In the winter of 2020, I called up a taxi for Mercy Hospital in Portland. When I got there, I sent it home to my parents’ house in Rumford for payment; I had voluntarily admitted myself for mental health treatment without their knowledge. I wasn’t receiving adequate advocacy or opportunity in the rooms at the hospital in Rumford, where I grew up, though I did receive the excellent treatment and personal care you often find at rural hospitals throughout the country.

This was the beginning of my passage through the mental health system in Maine – a system I’m still in, five years later. And I don’t regret a single moment or wish I was free from it.

After receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in 2013, Mercy suggested I might have something else. The hospital referred me to Riverview from its emergency department, where I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. With my consent, I was put on a year-long progressive treatment plan with the option for a six-month extension.

My parents were asked by one of the psychiatrists to be emergency and eventually limited medication guardians; that’s the only way they could get me to take meds. Even though I was not a threat to myself or others, I was resistant to medication back then, and that’s not good.

While they respected my right to refuse treatment in the beginning, they got impatient in the end. However, this was beneficial to me in the long run. And they respected my humanity and dignity more than if they had not forced medication on me – even though I was on wrong and insufficient medicine from 2013 through 2020, refusing medicine a competent doctor prescribes is actually a form of drug abuse and self-harm.

It can take many months, if not years, to get the medicine right for my kind of schizophrenia. I’ve been blessed to live in the state of Maine where – if you listen and advocate for yourself – there is not only an adequate amount of resources and services, there are some really smart services and people providing those services to patient-clients, like Assertive Community Treatment teams throughout the state.

Because of my experience, I find myself disagreeing with Disability Rights Maine and other advocates for the limitation of progressive treatment plans.

Progressive treatment plans and guardianship programs are no more an infringement of my rights and freedom, as a mental-health client, than any other kind of medical or psychiatric intervention. I agree that the commonplace criminalization of people with mental illness is a problem. But I would not have the freedom I have now, or be making the progress that I’m making, had those interventions not been in place. We’re all resistant to anything that constricts our lifestyle at first.

And I’m not one to think that any portion of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services should go unregulated by the people, any more than I am to think that companies should proceed unregulated by the state.

But Maine has probably one of the best mental health systems in the country. The problem in the case of the Lewiston shootings was that the Army National Guard – not the State of Maine – was responsible for the shooter’s care. In this season of increased environmental and genetic stressors and causes of mental illness, decreasing PTPs and limited-to-full guardianship assignments is not the answer.

Do we need more niches and nuanced care for such diseases? Yes. But that doesn’t mean premature babies do not need NICUs. Is their freedom restricted? Yes. Is it so that they will survive? Yes. Sometimes, PTPs and guardianship assignments do the same thing.