Schizophrenia is a devastating disease. Broadly, our culture has no charitable or nurturing way to shelter those who wander and struggle with grinding mental pain. We can only help with long armed tongs. The law is both friendly and frustrating. More on the details in later posts.
For now, on this Thanksgiving 2007, I want to acknowledge those for whom the cornucopia of America is filled mostly with a few grains and some rocks.
Those of us blessed with plenty on this Day need to think of those who don't and who don't on a 24/7/365 basis. And their family who will forever need to be patient, forgive and accept the inevitable anguish and helplessness.
May we remember those least able on this day celebrating the plenty.
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The legal issue w/ schizophrenia is determining -- in the absence of a clearly stated threshhold in a power of attorney (and even that is tricky because the person can always revoke the power of attorney) -- at what point a person is so disabled that he or she needs some kind of governmenally approved/ordered assistance managing their money and assets and/or caring for the person.
Governmentally approved assistance includes a representative payee for any Social Security benefits or Office of Personnel Management benefits, appointment of a conservator and/or guardian (nomenclature varies across jurisdictions).
And, usually, obtaining the appointment of a surrogate decisionmaker is the easy part (although it looms large as a threshhold matter). The hard part is exercising those "helpful" powers.
More to come on both aspects.
Happy Black Friday.
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