terms of Arizona's state behavioral health care system (including the author of this article, as well as someone like myself, and so on) is going to meaningfully address and resolve the deep set agency corruption and relatedly endemic shortcomings of a facility like ASH. And I commend Mr. ToersBijn for emphasizing the need for reform within the prisons themselves, too, in terms of mentally ill men and women incarcerated in Arizona's correction system. (PJ Reed) 

The first step is the prevention of crime by convicted felons released from prison and not tracked or clinically maintained to be stable law-biding citizens so they don’t pose a threat to our communities and their families.

Point in fact: The willful engagement of ASH's administrative staff in covering up Jesus Murietta's escape in late May, 2011, directly led to April Mott's brutal slaying in late August, 2011. And as I have written about at length in my blog, Jesus, a seriously mentally ill man around 22 years of age, is now going to have spend a major portion of his life in prison, rather than in treatment at ASH. I reported this matter to outside sources from the get go- all while still hospitalized at ASH- out of concern for A) Jesus' safety, B) the public safety, and C) for the fact that ASH's senior clinical and administrative staff were obviously covering the escape out in order to avoid accountability. But despite my best attempts to avoid the potential posed well before April Mott's death, and even later, when the four page feature article published on September 28, 2011, in the Arizona Republic newspaper, the Arizona Department of Health Services has taken no steps whatsoever to address the graphically clear wrongdoing of ASH's administration in this matter. (PJ Reed)     

The reason this is the first step is based on the fact that legislators have more control over legislation covering convicted felons than free citizens within our community. They can in fact mandate certain procedures and process a convicted mentally ill felon much like they can a sex offender under Megan’s Law and require them to register and maintain a treatment plan according to their parole conditions and release.

What needs to happen is for the various state officials and their charges in the state's agencies to abide by established law as it stand today. For there are already clear provisions of state administrative law applicable to these procedures, but I attest to the fact the Arizona Office of Attorney General blatantly defies/ignores  these laws, and are complicit in willfully granting the Arizona Department of Health the means to condone the wrongdoing at ASH and throughout the the whole of the state's behavioral health system go on unabated for many, many years. This, despite the good faith efforts of numerous individuals, including CONSUMERS (such as I), who have done nothing short of exercising their civic duty in order to report these matters. I have been party to a number of formal hearings in Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, wherein very well documented evidence was presented to the court relating to very overt wrongdoing at ASH, only to have assistant AG Joel Rudd blatantly challenge the merits of such evidence in order to preserve the highly unlawful conduct as a matter of standard practice. Indeed, legislators need to do something now, because if the office of the Attorney General is willing to engage in such criminal behavior, than all the efforts of someone like myself are effectively futile. My primary concerns today lie with the patients at ASH, who are highly vulnerable and seriously mentally ill and disabled; but it is critical for all of us to realize that this fundamental fact is precisely how people like Rudd get away with pulling this sort of shit on an ongoing basis. (PJ Reed)

The second step is to address the void of severely mentally ill persons neglected or not placed within a therapeutic or clinical environment such as private or public funded outpatient treatment clinics, admission to the state hospital or other referred treatment based on professional diagnoses and treatment needs.

Again, an excellent point. My awarenesses as a mentally ill person extend to events in the state of Arizona that occurred prior to my formal admission to ASH. The tragic shooting that caused six deaths and severely wounded former US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, for example, in Tucson, AZ, occurred three days before I was transferred from University of Arizona Medical Center (Tucson) to ASH on January 11, 2011. As the news of this event gained momentum over the following two weeks, we as a community were made aware of the fact that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, is a seriously mentally ill young man who had clearly exhibited very disturbing behavior in a variety of settings wherein the behavior could have been meaningfully addressed; and I also came to realize that I had encountered this young man in Tucson at the fall 2009 Fourth Avenue Street Fair, where he had set up a display designed to express his deep set concerns about socio-political disparity, and even then, I- a virtual lay person- sensed that Loughner was somewhat of a ticking time bomb. Regrettably, I had no idea at the time of what I might have been able to do, (and I still don't), but the fact remains, that "On that beautiful day, the mental health system failed us" (Patricia Maisch, November 07, 2012). So consider again the willful coverup of the escape of a violent patient from ASH in late May, 2011, which in time directly contributed to the death of a young Phoenix woman, and my related concern over the fact that the state employees centrally involved in this particular debacle have never been held accountable within any sense of the term. For in that specific case, the state of Arizona already had the seriously ill man in a safe setting, but the incompetence of his primary care providers- who for some reason chose to take him off of all of his medications while still there within the confines of ASH- and related willingness of ASH administrators and officials within the executive infrastructure of the Arizona Department of Health Services to allow this matter stand as it has, with no due action on behalf of the public in general. How many more innocent people will have to die or otherwise suffer the gross ineptitude of these resources before we, the people, take action in our own right and see that our lawmakers 

do their jobs in this context? (PJ Reed)

paoloreed@gmail.com