WHY WE ARE HERE…….

Keep 2 things in mind while reading this:

1: All it takes is a severe head injury and you or a loved one could end up going through this too

2: She has no control over herself. People suffering like this need love, compassion, empathy, support and proper care to overcome this terrible disease.

I am Terry High Jr., father of Chelsea Ray and founder of “The Chelsea Project”. In 2022, Chelsea was a 26-year-old mother of three children, ages 2, 3 and 7. She is a graduate of the CMA program through Dorcey and worked part-time with her fiancé, Erik Spangler, at Teddy’s Landscaping. 

During the process of looking for a new home she began showing signs of mental issues. She would be up at all hours of the night, walking around outside half dressed. She started believing that all her accounts were in the negative and she screwed everything up. After going over a couple of times to try to talk sense into her, she began to get worse. She came over to my house on Aug 19th telling me that all her utilities were going to be shut off and the kids were going to be dead the next morning because of the bank accounts.

On Aug 20th Chelsea was taken to Beaumont Taylor for the onset of severe psychosis. She has auditory and visual hallucinations, episodes of catatonia, memory loss which also affected her personal hygiene, anger and aggression, bases her reality on Disney cartoons and says the Simpsons are right. During episodes, she thinks she is Bart Simpson, will remove her clothes and try to go down the street naked. She has jumped out of two moving vehicles and is now transported only in a vehicle with child locks. Too much outside stimulus tends to send her into an episode. Even having her children over usually sends her into an episode. She does get to see them as much as she can handle. 

First Episode Psychosis, or FEP, can last more than 5 years without the proper treatment and services. In the first two years of her illness, Chelsea was hospitalized 13 times at various short-term treatment facilities, spent over a year hospitalized and has been on a variety of medication until finally somewhat stabilizing on Clozapine. We have tried Electroconvulsive Therapy, which provided very promising results but came with severe memory loss from the treatment. We were unable to continue the treatment for two reasons. First, insurance companies won’t pay for the full number of treatments nor for the maintenance treatments. The only two facilities in our area that perform ECT will not accept our Medicaid, and they do not work with any CMH outside of their Hospital network.

According to The Citizens Research Council of Michigan:
“Michigan currently has four psychiatric hospitals and one forensic center operating 722 psychiatric beds. Community hospitals with psychiatric beds operate an additional 2,197 adult beds and 276 children’s beds. The ratio of psychiatric beds to the population is inadequate to meet service needs.” Since this article, another facility was shut down. We now have three.

With the lack of Extended treatment facilities, insurance and networking issues, we have been limited to the treatment and services available through Short-term Treatment facilities and our Community Mental Health. She is currently on a waiting list for one of these facilities, but it could be a year or more until a bed is available and private facilities cost over $18,000 a month. These facilities are better equipped to fully stabilize patients with SMI, educate them on their illness and teach them how to live with and manage it, giving them a better chance at recovery.

We are over two years into our fight, and we have still received no patient education on her illness, no crisis response training or education. I’ve had research everything about Schizophrenia and treatments on my own. 

What kind of life does that allow your citizens?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” According to the Declaration of Independence.

My daughter has spent more a year suffering from her psychosis, being locked up in a hospital, not seeing her fiancé and 3 children. What kind of Life or Liberty has she had locked away? The lack of available treatment keeps her from her pursuit to get better and back with her family where her Happiness is.

The Healthcare system has huge holes in both care and coverage. These gaps MUST be closed. The mental health crisis demands reform. This affects so many people including those who suffer from mental illness and the ones who take care of them.

Mental illness episode response

Let’s start at the beginning of a mental health episode. The police are the first to be called. As reported by michiganradio.org on 14 Dec 2022, the Detroit police respond to an average of 64 mental health calls a day. Not all go to the hospital but the ones that do are transported by police or ambulance, taking away from other calls they could be responding to.

Next, they go to the emergency room and stay there until a short-term facility has a bed for them. This usually takes 3-7 days to be transferred.

Once at the short-term facility they try to get them out within 3-7 days. Now with a first onset of severe psychosis, getting a patient stable in 3-7 days is absolutely impossible.

So what happens? Good question!

They are discharged unstable and the whole scenario becomes a revolving situation that usually becomes increasingly dangerous for all involved.

Who benefits from this?

The Insurance Companies!

Financially this makes no sense either. People with SMI end up receiving Medicaid and food stamps, social security disability and Medicare. The system keeps these people as a revolving income for the insurance companies taking from other resources instead of stabilizing these individuals so they could possibly become employed and pay into the healthcare system that has them stuck in a loop of dependency. It costs the state money to keep hospitalizing people to pay for their stay, food, treatment, hospital staff and time from police and ems to deal with crisis calls, that many could be avoided.