Rachel Streiff

And then I eventually became, just through meeting friends, a legal guardian of a woman who suffers from schizophrenia and is a very complex case.

And so I help advocate for her and I help her family make sure that they are providing for her care.

I just started seeing a world that I had no idea existed.

It's really a genocide happening right now.

People are dying behind bars, dying in the streets.

People are dying prematurely from untreated illness and from comorbidities from the lifestyles that happen, substance use disorder that can sometimes co-occur, the side effects of

very strong medications that they need to take.

It's a very difficult world that has been long forgotten.

Right now, families and mothers in jails are the new asylums.

We closed the hospitals, most of them, and we didn't fortify community services.

And there's many elements of the IMD exclusion that is preventing specifically serious mental illnesses from getting the treatment they need.

Unlike other types of disabilities, our kids, our family members with SMI are neglected and forgotten.

And mothers are going to change this.

Probably the most foundational piece of this is education.

There has been a movement to really flatten what we consider a mental illness.

Somehow that term has gotten expanded to every type of depression or anxiety or worried mental health condition that exists.

That has significantly confused public perception.

That has detracted and funneled funding away from true mental illnesses, true serious mental illnesses.

Everyone is confused.

When I was 14 years old, my grandfather was a criminal defense attorney.