""Forced" Meds Treatment - The Real Issue"

[Joe Buck]

                                             "Forced" Meds Treatment - The Real Issue
                             
                             The argument is heated on all sides, but are they missing the point?

A man in the crowd was acting strangely. Then, he wheeled about and shoved Edgar Rivera, father of three, onto the tracks as the No 6 train screeched into Manhattan's 51st Street Station. The victim's legs were severed.

Police arrested Julio Perez, 43, a homeless man with schizophrenia and a long history of violence. The event, which occurred on April 28, 1999 was eerily similar to another subway attack in January. In that case, Andrew Goldstein, a 29-year old with schizophrenia considered by those who knew him as gentle but weird, pushed Kendra Webdale, who dreamed of being a writer, to her death in a subway station.

Starting from 1995, Julio wandered the streets of New York City, shuttling back and forth between homeless shelters, mental institutions, the streets, and outpatient clinics. In February 1999, he began experiencing paranoid delusions which escalated in March and resulted in his eviction from a shelter. Although a caseworker recommended that Julio be hospitalized, this did not happen.

Two weeks before the subway incident, Julio called a friend, panic-stricken because he needed medicine and his Medicaid card had been canceled. Two days before the attack, he again called his friend, saying he wanted to go into a hospital, but he failed to make a planned rendezvous. On the day of the attack, he actually presented himself in the emergency room of a VA hospital, and later that day appeared at a police station and a courthouse to file a complaint against his "enemies".

Then he made his final stop.

Andrew's story is not far different, notwithstanding more promising beginnings. He graduated from a New York high school for gifted students, despite early signs of schizophrenia. His illness intensified during college and he was admitted to a state-run hospital in Queens. Eventually he settled into a small basement room. According to fellow tenants, he would fail to take his medications, which left him disassociated and lethargic, with stiff muscles. Newer antipsychotics do not have these severe side effects, but they are more costly.

Andrew's records revealed a classic case of "slipping through the cracks" in the system, of a desperate person begging and being denied the care he needed and ultimately winding up on the streets untreated and without supervision.

A state report noted that Andrew, as well as his mother and social workers, repeatedly tried to get him supervised services, only to be turned away. Eighteen days after his last discharge he killed Kendra Webdale.

But New Yorkers did not know that at the time. To them, he was just some crazy man who had refused to take his medications.

[Dreamline]

I think that is just SO FUCKED UP how new meds are so expensive!!!  And how if you don't have the money for them, you're just fucked.  I don't think they should mark prices up like that...fucking predators!!!

[Paz]

 You are right about prices being marked up...it is a shame.
 Since most Pdocs are "in bed" with many pharmaceutical companies [they get kickbacks when they prescribe certain drugs] they should give out a lot more free samples than they do. I always requested free samples from my doc when they were changing my meds around. I simply told him I wasn't going to fill my script without having a month's supply for free. I wanted to make sure it worked before I was going to pay for them. And then I just kept asking, and I got almost 6 months of freebies before I had to start paying. The Pharmaceutical companies give tons of samples to pdocs...my doc has a frigging closet full of drugs. I think all BP's should be absolutley relentless asking and asking for free samples. Since they say there is no cure , and we have to take meds forever, they know we will eventually be buying meds. The least they can do is help BP's out.