Crystal Fox

We have people that have lived longer than that with cancer.

They lived that long with Alzheimer's disease.

They lived that long with Parkinson's disease, even Lou Gehrig's disease.

And we don't have the life expectancy with schizophrenia, which is a treatable disease with the proper medication.

And one more thing is the gap that we haven't talked about yet in the system, which has to do with the first episodes, which is what my son went through.

So when I went to seven different agencies to try to get my son help, none of them took psychosis seriously.

If he did not say he was suicidal or going to hurt somebody, they did not find his condition worthy of treatment.

Psychosis wasn't even though he had just not too long before that pulled a knife on his father because he didn't do it right then.

Even though we have the good laws, the interpretation in these intake departments and by doctors is not considering psychosis as the emergency that it is.

And so that was a big gap in Joshua's case, which led to the death of his father and then eventually his own suicide.

In Arizona, we have different populations that I look at.

So we have individuals that are developmentally disabled, individuals that have Alzheimer's or elderly population that require treatment.

like nursing home type care or assisted living in some fashion.

And then we have the seriously mentally ill.

So we have three different populations.

And one of the things that we've noticed is that in the two populations of the developmentally disabled, like autism, and the population of those that have, let's say, Alzheimer's disease, we can get federal dollars.

There's a more inclusive program.

for those two populations.

And with the seriously mentally ill, we have what's called that IMD exclusion, which keeps us from being able to get federal dollars to support this disabled population in housing who need extra supports.

They aren't capable of housing themselves and feeding themselves and all these things without a layer of support with them.