Summing It Up - Timothy Gionfriddo Earned Our Love and Respect

From time to time, I take a look at this blog - a collection of nearly 200 essays now aging in place - because I want to remind myself about how I thought about health policy broadly and the health and mental health policy issues that were hotly debated around the time the Affordable Care Act was being crafted and implemented.

I think about how my own narrative and the narratives of my family members were affected by policy decisions made by others.

There are plenty of commentators and scholars who know a whole lot more about this stuff than I ever did. So, most of my blogs have no historical significance at all - although one may someday.

It includes my first written expression of the "Before Stage 4" concept that became a hashtag (#B4Stage4) and the messaging frame for the work of Mental Health America beginning in 2014, a frame that was widely embraced by the mental health advocacy world.

I posted only a handful of new blogs here while I was the position as President and CEO of Mental Health America. I migrated most of my writing to MHA's blog after 2014.

But I am still proud of this blog, because it gave me the freedom to write about pretty much any health issue I wanted, covering a pretty broad landscape.

And when I visited the site recently, I noticed something else. Ultimately, it gave me the opportunity to express myself personally in a longer form than social media gives us.

The next-to-last blog I posted was about my daughter, Larissa, who had died from metastatic breast cancer. She faced that adversity with charm, humor, dedication, and determination the shine and thrive, as she put it, while she fought to live. And my blog let me eulogize her in a way that still brings her to life for those who did not have the privilege of knowing her.

The last blog I posted was about my son, Tim, and one of my efforts to visit him in San Francisco - a lost opportunity to share some time together because of the true insanity of our mental health service delivery system. We all lost Tim - and so many like him - a long time ago when we decided that mental health issues would be treated as public safety problems, not health matters.

I also had the sad, sad experience of losing Tim again in January when he died in San Francisco - a city he loved - at the age of 35.

During Tim's brief life, he earned our respect. He earned the right to choose his own recovery narrative. He earned our love, although he should not have had to. He was entitled by birth to these things.

So many people saw through his illness to his kindness. They saw through his daily challenges to his passion for living. They saw how much he challenged old ways of thinking simply by being himself, and not some tired media-driven caricature of a young man with a serious mental health condition.

I don't know if I will revive this blog in the days to come. My time at MHA grows short, as I plan to retire soon. But for those few of you who wander by this site and wonder about it, I hope you find something in it that still resonates with you, as I hope the hundreds of thousands who have visited it before you found something of value in it.

--Paul Gionfriddo

For the Health of Our Community, Can We Plan More in Advance?

Mayor Florsheim has proposed a budget with a 2.7 mill increase for the coming fiscal year. This will mean an increase in taxes of approximately $500 per year for a home with a market value (not an assessed value) of $250,000, with larger increases for many homes in our city. While I appreciate the time and effort that went into his budget calculation, like many people I don’t believe that this is a sustainable increase on top of the increases of the past few years. What I appreciate even more is that the Mayor has invited members of the public to work together to offer their own perspective and suggestions to the City Council. In the past few weeks, I have offered several short-term suggestions, including a job freeze, a search for an alternative health insurance provider, and greater advocacy at the state level for fairer PILOT funding for Middletown. As an example, the Mayor’s budget proposes $77,800 for a Grantwriter versus zero from the Finance Department. Maybe we wait on that? ...

Veterans and Mental Illness

On a sultry June morning in our national’s capital last Friday, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war. Some stopped and took pictures. One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo. Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet. It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall. It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored. Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight. It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight. Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence. I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the...

Scapegoats and Concepts of a Plan: How Trump Fails Us

When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan. And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives. The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-exi...

Our Health Policy Matters

Search This Blog