Rachel Streiff

And I know now this was the beginning of my training as an SMI advocate.

He sat me down at the age of 14 and said, you need to watch the most important movie ever made.

And most would think, oh, he made me watch To Kill a Mockingbird or something like that.

But instead, my grandfather made me watch the movie Psycho, which I don't think I slept for years after that.

And I don't know why he... I know now why he told me to watch it.

But that movie was about a man who ended up...

developing some sort of dissociative identity disorder.

And it was a horror film where he killed people in the infamous shower scene.

But most people don't realize that at the end of that movie, and this was the point my grandfather wanted me to get, the end of that movie plot, he is sent to a mental hospital for the rest of his life because he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

There was a time when we understood this as a society, that mentally ill people are very sick, that their illnesses and the symptoms of untreated illness can cause them to do strange and dangerous things and even commit horrible, violent crimes because of the symptoms of their untreated illness.

We have forgotten that as a society, and there's a lot of reasons for that.

we've also somehow lumped these serious brain and thought disorders that are actually organic brain diseases, probably even neurological illnesses.

These seem to have gotten lumped with general mental health and we are confused and we put them under the umbrella of behavioral health programs and these sort of

voluntary health and wellness treatment programs, but these are serious, serious illnesses.

And when we shut down all the hospital beds, now mothers in jails are taking care of these individuals.

From a fiscally responsible perspective, we pay for this either way.

Whether we are putting these disabled individuals in a jail or a hospital, we're still paying for it.

And it's a public safety concern.

So simply letting everybody run in the streets without treatment and untreated, it's a major public safety issue.

I have mothers right now in our groups that are in harm's way.