Janet Hays
Director - Healing Minds NOLA
(504) 274 6091
Dear David,
We're gearing up for 2025 with a focus on advocacy. Working to implement Louisiana's Assistive Treatment Law has been an eye-opener. The challenges of working within broken systems to ensure continuity of care and communications between providers reveals a more precise look at where the fissures are.
It's from this experience that we bring renewed energy to fighting man-made barriers that have resulted in suffering for people living with severe mental illnesses. Too often a severe mental illness is a sentence for homelessness, incarceration and sometimes death.
In particular, we will be pushing a state and national campaign to advocate for infrastructure to support intermediate, transitional living facilities between hospitals and homelessness.
With no other source of income, our advocacy needs funding. Fighting for justice for those who develop no-fault cognitive disorders is not a hobby for us. It's a way of life.
With funding, we have:
· successfully passed legislation to remove legal barriers to ensure families free access to Assistive Outpatient Treatment for loved ones struggling with untreated/ under-treated severe mental illness and anosognosia.
· amended the Grave Disability standard to include psychiatric deterioration as a criterion for treatment and care BEFORE dangerousness. No other disease REQUIRES violence as a condition for treatment.
· helped pass a law relative to continuity of communication on admission to, during stays, and discharge from, inpatient psychiatric facilities. The law also requires hospitals to inform families of HIPAA rules.
· conducted multiple trainings to educate on Federal Joint Commission Standards best practices and have worked with hundreds of families to assist loved ones access inpatient and outpatient care, voluntary and involuntary.
· conducted the first of its kind national conference on implementing a full continuum of psychiatric treatment and care with a focus on severe mental illness.
· conducted, and have received many accolades for our 2020 zoom-cast discussion series with some of the most influential people in the field.
2025 will be a year of replenishing our coffers, solidifying our foundations, and also organizing for our "DJ Jaffe Train the Trainer" program!
Thank you for supporting our work. We have much work to do to improve our mental health system so that people too incapacitated to seek help on their own receive lifesaving treatment and care. We will get there together.
All aboard!