Send us a textCrystal Fox shares her heartbreaking journey as the mother of a son with schizophrenia and co-founder of Arizona Mad Moms, an organization supporting families of loved ones with degenerative brain illnesses causing psychosis. Through her dual perspective as both a parent and a psychiatric nurse with 30 years of experience, Crystal illuminates the critical gaps in our mental healthcare system.• Anosognosia is a symptom of serious mental illness where individuals cannot recognize they are ill, truly believing their hallucinations and delusions are real• Despite clear signs of severe psychosis, Crystal's son Joshua was repeatedly denied proper psychiatric treatment because he wasn't actively suicidal• Current mental healthcare prioritizes treating suicidal ideation while allowing untreated psychosis, despite psychosis leading to higher rates of suicide and homicide• America has regressed in mental healthcare, removing people from hospitals and placing them in jails or communities without adequate support• Arizona Mad Moms successfully advocated for legislation requiring screening centers to document family information and created training programs on anosognosiaTell everyone, everyone everywhere, about Why Not Me, The World, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere, that you are not alone in this world.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: What is Crystal Fox's journey as a mother?
Welcome to Why Not Me? The World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor. Broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real-life people who will inspire... and show that you are not alone in this world.
Hopefully, you gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Meet the World? Humanity Over Handcuffs, the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us today is Crystal Fox.
She's the co-founder of Arizona Mad Moms, which is a place for mothers, caregivers, and family members of loved ones with degenerative brain illnesses causing psychosis. Join us as we explore her journeys, their advocacy, and the unbreakable bonds that drive this community forward. Thanks for coming on.
Chapter 2: What is Arizona Mad Moms and how did it start?
Yeah, thank you for asking.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Now, I understand that you're one of the co-founders of the Arizona Mad Moms. Is that correct? That is correct. Can you expand on when you first started your organization?
It was a slow start, a slow progress. We had gotten together. My son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. while he was in jail. And there was a group of us that were following his trajectory through the criminal justice system. He had trouble with maintaining his sanity, and he had to go back for Rule 11. And through that process, there was a group of us that followed him.
Shortly after he was sentenced, he went to prison and within 30 hours committed suicide. So after that, I was asked to speak at a hospital committee meeting for the Senate. And I spoke at the end, actually, the House as well. I think it had both sides on it. And after that meeting, we were just flooded with people who were dealing with the same issues.
And that's what created the Arizona Mad Moms. So probably around January of this last year.
Was that the House and Senate of Arizona or the House and Senate of the U.S.?
House and Senate of Arizona.
Okay. All right. So I think for everyone to understand, there's a difference between psychosis and then you have, I believe it's called anosognosia. Is that correct?
Anosognosia.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between psychosis and anosognosia?
What Arizona Mad Moms and many of us who have experience working with psychosis, we believe if you have that symptom of anosognosia, which many people call lack of insight. So when I used to document as a nurse, I would write whether people had no insight into their illness, that they thought that their hallucinations and their delusions were real and you could not convince them otherwise.
Some people had partial insight or a little, some anosognosia where you might be able to, they see that they need medicine, they might be sick, but they still believe their hallucinations and their psychosis and their mania. So you can have varying levels of anosognosia, but those that have severe anosognosia where they don't understand that they're sick,
that they think that their psychosis and their mania is real. They are the ones that Arizona Mad Moms most supports. They're the individuals that are severely mentally ill. We're also the individuals that often need treatment against their will or involuntary treatment because they don't understand that they're sick. My son was one of those individuals.
He truly believed his delusion and his hallucinations were real, and he could actually see them.
So when he saw them, was he around other people like yourself, or was he all alone by himself? If he was around you, how did you handle it so that way it would not get out of control?
It was tricky. And my son Joshua, he had some psychotic breaks when he was younger. He had his first psychotic break when he was 18. He believed that people were chasing him and after him. He believed that he needed a gun in order to protect himself.
He believed that I owed him the money from things that happened to him in his childhood, which I didn't know at that time what he thought those were. I later found out that he thought that his... Dad had raped him, had his friends come over and rape him, and then put it on the internet and made money. This could not have been true because his dad did not work the internet.
I've asked my other kids, and we have no recollection of John doing any such things.
So, in other words, this was something that he just believed, but it actually really wasn't true.
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Chapter 4: How does the mental health system fail families?
Then around the 1940s and 50s, there was a change. And I believe that change happened because they thought it was the best thing. but it has not been the best thing. So that change was is that we took people out of hospitals and they were supposed to get community care in society. That did not happen. And these individuals, instead of getting care in the community, were incarcerated.
There's never been a focus on psychosis or schizophrenia because we've just incarcerated people with this illness. And we've closed all the hospital beds. This is a big word, but personally, I believe it's like state-sanctioned torture, really, for individuals with schizophrenia. Imagine our individuals with autism, which there has been some, that end up incarcerated.
Yeah, I was talking with a judge, and about 50 years ago, he was in his teens, he went into this institution. They were dealing with this young kid that they'd gone through all these different things and thought that he was ultimately schizophrenic. As it turned out, they were treating him for schizophrenia, giving him all these kinds of medicines, and ultimately he was autistic.
That was over 50 years ago. Here we are in 2025, and we're still trying to figure things out.
Yes. And I will tell you again, my youngest daughter is severely autistic. There is no question she's got the epilepsy. She's cognitively impaired. She actually had a brain tumor. So she's got multiple disabilities. She functions pretty much as a three or four year old. There's no question. that she has autism and that she's cognitively disabled. No question in society.
No question if you spend any time with her. But my oldest son, Austin, had what they used to call in the old days Asperger's syndrome. We, again, same with him. And he was also twice exceptional. So he was also gifted. And he was diagnosed with ADHD. So trying to work out which issue he was having. We even questioned whether he had bipolar disorder as well. There's a lot of interlap.
And what they're starting to find in the genetics is genetically, there's a lot of interlap between all these diagnoses.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do families face when seeking treatment?
Yes, in the last year and a half, I've spoken with several people. A lot of them are autistic. Some are ADHD. Some are bipolar. Some are autistic and bipolar. It does seem to cross over and overlap quite a bit. That seems to be a very similar thing that happens around the world. The issue that I see, and this is just one of many, is the perception of it.
Not just the autism, but schizophrenia as well. They all seem to have that stigma attached. How do we change people's perceptions? How do we get them to understand? These are not people out there just trying to see how they can be bad. They don't have a well thought out plan on how to be bad. They just need help.
That's the million dollar question. And that's the question I ask a lot of people. So when I worked at the Arizona State Hospital for 30 years, one of the units that I worked out, and this is my favorite one that I like to talk about, was an open unit. It had open doors. So our patients came and went as they pleased. They were getting ready for discharge.
They were truly psychotic, schizophrenic, or bipolar, but they were stable on their medication, but still receiving a lot of supports. They were getting ready to go out into the community, so it was a slow transition back in those days. This is the 1990s when Clozzapine first came out. We went to the movie theaters. We went to what we call Park and Swap, a swap meet. We went on the bus.
We went to restaurants. They had dances to go to. They had all these different activities, but we've removed... all of those social situations. And so the thing with schizophrenia is just like the thing with developmental disabilities, they need support for an extended period of time with staff. And there shouldn't be any stigma around that.
The brain of somebody with schizophrenia that's been suffering with psychosis cognitively is impaired. They have to relearn stuff just like a person with a stroke has to relearn things. The difference between autism and schizophrenia, again, is we don't provide physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. Those things aren't provided.
And so the re-entry back into society is very difficult. And this is the questions we need to ask ourselves. I talk with the police. and they don't want to really deal with mental illness. You talk with the jails, they don't want to deal with mental illness. You talk with the store owners that are around the homeless population, they don't want to deal with mental illness.
We took all these people out of a safe place in asylums or hospitals, had people like me who care deeply. 30 years, I knew some of those patients longer than I knew my children. We took them out of those places for people who wanted to work with them, and we placed them in a community that does not want them. So that is the question.
The stigma is a hard one for me to understand because the stigma mostly has to do with everybody. And it has to do with systems, and it has to do with government. They've created such a difficult pathway for parents and such a difficult pathway for these individuals to succeed.
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Chapter 6: Why is early diagnosis of schizophrenia important?
The very good part about this is because she was living in a small town, the support she got from her friends, family, and just the town was actually quite touching. Can you relate to that when you were having issues with your son? Did you have people around that were supporting you, helping you, reaching out?
As we've talked about, the stigma of psychosis versus autism is a completely different situation. So how did they treat you? Did you feel like you was a cast out or did you feel like the community was trying to help and support you?
Good question. I didn't get any help or support. I also don't think I reached out, and I should have. Again, having my background, I think I thought that doctors and these hospitals that I tried taking my son to and all these places would see what I saw. I didn't know that you had to literally... write down a whole agenda. I didn't know that you had to be suicidal in order to get help.
I didn't know that psychosis wasn't enough. I didn't know that they would transfer him and not call me when he got out. I didn't understand how serious HIPAA laws were against parents. And I did not experience the support. And I think most of the Arizona Mad Moms have never felt supported. So my son, during his psychotic break, which lasted until his death, murdered his father.
And again, the first time he attempted to assault his dad, again, if this was my daughter Tia, she would have gone to a hospital or she would not have been removed. But with Joshua, even though his dad was going to file a petition, again, to have him placed inpatient this time, he wasn't on drugs. And even the last time, he was still psychotic.
That's why I knew it wasn't drugs the first time he went to the screening center. This time, during that petition process, my ex-husband called the police to just take him to keep him safe because he was trying to kill himself and others, and they took him to jail instead. And that's what started the whole incarceration process that led to, again, the murder and then the death.
And I even took him, being a nurse, I knew what to say. I took him to seven different screening centers and seven different hospitals to try to get him help. He was turned away by everyone. During that time, I had let them know that he had pulled a knife, that he was delusional, that he was threatening, that he wasn't making sense. Basically, I was afraid of him because he wasn't suicidal.
They didn't admit him.
That's the reason they didn't help, because he wasn't suicidal?
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Chapter 7: How can society improve mental healthcare for schizophrenia?
So we are hoping that will help to not just provide the intake departments in these hospitals and these centers more collateral information to be able to admit, but also to provide more safety to the family members so what happened to John doesn't happen to anybody else. And we also created in Arizona, when you mentioned anosognosia, we also created a bill training individuals on anosognosia.
Is that like a class people could take? And is it online?
It is. It's a class for behavioral health peer supports and staff who work in the centers that work in our... We have SMI clinics that work in our clinics to get that training so that they understand a lot of people think that anosognosia is just somebody being a jerk or somebody not being defiant or somebody choosing to... choosing this process, this thought process disorder, and it's not.
If I told Josh that he didn't have syphilis or hepatitis, which I did do because he didn't have it, he showed me the spots on his body that were not there and said that he knew that he had that disease and he knew I was trying to kill him because I wasn't getting him help for that disease. You couldn't tell him, even with a lab test, that he did not have that disease. That's not denial.
That's a medical emergency.
So is that something that you're trying to get changed where something like that would be the criteria to actually get him outside help?
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Chapter 8: What stigmas surround mental illness and how can we change them?
I would like to, and many of us mad moms would like to, escalate psychosis to the level that we've escalated suicide. If somebody says they're suicidal, they're straight into a hospital, paid attention to, it's important. Even if they've said they're suicidal 300 times and had been admitted to a hospital 27 times. They're still admitted for suicidal thoughts.
But if somebody comes in and says that they're out of their medicine, people are following them, they think that the aliens have come down and taken over their body, that's not a reason to admit somebody. That's not a reason to treat somebody. And we want to elevate that to the same level of emergency that suicide is.
Yeah, that's a good point. Now, what would you like to tell the listeners that you think is very important that they need to hear about what it is that you're trying to do?
Yeah, I think people need to hear that in a society that we need to decide. We need to decide, are we going to love and care for our neighbors, even if they're deranged and insane? Are we going to care for those individuals in society? Or should we place them in asylums or institutions where people who want to care for them are going to care for them?
The idea of placing somebody in the jail system for having schizophrenia, even when they do these horrendous things, which I know they're horrendous things, and I understand that, but not treating them why they're in jail and prison is, is torture. My son believed that he was being raped, that everybody was against him.
He jumped off a balcony breaking his back and both of his heels because he thought he was resurrecting a female from hell. He tried to kill himself multiple times. He felt that the devil had come into his body. He could tell because it was changing the way he looked. Leaving people in jail to be laughed at by guards and to be treated like that is inhumane. It's absolutely inhumane.
And whether you're going to incarcerate people, whether you're going to put them in a hospital, or whether we're going to try to treat them in the community, somehow we have to have love and humanity for these individuals that once they're treated would never do those things that they did.
Yeah, I think that's great. There's definitely a lot of tragedy that happens because of this and we definitely need to get a better handle on this so that it can get under control or at the very least give people an option to do the things that they need to do so they can have a better life.
Yep. So yesterday, Josh was so inflicted with his illness that he did not know how to use the telephone. Between September 27th, where somebody taught him how to use the phone, And yesterday, a year ago yesterday, we talked every single day for 30 to 40 minutes, depending on what the devil would let him do, what his voices would let him do. We talked about love and kindness, forgiveness.
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