Tulsa man’s message bears repeating over and over again

M ICHAEL Stick knows all too well the toll that mental illness can take, and wants others to know it as well. Efforts like his are an important part of breaking down the stigma long associated with a disease that affects thousands of Oklahomans.

On Oct. 5, 2012, Stick’s 20-year-old son, Matt, stabbed his mother to death at their Tulsa home. The family had noticed emotional and behavioral changes in the young man months before, and in September of that year Stick, whose family didn’t have insurance at the time, took his son to a health clinic for help. They were given an appointment for Nov. 20.

“This is the equivalent of going to the emergency room with chest pains and the doctor saying come back in 90 days,” Stick writes at the website for Mental Health Association Oklahoma (http://mhaok.org).

During May, which is Mental Health Month, Tulsabased MHAO is promoting an awareness campaign called #mytruth that focuses on four major issues related to mental health: death by suicide, the difficulty in getting access to care, incarceration and homelessness.

Each Tuesday of the month, the agency will put a face to those four issues through stories told by Oklahomans who have experienced them. Stick’s is the first in the series.

MHAO notes that nearly two people per day died by suicide in Oklahoma in 2016. Only one in three Oklahomans receives the treatment needed at the time it’s needed — the wait time is about five weeks to get into a local community mental health center. More than 4,000 people in Oklahoma experience homelessness on any given night. And 17,000 incarcerated Oklahomans suffer from some form of mental illness.

Only one in three Oklahomans receives the treatment needed at the time it’s needed — the wait time is about five weeks to get into a local community mental health center.

Stick writes that his wife had struggled with depression all her life, and the family saw signs of that in Matt, “but that’s all we saw and were unaware of the extent of his disease.” The attack wound up occurring long before the potential late November appointment. In 2015, a judge found Matt Stick not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered him confined to the Oklahoma Forensic Center in Vinita.

Stick’s testimonial urges Oklahomans to ask their lawmakers to provide additional funding for mental health. That’s to be expected, given MHAO’s mission, and it’s also a worthy cause — state spending in this area, per capita, ranks among the lowest of any state.

But we salute Stick most of all for being willing to speak out. “How many of us hide our story because we are ashamed?” he wrote. “We must speak up.”

He added, “I want you to understand that being impacted by mental illness is not a moral failing and it’s not someone’s fault. They are struggling with something that most of us can’t begin to understand. We must break the stigma of mental illness and the only way to do that is to create awareness …”

It’s a message that is spot on, and needs to be repeated over and over again.