Here at CVH, Dr. Karen Kangas and the Commissioner Thomas Kirk were introduced to us by Melissa Marshall and David Howe. They worked extremely close with us. The entire systems staff of Advocacy Unlimited, Inc. at Wethersfield we have met and even though there is some negativism here at CVH we hope to overcome this.

I, as an Advocacy Unlimited rep, would like to see myself as a patient who assaulted a child, but not sexually. I would like to get others not to treat me in this hospital as a threat to them with brawn and brain power that offends them, but as someone to help one another treat clients with good staff perspective.

Today I am going to tell you what the Mental Health Consumer Movement means to me. I believe in some ways we have come a long way and in other ways we are still in the dark ages. I am 44 years old and I'm diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic. My symptoms started about ten years ago shortly before the death of a family member. I have been to numerous emergency rooms, jails, courts and prisons. I have treated with respect by the police and EMT's that brought me to the emergency rooms. I have been threatened, had the air conditioned turned up full while I was restrained naked, been forcefully medicated and I have seen and heard of others treated in similar ways. Yet I am not bitter. I think a lot of the bad attitudes I've experienced come from stigma and lack of knowledge about mental illness. I have to admit that I met someone who was schizophrenic about ten years before I was diagnosed and I thought he could make himself better, if he only wanted to. I found out the hard way how wrong I was. A friend of mine was told by a nurse when asked for a glass of water, "I'm sorry we just don't know what to do with your kind". Now for the positive, I have the Americans with disabilities Act of 1990 which prohibits discrimination based on physical or mental disability. At that time (1990) there were 45 million Americans with one or more physical or mental disabilities. We now have patients advocating for other patients. We now have people with psychiatric disabilities working for the Connecticut Department of Mental Health. I now have some input into what medications work for me. These are great improvements that would have been unheard of even twenty five years ago. We have come along especially in the last twenty years, but I feel we need to continue to educate others about mental illness and people with disabilities. Thank you.