TAC Podcasts

Episode 1: Surviving schizophrenia

When Corey Minor Smith‘s mother was significantly affected by untreated paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, she was no longer able to care for Smith. Smith was able to survive her mother’s untreated schizophrenia by relying on her village of friends, family, and mentors. When Smith became an adult, the roles reversed, and she found herself prematurely responsible for her mother’s care. Now an author, attorney, activist, and motivational speaker, Smith shares her story and hopes to shed light and hope on the experience of caring for a family member with a diagnosis of severe mental illness. Expert Kathy Day provides insight on the caregiver experience.

Episode 2: Do no harm: Chris Evans enters the ER

Individuals with a diagnosis of severe mental illness (SMI) are often the victims of harm. Harm can be criminalization, an inability to provide basic needs, self-harm such as suicide, or harm from a lack of community support and resources. Sometimes that harm is fatal. And sometimes that harm comes from the very institutions meant to keep us safe. Monica Peltier will share her family’s story: how she and her mother served as caregivers for her elder brother, Reginald Wilson, who grappled with schizophrenia for three decades. In 2018, while in police custody, Reggie Wilson experienced devastating harm when he died alone in a Cobb County jail cell while awaiting treatment. Thurmond Gillis Jr. will serve as our expert as we unpack harm and psychosis, how they are related, and what we can do to help our loved ones who are often too sick to advocate for themselves.

Episode 3: Black faces, not Black issues: Advocating while Black

For over 20 years, Margot Dashiell has served as her son’s primary caregiver. During this time, she pieced together her own network of organizations, support, and services to ensure her son’s survival. When she found few safe spaces to talk about race and severe mental illness, she created her own organizations. Currently she is on the board of the African American Family Outreach Project, which helps family members of loved ones with a diagnosis of mental illness and Substance Use Disorder access resources through their “You Are Not Alone” Workshops series. Dashiell shares her journey of challenges and successes which all were sparked from the same aspect of her identity – advocating for a loved one with severe mental illness while Black. As a family member and senior family liaison, Kathy Day knows about the learning curve, and she knows how earth shattering it can be when severe mental illness suddenly enters the family.

Episode 4: Emotionally perfect: When treatment looks like punishment

Olachi Tiffani Etoh made headlines after being arrested in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport for kidnapping a child while in the throes of psychosis. For years, she struggled to cope with her diagnosis of bipolar, and it eventually led to this devastating event. Yet, after years of perseverance, Etoh is on the other side of these challenges and can now share her story of success. Today, Etoh shares her story with grace and reverence in hopes of inspiring others. Prosecutor Eli Savit, Prosecuting Attorney for Washtenaw County, is a teacher turned civil rights attorney and is today’s guest expert. Prosecutor Savit shares his experience and expertise in restorative justice and how the systems we have in place to help those with a diagnosis of severe mental illness aren’t as effective as we may think.

Episode 5: I called on Jesus

This episode explores the impossible position our disjointed and underfunded patchwork of services places family members and loved ones in when we put all the responsibility on them for peoplewho won’t seek treatment on their own. In our first episode, we heard about Corey Minor Smith’s terrifying experience of violence at her mother’s hands during psychosis. Today, we’re going to get into how our stubborn refusal to acknowledge the risk untreated psychosis can pose has effectively shifted what used to be a government responsibility onto the families of people with SMI – and there isn’t a back-up. Spoiler alert: it happens on the backs of desperate and unsupported loved ones left with few options and no good choices. For Black and brown families, there are fewer services available, and the stakes are even higher if they have to call 911. We talking with Nieva about her experiences with her son in Georgia. We turn again to Thurmond Gillis, a mental health counselor from New Jersey who specialized in first episode psychosis, for his clinical perspective.

Episode 6: What gives you the right

This episode gets right to the heart of the biggest controversy in the treatment of people with severe mental illness: involuntary intervention, and what gives another person the right to act when their loved one is not willing to seek or accept help. This, more than any other issue, is the determinant for what our systems of treatment look like. It affects what our laws allow, and it also affects how people choose to interpret and implement those laws. Some individuals and groups believe that involuntary treatment should never be an option, and other individuals and groups believe that, at times, it is both necessary and compassionate to intervene when our loved ones are not willing to seek or accept treatment due to the symptoms of their illnesses.

Episode 7: The two Olmsteads

This episode looks at two opposing realities from the Olmstead court decision – which makes it a conversation about community. The word “community” has special significance in the world of mental illness. For most Americans, community means home. A place where your needs are met. Where your family goes to school and work, engages with friends and neighbors – a place to thrive. For the mental illness community, community carries that political duality. Today, we’ll take a look at the legacy of Olmstead and what it means to access community treatment for people with severe mental illness.

Episode 8: I shot the sheriff

In this final episode of “Make Them Hear You,” we explore the medical and treatment systems’ neglect of BIPOC communities and how this neglect drives criminalization of mental illness in Black and brown people – especially young Black and brown men. The message we take away from something is shaped a lot by whether the messenger delivering it is creditable or not. This comes up a lot in the severe mental illness world, which is where the phrase “lived experience” comes from. Does the messenger know what they’re talking about? Police engagement with people who have severe mental illness is constantly under scrutiny. Severe mental illness advocates generally acknowledge that, in some cases, police might need to be involved if there’s a risk of violence. Advocates focused on justice reform often call to defund the police entirely. Sometimes the argument is divided along racial lines and sometimes along the lines of safety. Perhaps the biggest division, and the reason that the different perspectives can’t get together, comes from distrust of the messenger. Neither side of this debate believes the other knows what they’re talking about.

Episode 1: Assisted outpatient treatment: A lifesaver?

Episode 2: AOT champions

Episode 3: AOT: Inside the courtroom

Episode 4: AOT Success stories