When hospitals release seriously mentally ill patients too soon without outpatient follow-up, the patients can end up homeless, jailed, harming others, or even dead. When patients are deemed suitable for inpatient care, they can languish for weeks in hospital emergency departments before placements become available. Meanwhile, patients who fake the need for care are smoothly and swiftly moved to inpatient settings. Breakdown opens a dialogue with anyone interested in improving the system of care for the seriously mentally ill population. Using vignettes based on real interactions with patients, their families, police officers, and other mental health providers, Lynn Nanos shares her passion for helping this population. With more than twenty years of professional experience in the mental health field, her deep interest in helping people who don’t know how to request help is evident to readers. Breakdown uses objective and dramatic accounts from the psychiatric trenches to appeal for simple and common-sense solutions to reform our dysfunctional system. This book will benefit anyone interested in seeing a glimpse of the broken mental health system way beyond the classroom. It can guide legislative officials, family members, mental health professionals, and law enforcement officers toward a better understanding of the system.
In a recently published book, Breakdown: A Clinician's Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry, Treatment Advocacy Center supporter and Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, Lynn Nanos, offers first-hand insights into a mental health treatment system pushed past the brink. In it, she details systemic dysfunction in hospitals that prematurely release patients with serious mental illnesses without outpatient follow-up. Predictably, those patients end up homeless, jailed, harming others, or even dead.
Using vignettes based on real interactions with patients, their families, police officers, and other mental health providers, Breakdown shares Nanos' passion for helping people, many of whom are unable to request help themselves. She also helps open an important dialogue about our mental health treatment system – one that we hope will spur interest in improving care for individuals with severe mental illnesses, in Massachussets and across the country.
Nanos is in her eleventh year as a full-time mobile emergency psychiatric clinician in Massachusetts. She received a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University and worked as an inpatient psychiatric social worker. Her book Breakdown: A Clinician's Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry is now available via Amazon.
Earlier in the year, Nanos shared this blog post about discrimination against people with serious mental illnesses and their disparate access to treatment.
