In the 1960s the breakaway Scottish mystic/psychiatrist R. D. Laing was prominent among many emerging voices proclaiming that mental illness does not exist. His aphorisms such as “Insanity [is] a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world” and “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through . . . ” made him a charismatic figure among the counter-culture. His work placed him in the company of the greatest denier of them all, Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, crippled the status of psychiatry for generations.
In that time, neuroscientists and psychiatrists worked patiently to rebuild the legitimate acceptance of mental illness and its destructive properties. Breakthrough advances in microcomputer technology established, for instance, that schizophrenia is a genuine disease of the human brain, and not just a synonym for “nut job”: it leaves lesions–tiny traces–in the brain; its clusters of flawed genes are genetically inherited and, to date, incurable.
Yet even as science (that fake mumbo-jumbo!) has steadily clarified the properties of mental illness at the top levels of discourse on the subject, its work is being rapidly undermined again where it counts: in the chaotic maw of popular culture, where malign ideology, semi-literacy, and poisonous cynicism threaten to nullify reason. Including reasoning about unreason.
Thus when the ineffable birdbrain Ann Coulter tweet-tweets, as she did on August 27, that she wants the deranged teenaged lethal shooter Kyle Rittenhouse to be her president (above), we may think of her as the hideous drum majorette at the head of a long malign parade, marching directly toward a new Dark Age.
This was one of the first interviews, if not the first, that I did for the book. From my perspective, it was an ordeal: not because of any deficiencies on Ms. Gross’s part, but because I found myself almost disablingly tongue-tied. At least that was how I sounded to myself as I sat in a studio at Vermont Public Radio and spoke to her at her studio in Philadelphia.
It took two hours for Ms. Gross to extract from me the material that she and her editors stitched together for the 35-minute version that aired on March 20 of that year; it is linked below. I was so bummed by what I thought I must have sounded like that I avoided listening to it–until today, as I write.
I listened today because my good friend CJ Hanson placed this rebroadcast on her Facebook thread and alerted me. CJ, as followers of this blog know, is a sister of the brain-damaged, blind, schizophrenic and homeless Mark Rippee of Vacaville, California.
Because CJ found the time and the largeness of spirit to repost the interview, I figured that it was time for me to listen. Judge the result for yourself. And thank you, C.J.
The author of the best-selling BRAIN ON FIRE is back with a riveting investigation into the life and works of David Rosenhan, the late Stanford psychologist known for his influential views that challenge the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. Her tour schedule of The Great Pretender is below. If you live in or near a city where she will be speaking, I urge you to attend.
I’m taking the liberty of reprinting the book-tour schedule sent to me and others this morning by my friend Susannah Cahalan. You may recall Susannah’s stunning 2012 memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, in which she chronicled her own descent into what appeared to be severe mental illness until she was rescued by a brilliant doctor who recognized it as a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. The 2016 film adaptation starred Chloe Grace Moretz as Cahalan.
In the 1970s, David Rosenhan sent seven volunteers into various psychiatric asylums around the country to test the validity of the doctors’ diagnoses and conclusions. The results shattered existing opinions of psychiatry and led to the closing of several hospitals. In this masterpiece of dogged, almost incomprehensibly persistent intellectual detective-work and sustained reasoning, Cahalan has exposed the flaws, the deceptions and the distorted understandings that found their way into society on the ballast of Rosenthal’s influence. The book is destined to become a standard of its genre and a daunting model for immersive journalism.
in conversation with the legendary St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan.
NOVEMBER 13 – MINNEAPOLIS
Magers & Quinn — sign up here The Great Pretender‘s own “footnote” will be making a special appearance….(earlier in the day I will be doing a talk at the University of Minneapolis, email me for details).
Andrew Romanoff could be our long-awaited congressional beacon of mental healthcare reform–if the lifers among the Democratic power-brokers will give him the chance to shine.
I traveled to the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colorado, over the weekend, to flap my gums about reforming mental healthcare in America. And found myself listening to the most stirring talk I have ever heard about reforming mental healthcare in America.
Hint: it wasn’t mine. It covered much of the same ground, but with the riveting pace, passion and purpose that educates and inspires.
The talk was delivered without notes by a guy who came so late to the event that people were starting to walk toward the exits. When they spotted him coming through the door, they rushed back to their tables and shouted in unison: “You’re LAAAAAAATE!”
The shout was not hostile. It had been rehearsed: an affectionate scolding to one who was known and loved by the people there, who understood that he is deluged with speaking obligations.
The speaker did not disappoint. His remarks galvanized the audience, which erupted in a standing ovation at the conclusion. He had completely upstaged a certain gum-flapping speaker from earlier in the evening. The gum-flapping speaker hardly minded. He recognized that if the political will of Colorado voters were to move in the right direction, this late-arriving figure could well be the charismatic figurehead of the mental-health reform movement from the floor of the United States Senate.
If that should happen–well, better late than never.
The occasion was a gala honoring Heart-Mind-Connect, a new entrant in the expanding archipelago of grass-roots advocates for fixing our broken systems for reclaiming the mentally ill. H-M-C was recently organized by a small collective headed by the singer-songwriter Maree McRae, whose son Stephen was stricken with a rare disease known as common variable immune deficiency. CVID, a genetic disease, attacks antibodies that fight infections, and can produce schizophrenia-like behavior in its victims.
The galvanizing, late-arriving speaker was Andrew Romanoff, 53, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2020. Romanoff is campaigning to get past a crowded primary field that includes the former Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, so that he can take on the incumbent Senator, the Donald Trump-supporting Cory Gardner.
Andrew Romanoff
Romanoff’s resume bristles with achievement. He won four elections to the Colorado House of Representatives, serving from 2001 through 2009, serving as Speaker from 2005 until term limits ended that run. His causes included expanding the Medicare health program; supporting the “Green New Deal” to promote renewable Energy; championing immigration reform to ease the path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; and opposing special-interest funding of political candidates. He has rejected Political Action Committee donations for his Senate campaign.
Romanoff holds degrees from Yale and the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He has researched the Ku Klux Klan for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has taught English in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
So naturally (according to Romanoff’s own accounts) the intrepid and visionary Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has done its best to make him disappear. Apparently the DSCC prefers the easy listenin’ strains of the incumbent to the reformist drums and trumpets of candidates such as Romanoff.
As Channel 4, the CBS affiliate in Denver, reported in August:
“The DSCC is a powerful political machine that spends hundreds of millions of dollars each election and Romanoff says it is threatening polling, media and other political consultants that if they work with him, it will cut them off.”
“The DSCC has endorsed John Hickenlooper. Romanoff says helping Hickenlooper is one thing, sabotaging his campaign is another.”
Romanoff’s focus on mental healthcare springs from personal experience–as it does for so many advocates and policymakers.
During his tardy appearance at the H-M-C gala, Andrew Romanoff spoke for about twenty electrifying and lucid minutes, sans suitcoat (the polar opposite of being an empty suit, it occurred to me), tie loosened, fingertips in his trousers pocket, crisply ticking off the goals and the challenges of the mental healthcare reform movement. I did not take notes–no one at the event had prepared me for the eloquence and accuracy and force of Romanoff’s words. I can guarantee one and all, however, that the standard-bearer we have all longed for within the halls of political power may be working his way there.
The emotional peak of his remarks came as Romanoff recounted the horrific story of a family member who put a pistol to her head in 2014 and pulled the trigger.
The victim was Romanoff’s first cousin. “I thought of as her my kid sister,” he said. The calamity occurred without warning, without advance hints that the young woman was disturbed. “Her mom and dad and I–the four of us–were celebrating New Year’s 2015 when she walked into the backyard and killed herself.”
Romanoff’s casual, wry demeanor changed as he briefly told this story. His eyes filled and he paused several times.
A cynical politician–perhaps a lifer on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee–might have seen this moment as calculated; a carefully rehearsed, twice-told tale manufactured to elicit sympathy.
I choose not to think so. As Huck Finn said, I been there before. I doubt that many readers of this blog, burdened in private by their own bereavements, would think so either.
Andrew Romanoff, Photo Credit: Jeffrey Beall via Flickr http://bit.ly/2Mg8jqI https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
I choose to believe that Andrew Romanoff is the goods: as a potential voice in the Senate for enlightened reform of our country’s shameful mental healthcare systems; but also as a voice for enlightened governance generally.
QUINCY — After Ron Powers’ youngest son committed suicide in 2005, the Pulitzer Prize winner and prolific author swore that he would never write about the “hellish” pain that he and his family went through.
“I was in a daze in the first five years, then the healing began, and I realized after reading more about the disease (schizophrenia) that I really had to do this,” Powers said.
Powers’ book starts with the words: “This is the book I promised myself I would never write.” But as he began going back through photos, emails and other items that belonged to his youngest son, Kevin, Powers saw the need to tell the world that ignoring mental illness is a terrible mistake and a social injustice.
National statistics indicate that more than 10 million Americans will suffer a serious mental illness each year and with more than three people in the average home, more than 34 million American lives will be disrupted.
Powers’ older son, Dean, was diagnosed with schizophrenia only months after Kevin’s suicide. Thanks to informed treatment choices, Dean’s illness has been controlled.
But too many people with mental illnesses are sent to jails, Powers said.
“The moral necessity for us as individuals, and for our country, is to reclaim these people,” Powers said.
“There’s primal fear and prejudice against the mentally ill and because of that, (society) punishes the mentally ill when we should be treating them.”
Since his book was published, Powers has been scolding the government for spending $31,000 per year to jail the average person with mental illness, rather than spending the $10,000 needed for treatment. He also has promoted programs that help those with mental challenges.
“Organizations around the country, like Transitions, are taking up the slack, and I’m so gratified that people are doing what they can to help,” Powers said.
Barb Baker Chapin, director of development at Transitions, hopes that Powers’ visit will help people see mental illness in a new light.
“One in five of us will suffer from a mental illness at some time in our lives, and yet there’s still such a stigma associated with it,” she said. “I hope Ron Powers’ very personal story can help us have a dialogue about the changes we need to see in the mental health system and the way we’re funding it.”
Powers has written 16 books, including “White Town Drowsing,” which looked at his hometown of Hannibal during the 1980s. He also wrote a biography of Mark Twain, “Mark Twain: A Life” that was a New York Times best-seller and a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. In more recent years, Powers was co-author of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “True Compass,” which were both No. 1 New York Times hard-cover nonfiction best-sellers.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his critical writing about television for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1972. He also won an Emmy Award in 1985 for his commentaries on “CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.”
Several of Powers’ books will be available for sale. A complementary copy of “Flags of Our Fathers” will be presented to those who buy tickets to a social hour with the author, and he will do a book signing.
Ticket information for “An Evening with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Ron Powers on April 26
Meet and greet tickets are $75 for the 6:30 p.m. social hour, complementary copy of ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ the chance to meet Powers during a book signing and preferred seating.
Preferred seating tickets are $25 each.
General admission tickets are $15, with doors opening at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are on sale at the Oakley-Lindsay Center box office at 217-222-3209, or online at http://www.1qct.org/.
QUINCY — Pulitzer Prize winning author and Hannibal, Mo., native Ron Powers will speak in Quincy next month in support of the Transitions Foundation.
The foundation will host “An Evening with Pultizer Prize Winning Author, Ron Powers” at 8 p.m. April 26 at the Oakley-Lindsay Center, where he will speak about his writing career, as well as the challenges and obligations of exploring family tragedy.
In 2017, Powers released “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America.” It describes the ravages of schizophrenia, which afflicted his two sons and triggered the suicide of his younger son Kevin in 2005. The book offers a critique of the mental health systems in the nation.
“I think it will be an interesting evening for people in our area who know he had grown up in the Hannibal area, as well as people who have an interest in history and his writing about the six men who planted the flag on Iwo Jima and people who have an interest in mental health and the status of mental health services in our country,” said Barb Baker Chapin, director of development at Transitions of Western Illinois.
Powers is the co-author of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “True Compass,” which were both number one New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestsellers. His biography of Mark Twain, “Mark Twain: A Life” also was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his critical writing about television for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1972. He also won an Emmy Award in 1985 for his commentaries on “CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.”
The event is sponsored by The Herald-Whig, WGEM, the Blessing Health System and Knapheide Manufacturing.
All proceeds from the event will support mental health services at Transitions.
Tickets for the event are available at the Quincy Community Theatre Box Office in the Oakley-Lindsay Center, which can be reached at 217-222-3209.
Tickets also can be bought online at 1qct.org, by clicking on “upcoming events.”
A limited number of tickets are available at $75 per person for a meet and greet with Powers from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. The event includes a social hour with hors d’oeuvres, a complimentary copy of “Flags of Our Fathers,” and opportunity to meet Powers during a book signing and preferred seating for Powers’ talk.
Tickets for the talk are $25 for preferred seating and $15 for general admission.
Copies of several of his books will be available for purchase at the event.
I was honored to deliver this talk on November 4 at Austin, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Medical Colleges. AAMC is a 142-year-old organization dedicated to improving American health care through educational initiatives and state-of-the-art medical research. My invitation signaled that the AAMC has recognized mental healthcare as an essential part of their outreach.
I feel grateful to the distinguished outgoing president of AAMC, Darrell G. Kirch, MD, for his warm introduction, and to Stacia Gueriguian of the AAMC for her superb stewardship of the technical production. If you find the talk useful, I urge you to repost it on the web, and perhaps to recommend it to a university, public-school system, or community-access channel in your area.
Below is the text of the talk I delivered to the 2018 conference of Pathways to Hope in San Antonio on Friday. Pathways is an exemplary nonprofit outreach organization that has set new standards for reclaiming and treating victims of mental illness and addiction.
Because of a last-minute scheduling conflict, the venue for my talk was shifted from an auditorium furnished with audio-visual recording equipment to one that lacked same.
In one sense, that is a good thing: people who are curious about what I had to say can find out without having to watch the image of my homely mug flapping its gums for half an hour.
In another, it is not so great.
I’d designed this talk as a forceful message—a call to arms, if you like—not only for the Pathways attendees but as a video document that could be distributed on the Internet to advocacy groups around the country, to access stations in towns and cities, to educational and religious groups, to judges and the law-enforcement community, and to state and federal political leaders with the power of policy-setting over our country’s broken mental-healthcare system.
My talk includes a look into the broken lives of two sufferers whose hellish plight epitomizes the rank obscenity of the ignorance, indifference, and neglect at the extreme edges of our judicial and municipal authorities. These victims’ images and encapsulated stories may be found near the end of my talk.
Finally, my remarks conclude with two proposals that will be difficult to achieve and can be fulfilled only via a sustained and broad-based outpouring of activist passion. One proposal is the enshrinement of mental-illness reform as the predominant civil-rights issue of our time. The other is the establishment of a new Cabinet-level federal department: the Department of Mental Healthcare.
I cannot overstate the urgency I feel for the necessity of these goals, and for our sustained witness of those unfortunate people who exemplify the atrocities in our dealings with the insane. Nor can I overstate the frustration I feel (I seldom mention this) at the societal inertia that enshrouds progress and muffles the voices of reform.
I realize that the remarks below are not for everyone. Except that they are.
________________________________________
TEXT OF MY TALK TO THE PATHWAYS TO HOPE CONFERENCE, AUGUST 24, SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
My wife Honoree and I would like to thank you members of Pathways to Hope for inviting us to this enlightened and important conference.
We are grateful in particular to your inspirational president, Doug Beach; his associate the Rev. Carol Morehead, and their All-star array of board members. Including your great county judge Nelson Wolff, who has so brightly illuminated your path.
You have reached out to a couple of chilly Yankees from the People’s Democratic Republic of Vermont—and got us down here to enjoy a little sunny weather.
Honoree was actually kind of rattled yesterday when I read her the temperature here. I told her not to worry; it would probably warm up.
I hope you know how special you are. Three years ago Pathways to Hope did not exist. Today, you are a piston in a great city’s emergence as a dynamo of human reclamation: the reclamation of the most helpless and vulnerable and overlooked people among us. I speak of those who have been stricken with mental illness.
And I speak of the families and friends who have interrupted their lives and often their livelihoods to protect them.
Something big is going on here in San Antonio and Bexar County. Has been for a while. At about the time Pathways was getting organized, in December 2016, the Boston Globe had this to say about the civic revolution you were joining:
“San Antonio has done in Texas what Massachusetts has not come close to: making mental health care a community priority, a real system built with creativity, humanity, and sustained commitment. A national model, saving lives and money.”
And you are now a central part of this. Your work embodies what has come to be known as “the San Antonio way.”
Let’s examine what “the San Antonio way” means, for the benefit of those who are not aware of it.
It means a great and rare coming together. A spontaneous combustion of civic will that rebukes our long national apathy toward mental health reform. A galvanizing of public agencies and private businesses and healthcare providers and churches and ordinary people—teachers, volunteers, and victims of mental illness themselves. A drive to finally seize control of our broken care and judicial and enforcement systems that too often intervene in the shattered lives of afflicted people only to make things worse.
San Antonio has said “Enough of this! Let us intervene in these systems and rebuild them from the grass roots up!
And let me be more specific still:
In this city it has meant creating special mental health units within the police force: handpicked officers who are rigorously trained to ease themselves into crisis situations and tamp down psychotic behavior, using words and gestures instead of guns. Incredibly important!
It has meant achieving national prominence in the practice of jail diversion. Gilbert Gonzalez and his Bexar County mental health staff have used jail diversion to identify more than 20,000 people with serious mental illness and divert them from jail into treatment. It has saved Bexar County more than fifty million dollars and counting!
That is just incredible! Cost-efficient—and more importantly, humane! Why is the San Antonio Way not the American Way?
I want to help make that happen!
My tools are limited. I’m a bereaved father and a writer—not a policy-maker or a neuroscientist or the leader of a great movement. Just a writer.
But as Elie Weisel said, “Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.”
So let me pray for grace, and not mince words.
American mental health care today is in a crisis.
I will speak to you of this crisis, but I also want to speak through you . . . to all those Americans, good and solid citizens, who may not yet have been poked and prodded to see our mental illness crisis for what it really is.
It is a crisis that takes many forms:
It is a landscape . . . a landscape of humiliation and grief and ignorance and shame. A hell on earth for too many of the most helpless, the most dispossessed, the most misunderstood, the most feared, and too often the most brutally confined and punished for the crime of existing while insane.
The crisis is a graveyard . . . a graveyard of hope, where we bury our complacent myths of compassion and loving community. These qualities are just not evident in society’s dealings with the mentally ill.
And all too often, it is a literal graveyard—where we bury the bodies of our brothers and sisters—our sons and our daughters—whose lives have been needlessly sacrificed to the appalling indifference and outright cluelessness of the very institutions designed to protect them.
The crisis is a swampland: an economic swampland whose quicksand drains and drains our national treasury. America spends about as much as any country on mental healthcare. Around $230 billion a year, in federal, state, local and private funds. That is nearly twice the amount spent in 2012.
And we spend it worse than just about any country.
The great advocate and my friend Dj Jaffe lays it on the line: our government, spurred by lobbyists, pours money into treating high-functioning patients and on treatments that lack evidence.
I know that Pathways to Hope reaches out beyond the borders of chronic mental illness to help those with behavioral and addictive issues, and simple bad luck. Yet you take care of the core group, the chronically insane, as well.
But at the national level, Jaffe and others have a point.
The powerful blogger Pete Earley adds that we squander even more money by over-spending on emergency systems: jails and prisons, for example. Meanwhile, state mental hospitals are being closed.
Politicians love to build jails because voters think jails keep them safer. Politicians love to close hospitals because voters think this will save them tax money.
This gets it exactly backwards: housing an inmate with mental illness in jail costs $31,000 annually, while state and community mental health services cost about $10,000.
Folks, America is getting fleeced! And America can’t or won’t see it! And so it goes on: a jail is built. A hospital closes. Fewer beds. less care, treatment, and medication. But more cells. And hundreds of thousands of chronically ill people—bipolar and schizophrenia sufferers—go untreated because the money doesn’t stretch to them.
Now I want to move to an area of spending on mental illness that is even less examined than the squandering of public dollars—but is perhaps even more catastrophic and dangerous to our social fabric down at Ground Zero.
I’m talking about the uncounted millions of dollars sacrificed each year by private households. By families. By parents who have no choice but to empty their bank accounts and their life savings, and often quit their jobs, to protect an afflicted child from going under.
I can’t give you statistics. There are no reliable statistics; not yet.
But I can tell you a couple of stories. Stories that represent hundreds of thousands of similar stories. Stories that I use with permission from the mothers and wives who shared them on a private Facebook site.
Here’s one:
“I have no way to go back and detail the cost to me and my family. I can say that the cost was tremendous. The expenses of traveling to the hospitals, the days lost at work because I had to be in the emergency room, or at a treatment team meeting, or in court. These things caused me to lose my job. More than once. So, how do you account for that? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And this is not counting paying for attorneys and doctors, neurologists and neuropsychologists. And medicine! And a locked safe to keep the medicine.
It’s tremendous, just a tremendous reality.”
This mother concludes:
“I retired way early because I am not able to work anymore.”
Here’s another, from the wife of an afflicted husband:
“Many years of paying rent and utilities before finally getting public assistance. Raising his children while his ex-wife recovered from breakdown due to his illness. Full time work cut to very part time, so I could be there for the grandchildren and to advocate endlessly for any kind of help.
Early retirement related to my own stress. Retirement pension a third of what it should have been. Paying for others to clean his apartments. Automobiles totaled at least twice. Expenses to keep him out of jail. Paying others to shovel out his filthy apartments so he doesn’t have his section 8 housing taken away. Vet bills for his dog. Transportation costs numerous times to get him home from yet another place he’s run away to. The long-term financial repercussions have been devastating.”
I think these two examples give us enough to think about. Or should.
So let’s move from the crisis of foolish spending into the crises of our hospitals, our caregivers, and criminal justice system itself.
America harbors two million, three hundred thousand incarcerated citizens at any given time. One-point-three million in state prisons. A little over half are serving time for violent crimes. The rest are in for property theft and drug convictions, and they should be somewhere else. Treatment, supervised community service. More humane, less expensive.
But no: lock ‘em up.
Jails and prisons breed psychosis like the Tropics breed mosquitos and grass breeds ticks. The Kaiser Foundation estimates that about eighteen percent of these populations live with serious mental illness. Serious meaning chronic. Incurable. Leaving the victim essentially helpless. I’m talking about schizophrenia. Bipolar affliction. And the rest of that happy little family. That amounts to three hundred eighty-three thousand insane inmates. Or about ten times the number of patients in our dwindling state hospitals.
I think everybody here can recite the following sentence in their sleep: “We are criminalizing mental illness.”
And yet, with the exceptions of certain oases such as San Antonio, we just keep on doing it.
We buy ever more cells, but never enough, and more solitary confinement: in my opinion, the cruelest, most unethical, most psychologically damaging and most worthless form of legalized torture in our criminal-justice system. Think of the descriptive nicknames: “The box.” “The hole.”
Yet jail inmates, most of whom have not been convicted of anything, keep getting shoved into solitary. Why? Because it’s there. A handy space in an over-crowded jail. And why are jails over-crowded? Mainly because of the stream of mentally ill kids who do not belong there. But are crowded out of hospitals.
Time in the box deepens psychosis. In Florida two years ago, a psychotic young man who’d been in solitary for two years tore off his penis with his bare hands.
One in eight jail prisoners in Florida lives in solitary. One in eight! About twelve thousand total. Out of eighty to a hundred thousand American inmates at any given time.
And the circle goes round and round. And solitary confinement goes on and on and on. Why? Because there is no substantial reform movement. So most Americans hardly ever give it a thought.
Solitary confinement is a national disgrace, and it must be abolished!
A couple more stories now. Stories have a moral force that statistics usually lack.
This from a mother whose brain-damaged son did some time in jail:
“First of all, everyone said that he should not be there. Doctors and other staff. It was known that he needed a real neuro psychological environment. To sum up years of suffering: The state knew, the state hospital knew, and no one did anything until I threatened a lawsuit, even then nothing, until I caught the division in a big lie with a brain injury facility.
The lack of training is unbelievable. State hospital employees don’t keep up with new findings, because they are not encouraged to do so. When I did find a good person, I made sure to tell the top administrator. Then that person was actually told not to talk to me anymore. Yes, buck passing and leaving my son to be secluded for years. I truly believe that the disdain is the word that tells our story. I would say to staff, ‘How can you sleep at night?’”
Listen to this message from the mother of a young psychotic son:
“One of the most shocking remarks said to me was when I tried to get our local hospital psych ward to keep our son over the 72-hour hold period. He was psychotic and refusing treatment. The nurse I pleaded with said, ‘You are his mother and he has a right to be crazy if he chooses.’”
This was said by a professional nurse in a hospital psychiatric ward. How many of you have heard variations of this remark?
Here’s another testimony from the mother of a psychotic child:
“The hotline sent two police officers to my house. When I asked them how they would approach the situation, one of the officers said, ‘If I feel threatened, I will shoot him.’ Based on this interaction, my husband and I declined their offer to do a ‘wellness check’ on my son.”
I will close off with two cases that have literally kept me awake at night. Because I cannot square either of them with any vision of an enlightened and just America.
Tyler West of Fruitport, Michigan
Youknow about Tyler if you‘ve been reading this blog. I’ve written several times about him and his family. Tyler is the adopted son of Kimberlee and Dan West, two of the best and most civic-minded people I know.
Tyler was already suffering from brain-related afflictions when the Wests took him in as a small child. He is a small and dark-skinned and sweet-natured young man, and he has cognitive processing problems, including with language that is spoken to him. Later he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism.
These traits made him a target for repeated beatings in his childhood. Yet Tyler remained gentle, and developed talents for music composition and computer programming. He carried a comic doll around with him.
Still, his symptoms of psychosis deepened and he had trouble grasping reality. Two years ago, when Tyler was 16, he disappeared for about eleven hours with a 14-year-old girl. They both denied having sex, and no traces of semen were found. Still, a judged sentenced Tyler to five days in jail on a charge of statutory rape.
This sentence put Tyler in the crosshairs of local law enforcement. I will skip over several harmless misdemeanors and suicide attempts, not to mention futile efforts to have him civilly committed in a hospital or care center. Bed shortage, you see.
But I will tell you that Tyler’s brain continued to decompose. Disaster struck on a February night in 2017, when Tyler, in a mild psychotic state, wandered across his family’s lawn to a neighbor’s house, opened an unlocked door, and fell asleep on a sofa.
The neighbors discovered him and had him arrested on a charge of home invasion.
Tyler West entered the Muskegon County Jail on February 19, 2017, until June 29, 2018. Sixteen months, as his hearing date got postponement after postponement, During that time, he suffered concussions from at least four beatings from violent fellow inmates. He did stretches in solitary, and could be heard beating his head against a wall. He was deprived of regular medication.
Last June, Tyler finally got his sentencing hearing. The judge moved him to quarantine in a reception center for a month. He is now an inmate at the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. Length of stay, undetermined. But he may be facing an 18-month sex offender class.
The whereabouts of Tyler’s comic doll are not known.
Okay, I have saved the worst for last. I ask you to please brace yourselves.
James Mark Rippee
This is James Mark Rippee. He has lived on the streets of Vacaville, California, for nearly twelve years. He is schizophrenic. Thirty-one years ago, Mark Rippee suffered a motorcycle accident that left him blind, with head trauma, brain loss, and a shattered right leg that is kept in place with a metal rod. He has endured more than fifty surgeries. He is beaten and robbed regularly.
Mark Rippee’s brother and twin sisters cared for him for eighteen years, until they could no longer control his violent behavior. They have since petitioned every service agency available to them for help get Mark into a protected and therapeutic environment. Or at least a legal guardian, someone who would look after his finances and his needs for shelter, and food, and medical care, and safety.
Every agency has told them “No.”
Why?
The bedrock answer is that Mark Rippee has his RIGHTS!
He enjoys the “right,” the civil “right,” to refuse care and treatment. And in his disordered, shrunken state of reasoning, he exercises that right.
And that is all the caring agencies need to hear in order to turn their backs on this hopelessly brain-damaged man.
Here is Mark’s brother, Joseph Privatte.
“I have contacted lawyers, Adult Protective Services, The Public Defender, The Public Guardians Office, the police and fire departments, Mission Solano, five hospitals, several case workers, Laurel Creek Mental Health, the Vacaville Homeless Roundtable, the Solano County Health and Social Services Administration, the Vacaville mayor . . .”
..and he goes on. I’ve left out about half the agencies he has contacted.
And now listen to Mark’s sister, CJ Hanson, after she attended a meeting of the Solano County Board of Supervisors. They were seeking to have Mark designated as “gravely disabled” so that he could be involuntarily committed and receive protection from the county.
California law defines “gravely disabled as being unable to provide for one’s basic personal needs for food, clothing, or shelter.
The siblings’ mission failed. The Board of Supervisors, CJ told me in an email, “consider him self-sufficient if he can eat out of dumpster. They consider him self-reliant if he knows to cover himself with newspapers, or to sleep under a bush to try to stay warm. They consider him self-sufficient if he can panhandle.”
CJ wants to get the state to re-define what it means to be Gravely Disabled. “If my brother is not aware or capable of seeking medical attention, then he is not capable of being self-sufficient. The criteria now in use is archaic! It is disgusting! It is inhumane!”
And it is likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future.
I can’t predict the fate of Tyler West or James Mark Rippee. Or the tens of thousands of Tyler Wests and James Mark Rippees who suffer atrocities today because institutions of justice and reclamation have turned their backs. I’ll repeat it: suffer atrocities, in the landscape of ignorance and shame, the graveyard of hope, or the swampland of wasted resources, that make you wonder at times how far we have really progressed from the era of Bedlam Asylum in the London of the Fourteenth Century, where torture, demonic superstition, and shackles ruled the brief lives of the so-called idiots and lunatics and morons trapped inside its filthy cells.
I am tired of wondering. I am tired of passively complaining. I am tired of giving talks around the country that aim to stimulate the passion for reform, yet result generally in kindhearted applause and handshakes.
I am angry and frustrated, and I want action! I have chosen this gathering of Pathways to Hope as the occasion for two specific action proposals that I am willing to fight for, if enough committed people will rally along with me.
Proposal One is my call for the establishment of a federal Cabinet-level department, the Department of Mental Illness!
This Department will have broad powers of oversight and policymaking into federal, state and county levels of criminal justice: establishing and enforcing standards of education in mental illness among judges. Ensuring speedy trials for jail inmates and accountability in sentencing. Demanding accountability from jails in consistent, humane treatment and medication of inmates in psychosis.
And pursuing, with remorseless intent, the agenda of wiping out the great moral blight that continues to infect our jails, our prisons, and our claim as a civilized nation. I am talking about solitary confinement. It destroys minds! It does not rehabilitate! It is bestial! It must go!
That is Proposal One. A Cabinet-level Department of Mental Illness. Here is Proposal Two:
We must recognize mental healthcare for what it so clearly is: the civil rights issue of our time!
I’m not talking about symposia or a holiday or public-service commercials. I am talking about a national movement! Built around a charismatic figurehead. Someone who can ignite and fuel an ongoing national movement. A galvanizing male or female member of Congress, perhaps. A retired statesman. A member of the clergy. A leader from the world of business. Someone from the ranks of Project Hope. Or someone we have not yet heard of.
It is a civil right to live with hope and dignity. Other movements have recognized that and have broken through. Now it is our turn.
The novel was an indictment of cruelties visited upon American migrant farmworkers, traveling west to California to find survival work in the Great Depression.
One of its immortal passages described the shock—the sense of violation—that these starving migrant workers felt as they looked upon acres and acres of rich ripe fruits and vegetables that had been strewn across the land to rot, because the owners did not want to pay decent wages to the migrants for harvesting them.
Here is what Steinbeck wrote:
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes.”
Do those lines remind you of anything going on today? We have work to do; the work of reclamation. Let’s get to it. Thank you.
While in Providence to give a talk to the powerful advocacy group, the Mental Health Association of Rhode Island I stopped in for an interview with Molly O’Brien, a young and talented host for the innovative public-affairs webcast GoLocalProv. Here is the clip:
Madeline and Terrie, you tried to put me wise to the special challenges of African-Americans who suffer from mental illness. You reached out to me as I began research on NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.
You provided me with sources. You tried to educate me. I promised you that I would look deeply into this topic in my book. But in the end, I did not look deeply enough.
Recognition of this truth arrived, appropriately enough, on Mental Health Day, October 10. It arrived in the form of a young woman in Cleveland, an African-American service-staff employee at the Intercontinental Hotel. It arrived just minutes after I’d finished addressing an exemplary civic group on—well, on the topic of education. Education about mental illness. How important this kind of education is.
(from left) David E. Weiss, board chairman; Honoree Fleming; Ron Powers; Elizabeth Newman, president and CEO at The Centers for Families and Children Benefit Luncheon 2017.
It took a three-minute conversation with this soft-spoken young woman to make me realize that my own education has been incomplete.
This is a rich irony—or a well-deserved comeuppance, depending on your point of view. I wrote NO ONE CARES essentially as an effort at education. After schizophrenia invaded my family and attacked both my sons, triggering the suicide of one of them, my wife and I realized that we’d become citizens of a “sub-nation”: the largely opaque nation of the afflicted and their families. Years later, when I recovered my willpower, I decided to write the book as an attempt to widen public understanding (and my own) about the nature and the reach of serious mental illness. That, and to illuminate the gross deficiencies in the American systems of mental health-care, criminal justice, and political willpower in addressing the problem.
As I’d hoped, writing the book educated me—but incompletely, as I now understand.
It is not as though the book ignores the particular ordeal of mentally ill black Americans. At least the public symptoms of that ordeal. It covers the epidemic of fatal shootings, by police, of unarmed and psychotic black men on the street. It portrays the overcrowding of the nation’s jails by juveniles, mostly black, who have been charged with crimes but not yet tried; and the violence visited on them by wardens and guards.
All of this is important. Yet in merely evoking these familiar abuses, I failed to cross an elusive border: the border that defines the daily realities of a sub-nation within a sub-nation. The lives of African-Americans struggling with mental illness amounts to unknown territory—unknown, at least, to most white Americans, of which I am one.
Ron Powers – keynote speaker at The Centers for Families and Children Annual Benefit Luncheon
I was ushered across that border in Cleveland on Mental Health Day.
My guide, the young service staff member, approached me just minutes after I had finished speaking at the annual luncheon of the Centers for Families and Children at the Intercontinental. (I am withholding her name. It’s a sad possibility that in these hair-trigger times, her employment could be jeopardized by the very fact that she spoke up to me about a racially charged public issue.)
Woodlawn Avenue, East Cleveland
The Centers deserves a moment of illumination here. It is a sterling civic institution. A nonprofit with an annual budget of $55 million, it reaches out to the poor, the hungry, the under-educated, the sick, and the troubled—some twenty-five thousand clients—in a city striving to overcome chronic post-industrial poverty entrenched racial tensions. The racial stress is burned into the city’s history along lines of segregation in its housing patterns: most of its black and poor population is concentrated in the near East Side, and most of its white population farther west. Cleveland’s incidents of fatal police gunplay in recent years, highlighted by the shooting of the 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, have deepened black Cleveland’s distrust, bordering on paranoia, toward the mostly white police department.
David E. Weiss
Amidst these overwhelming challenges of poverty and racial unease, the Centers for Families and Children persists as a national model of enlightened civic service and hope. Its board chairman, the lawyer and businessman David E. Weiss, ranks among the most socially engaged civic leaders in the country. Its new director, Elizabeth Newman, has re-ignited its six hundred volunteers with her own passionate sense of mission: to help people find job opportunities and early-education conduits for their children, provide food for hungry families, dispatch pharmacists to households to help manage nutrition and medications, find treatment for substance abuse, and summon emergency services in crisis situations.
And to co-ordinate intervention and help in the crises of the mentally ill. Elizabeth Newman explained this cornerstone service to me in detail:
Elizabeth Newman
“The Centers is equipped to support people with serious mental illness, this skill set actually sets us apart in the community. We routinely assist people living with schizophrenia. We have psychiatrists on staff, in addition to relationships with the local/regional hospital systems and emergency rooms. In terms of onset of psychosis, we are outpatient providers but work in partnership with inpatient providers, so it really depends on the level of severity. Another agency in town runs the mobile crisis unit, but we receive referrals and connections to clients directly from that unit.”
Which brings me (in my round-about way) to the topic of this blog.
Ron Powers
As mentioned, I had completed my remarks and was standing amidst the departing luncheon attendees when she emerged from the mix of people. She wore the brown uniform of the hotel’s service corps, and her manner was hesitant; yet it was clear that she had something she wanted to say.
What she said was, “Thank you for speaking about schizophrenia.”
I sensed the urgency behind this polite comment and asked her: “Is there a history in your family?”
She hesitated for a moment, as if trying to decide whether she could trust me with an answer, and then:
“My mother. And my brother.”
There is no way to prepare for a response like this, no matter how much you expect it, no matter how often it comes. One rule of thumb is to avoid “condolences.”
I asked her the only questions that seem fitting, and necessary:
“Are they getting treatment? Are they on medications?”
She smiled just a little before answering; and the smile should have told me everything I needed to know. But she spelled it out anyway.
“Black folks don’t like to get treatment. Black folks see it as a white man’s disease.”
While I was digesting this, she added: “Black men don’t like to talk about mental illness. They see it as a sign of weakness.”
And then, as if recognizing the need to explain the obvious to a blockhead (accurate, I suppose, in this instance): “So, no. They aren’t getting any treatment.”
And there it was: a key to the inner realities of a sub-sub-nation. The culturally learned set of attitudes that makes it all the harder for doctors and psychiatrists to intervene in the mental-illness crises of African-Americans. African-American men in particular, who routinely suffer violations of their self-respect, their safety, their very humanity, at the hands (and guns) of those who view them as inherently alien, dangerous, unworthy of inclusion in society.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly the same way that many people view the mentally ill in general.
I left the Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland as the educated educator. I thought of my friends Madeline McCray and Terrie Williams, and about the exasperation they must have felt at my failure to cross that border. Felt silently, without rebuke, in the way many African-Americans experience the myopia of their white friends.
Back home, I sought to verify the viewpoint of the young service-worker at the Intercontinental in Cleveland. Below are some samples of what I came up with. There are more, many more, as a Google search of “African Americans mental illness” will show.
–That African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population, owing in part to the exceptional stress they experience just living their lives. The problems include major depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, recourse to suicide, and post-traumatic stress disorder (this last because African Americans are especially likely to be victims of violent crime).
–That many black Americans misunderstand what a mental health condition is and don’t talk about it. Many thus believe that a mental health condition is a personal weakness punishment from God.
–That stigma—which knows no color lines—triggers especial reluctance among African Americans to discuss mental health issues and seek treatment.
–That a pervasive deficit of information—education—causes many African Americans to have trouble recognizing the symptoms of mental illness and to underestimating its dangers. Some may think of depression as “the blues” “or something to snap out of.”
–That black Americans’ distrust of doctors has some factual justification: Blacks are “over-diagnosed with schizophrenia, frequently misunderstood by their psychiatrists, and largely disenfranchised,” in the opinion of William B. Lawson, the distinguished African-American professor and chair of psychiatry at the Howard University College of Medicine. (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/768391#vp_2)
A Closing Thought
This has been far from an easy blog entry for me to write. No one likes to own up to failures of understanding, especially in the fraught arena of of racial relations. As with NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE itself, I at first resisted writing it at all. Then I decided I had to write it because it was the truth. I hope that it is read with an understanding that writers are often fallible—just like ordinary people.
