I am wearily–yes, wearily–posting links to two recent pieces by the peerless mental-healthcare blogger Pete Earley. Below them I’m linking to an archive within the blog you are reading now.
Their common denominator: they are about young brain-damaged men enduring Hell-on-earth lives on the streets of America as those who love them–mothers, sisters–trudge on through the years, and decades, trying vainly to awaken the conscience of the–the what? The whom? The withered, laughably misnamed “mental health” systems in their states that are restricted by outdated boneheaded rules and by the soul-deadened payrollers who run them. By the distracted politicians who appoint those payrollers and promptly forget them. By the oblivious electorate that will never form a constituency to keep the politicians on the case.
The school shooting in Michigan last week has opened up new avenues for thought and action, and re-opened old ones. We must not let this awful opportunity evaporate.
More than a week after the Oxford High School shootings in Michigan, the episode still bristles with implications that drain the will and resources of mental-health advocates. Granted, we are not (yet) nearly as overwhelmed as, say, hospital staffers in the resurgent Covid plague, though there is some psychic overlap.
School shootings have haunted our collective consciousness for decades—a hoary specter that still grips us with dread—but this case brings new horrors to consider. It was not just any old spree of classroom murders carried out by a mid-adolescent with a semiautomatic handgun bought for him as a Christmas present by his Dad on Black Friday. This one dropped some new elements on us—and managed to bypass an element of omission. Advocates and all people of conscience must grapple with them, no matter the tedium and the elusiveness of solutions. Our sanity as a nation is at stake.
So, what must we grapple with?
First, a recap: the 15-year-old shooter, Ethan Crumbley, faces 24 felony charges for slaughtering four classmates and wounding seven other people with that semiautomatic handgun lying around in his parents’ bedroom. The charges include first-degree murder and terrorism. Ethan was captured before he could turn his Christmas present on himself. This is relatively rare, as is the high count of charges. The terrorism count may be unprecedented, and might set a legal precedent. Or it might set a legal obfuscation: The Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald told CNN, last week:
“There is no playbook about how to prosecute a school shooting and candidly, I wish . . . it didn’t occur so I wouldn’t have to consider it, but when we sat down, I wanted to make sure all of the victims were represented in the charges that we filed against this individual . . . If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is.”
Well, with all respect, Ms. McDonald, it might be mental illness. More on that in a moment.
The most striking new element is that the boy’s father and mother, James and Jennifer Crumbley, have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. This fact turns the spotlight on the criminal culpability of parents who leave lethal weapons unconcealed and unlocked in the household. Its implications could be seminal. The Crumbleys, as media accounts have made clear, are appalling and stupefyingly negligent parents. There’s a lot of that going around.
James and Jennifer Crumbley
Here the “element of omission” takes center stage. Are the Crumbleys psychotic? Is Ethan psychotic? What is “psychotic”? How do we identify psychosis, and what do we do about it when we think we’ve seen it at work? Is this case an example of “shared psychosis,” in which some of the victims do not show clinical symptoms? What are the responsibilities—and the risks—of intervening in the actions of one who might be in a psychotic state?
These are old, wearying questions. They have been charged with fresh urgency by the bloody Oxford affair. Or should have been. After days of online searching, I have not been able to find an indication that any of the Crumbleys has received psychiatric diagnosis. I’ve found nothing but the most glancing speculation that serious mental illness—genetically inherited brain disease—was present in any of these people. And I certainly have found no serious, informed discussion about this possibility. And so the Crumbley story remains a missed opportunity at least as a “teachable moment,” a broad, ongoing national discussion on the nature of this beast. And on the policies—judicial/legal, educational, budgetary, and ethical—that scream out for rapid and thoroughgoing reform.
I am going to offer an example of policy dysfunction that I published in my previous blog. It was articulated by D.J. Jaffee, a disciple of the pioneering E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the invaluable Treatment Advocacy Center. Shortly before his death last year, Jaffe restated an observation he’d made many times in his talks and writings. It bears strongly on the Crumbley case:
“The law says we can’t do anything until after the psychotic victim becomes dangerous to self or others. As ludicrous as it sounds, the law requires dangerous behavior rather than prevents it.”
Credit: Database Center for Life CC BY-SA 2.1 JP via Wikimedia Commons
I cannot say whether Ethan Crumbley or his parents are mentally ill. A competent psychiatrist should and must make that call. I will say that telltale signs are blinking red.
There are Ethan’s notebook jottings, noticed by teachers: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and “Blood everywhere,” and “my life is useless,” and “the world is dead.” There are his sketches depicting a bullet and a bullet-riddled body.
There is the now-infamous message texted by Jennifer Crumbley to her son the day before he shot up Oxford High School, after a teacher told her that Ethan was searching for ammunition online in class: “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.” And of course there is the fact of James buying that hideous weapon for his young son in the first place.
And there is the widely accepted thesis that if the rare onset of schizophrenia is going to occur, it typically occurs in mid-adolescence, Ethan’s period of life. This is the stage in which the prefrontal cortex is pruning itself of outworn synapses and generating new ones. If a genetic disorder produces over-pruning, an oversupply of normally essential chemicals such as dopamine can rush in and produce an imbalance that permanently damages the brain. (No thesis is yet seen as conclusive in the study of this affliction.)
The social effects of serious mental illness spread out in a widening cone from the victim through the family, the community, our schools, our political life, and the health of the nation. Mass shootings continue to be rare, but the debilitating dread of mass shootings is nearly pandemic. The cumulative costs are as under-appreciated by the populace as the nature of the disease itself. Ignorance, apathy, and fear continue to rule.
I have called in the past for creation of a federal cabinet-level department that would unify, critique, and extend policymaking in all these problem areas as well as others. Foundational reform of our disgraceful jails and prison systems, de facto catch-basins for the insane, for instance. Solitary confinement, that turns sane prisoners into madpeople and the mad into vegetables, must be abolished.
D.J. Jaffe disagreed with me about this. He felt that such a department would only add another layer of bureaucracy.
All right. Let’s add another layer of bureaucracy.
Mental-health reform is borne on the backs, overwhelmingly, of women: mothers of victims, mostly. Their advocacy work in the past twenty years alone has been heroic and sporadically effective. But these “secular nuns”—the phrase just came to me—are largely worn out and disillusioned. They carry on, but we must not depend on them to keep doing the trench-work that the problem demands. Our advocates need reinforcement—collective national reinforcement. Society must be made safe from our Ethan Crumbleys. Yet we must not let things rest at primitive blame and punishment. Humanity and moral justice call us to protect the mentally ill and to reclaim them if we can. This would be the most honorable means of protecting ourselves, and reclaiming our own souls.
The mass shooting in Michigan compels us to look again at psychosis, mayhem, and the enormous difficulties in warding off this witch’s brew.
The Crumbley family of Oxford, Michigan, and the victims of Ethan Crumbley’s early semiautomatic Christmas present purchased by Dad on the well named Black Friday, have been on my mind for the past week. I wish they would go away, and I wish It would go away. But they won’t go away, and It won’t go away. “It” being nightmarish gun violence in America.
Jennifer Crumbley, Ethan Crumbley, James Crumbley mugshots
In writing about annihilations such as this one, I would normally (strange word, that—“normally”)—I would normally jump astride one of my hobbyhorses as a mental-health reform advocate: I would renew my call for early intervention—diagnosing—as a means of thwarting people in the throes of psychosis before they act out their fantasies.
After Oxford and all its complexities, I realize that this “solution” is not enough. It may not even be attainable. Yet we have to try. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.
Instead of dashing off on the hobbyhorse, I have spent the week studying the case and renewing my layman’s education in mental illness. Here’s what has popped up:
It seems clear that the teachers and staff at Oxford High School went nearly as far down the road as humanly possible in reacting to the red alerts in Ethan Crumbley’s pre-shooting behavior. Nearly. On the day before the gunfire that left four students dead and seven wounded, a teacher spotted the 15-year-old Ethan looking at iPhone images of bullets in class. The next morning—D-Day—a teacher noticed Ethan at work on some deeply ominous sketches and writings: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” and “Blood everywhere,” and “my life is useless,” and “the world is dead.” The sketches depicted a bullet and a bullet-riddled body.
The teacher reported these to a school counselor. Rushed to the counselor’s office, Ethan dismissed the materials as plans for a video game he was working on. (Police later found two videos that the 15-year-old had recorded on the Monday night before the slaughter. They showed him predicting what he was to do the following day.) The superintendent of schools called James and Jennifer Crumbley, Ethan’s now-infamous parents. In the 90 minutes it took them to arrive, school staff members observed and talked to Ethan as he sat in the office. His Christmas present lay unsuspected in his backpack. On arrival, Crumbleys were told that Ethan needed counseling. James and Jennifer shrugged it off and left. The school administration let the boy return to class. It was better, they figured, than letting him go home to an empty house.
At around 1 p.m., Ethan Crumbley began visiting classrooms.
I wrote above that the teachers and staff at Oxford High School had done “nearly” everything possible to prevent a young person in psychosis from a murderous rampage. What else might they have done? Here we enter the realm of the conjectural, and clarity is essential.
Those staff members acted—at least on the early evidence—with exceptional initiative and responsibility. Should they have gone further and called police? Perhaps. Michigan law permits protective custody and transport to a hospital by police if an officer observes behavior that suggests “a serious danger to self or others.” Would Ethan have sat and waited for the police to arrive at the school, and then thoughtfully exhibited his psychotic symptoms? Not likely, even should the officers have been trained to handle the situation, far from a foregone conclusion. As for these parents giving their permission . . . well . . .
The great, recently deceased advocate D. J. Jaffe best summed up this perverse tic of social policy:
“The law says we can’t do anything until after the psychotic victim becomes dangerous to self or others. As ludicrous as it sounds, the law requires dangerous behavior rather than prevents it.”
So there we are. And here we don’t go again.
Related to the subject of psychosis and mayhem, my week of re-education led me to an essay that merits reading by anyone interested in this issue. It has prompted me to re-think some facile assumptions I’ve let myself slip into. More on it tomorrow.
The documentary-in-progress inspired by my book No One Cares About Crazy People rolls along. Here is an updated promo reel created by the producer, Gail Freedman.
Gail Freedman, the gifted and tireless producer of the documentary arising from my book No One Cares About Crazy People, has just revised and expanded the promo reel for the docu-in-progress. The new, riveting interviews show that Gail has traveled the United States on limited resources, eliciting personal stories from a range of afflicted people and their loved ones. She has also homed in on the unthinkable tragedy of the Rippee family of Vacaville, CA, giving us raw access to the ravaged Mark Rippee. Brava, Gail!
A personal note: the film now opens with my late son Kevin belting out “One More Saturday Night,” accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, at age 7. Kevin was en route to becoming one of the premier guitar artists in the nation when he took his life in 2005 on the eve of his 21st birthday. Schizoaffective disorder.
I gave this tape to Gail early in the process. But I had not then listened to it myself–couldn’t. This morning was the first time I had heard Kevin’s child-voice in about 30 years.
No, seriously–and props, and godspeed to her! Her piece in the October 19 Washington Post turns a rare spotlight on one of the many under-explored areas of corrupt and viperish traps for mentally disturbed children.
Paris Hilton, Photo Credit: Gil Zetbase, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Like solitary confinement–into which Ms. Hilton was dumped for a while, even though the foul world of “parent-approved kidnapping” has no law-enforcement authority–these predatory outfits are barbaric relics of the notorious “Bedlam” asyum, founded nearly eight centuries ago. Justice and human decency cry out for their abolishment, yet they and similar atrocities remain in business.
Paris Hilton’s bold denunciation has helped me to understand her for the first time, and to welcome her into the lists of reform advocacy. We need many more like her: public figures (all right, dammit, celebrities) who speak out from raw, often psychically crippling personal experience, to help us end the long sordid reign of abuse toward the mentally ill.
From the Washington Post:
Opinion: America’s ‘troubled teen industry’ needs reform so kids can avoid the abuse I endured
When I was 16 years old, I was awakened one night by two men with handcuffs. They asked if I wanted to go “the easy way or the hard way” before carrying me from my home as I screamed for help. I had no idea why or where I was being taken against my will. I soon learned I was being sent to hell.
I am typing these words in a near-incoherent state. I am consumed with boiling anger that makes me want to scream; black despair; bottomless pity for Rebecca Distel Reinig, the mother of Joseph; for Joseph’s father, and for Joseph, rest his soul. I feel such contempt for the pigsty that is our mental healthcare system and for the hospital and the healthcare factotums who carried out this coldblooded deceitful near-execution. (A sack lunch they gave him before dumping him in the rain. A SACK LUNCH).
I feel trepidation on behalf of certain friends who will read this and feel stricken because they have also felt the sting of American barbarism—institutional and private—as regards mental illness. The Rippee family. The West family. Find them in my blog archives if you don’t know who I am talking about.
Yet I derive hope from the handful of heroes in this country who do not let their own exhaustion and despair halt their crusade: the author and advocate Dede Moon Ranahan, who originally posted Rebecca Reinig’s nightmarish account of her son’s fate. Others.
I know that many, if not most of you, being human, come upon my mental-illness blog posts and read past them. Not this one. Please. Don’t skip this one. Read it, Every word. And learn something about the hellscape that awaits just on the other side of the membrane.
From Rebecca Distel Reinig:
“It’s with a heavy heart and a sadness that I did not know existed in a human soul that I would like to share with you the passing of my son Joseph. He was found Wednesday in some bushes in Oceanside, CA. Alone in the rain. Still wearing the hospital gown that he was had on when he was dropped off by staff from the behavior health hospital on Monday afternoon. His death is a tragedy and could have heen prevented if the doctors and social worker had truly listened to me when I begged them to not release him to the streets. I told them he was gonna die. Keep reading…I will explain the trajedy of his death. His cause of death is under investigation by the San Diego Coronor. An autopsy will be performed within the next few days.He just turned 30.
Joseph Reinig (Joey) visiting Children’s Hospital
For those of you who do not know my son’s story, it’s not that much different than thousands of families out there. Joseph lived in transient camps in San Diego County with severe mental illness. We wanted him to live with us. In fact we took early retirements to move him and us away from San Diego 350 miles north to a small town in the foot of the Eastern Sierra mountain range, where I was raised, and where as kids our we would take our children. We thought taking him to the mountains where he loved hiking and fishing, that giving him a stress free life in the mountains and loving him up would “cure” him. His delusions had him convinced that living up here with us was endangering our lives. He was convinced that if he did not leave ” they” would bomb our house, kill us and put him in a cold dark room ( not unlike the padded cell in jail where he would spend days at a time in, naked in a straight jacket).
Joseph and his family at his high school graduation
He lasted living with us for only several months, and thinking he was saving our lives, he went back to the streets of San Diego CA. That was 3 years ago. Since that time his life had been a revolving door of mental hospitals, medical hospitals and jail. He has been hospitalized in behavior health hospitals 9 times this last year. Sometimes against his will, often times he would admit himself. Often times I would drive the 5 hour trip to pick him up, get a motel and would try to convince him to come home. He always refused. Stating our house would be bombed if he did.I’m also angry…that’s not even a strong enough word. Joe admitted himself last week to Aurora Behavior Health Hospital. That was his go to place. He liked the staff and doctors and they seemed to care about him. It was there 2 months ago that the psychiatrist determined he was unable to care for himself and referred him to the County conservitor office so his dad and I could gain control of his medical needs and help him obtain the long term help he needed. The conservitor investigator denied the claim because he did not meet the criteria of gravely disabled. In California the bar is set very high to meet the criteria of gravely disabled. I have yet to know of anyone being successful with that endeavor in california. Accept Britney Spears. Her conservitorship is a slap in the face to those of us whose loved ones truly need help.
Joey with his dad
Anyway..Last week Joey admitted himself because he was feeling suicidal and was psychotic. He would always call to tell me keep was trying to get help. He wanted help so badly. Last Friday the social worker called and assured me that he would not he released to the streets, she was trying to get him reestabluxhed with a care management team and get him long term housing. I stressed that he could not be released to the streets. She assured me he would not. Monday morning she called and said he was heing released and Gould I pick him up? I asked what happened to the management team and housing. She explained no one would accept him because over the weekend he had been violent with staff. I instantly asked her why would she ask me to pick him up if he had been violent? I begged her to have him out on s 5150 hold to buy me some time to figure it what to do. She was heading to a meeting about him and would talk to the doctors. I was clear when I stated to her that under no circumstances should he be released to the streets. I said he is gonna die of we cannot get him the help he deserves . She assured me they would not and would get back to me. She did not. I called the hospital to talk with Joey monday night, he was not there. Still no call from the social worker. Tuesday morning I called her. she explained that her ” team” had given him a ride to Ocesnside and dropped him off at a CVS pharmacy with his prescriptions and a sack lunch. I was in shock, hung up and waited for his call. He always called. His body was reported to the sheriff’s office Tuesday night but because of bad weather they could not locate him with drones. The homeless lady who reported him took them to his body Wed. morning. He was still wearing his hospital gown and still had a baggy of white powder clutched in his hand. He was steps from the homeless camp. the coronor explained that it appeared he got some bad dope laced with fentanyl. Although suicide and foul play have not been ruled out. What kind of crazy fuck places meth with fentanyl? Its deadly and kills almost instantly.I’m so angry and devastated I want the system to pay for failing him. I want accountability. I m so angry its consumed me. I dont want to he consumed. Yesterday in.my grief i called a wrongful death attorney and babbled like an idiot. I told them i needed an attorney with balls enough to take on the “system” and make the “system” accountable for my son’s death and the needless deaths of all the other josephs out there. I want justice, awareness , accountability and the laws changed that binds the hands of families trying toget help to save their loved ones lives . iI dont want his death to have been in vain. The attorney politely said they will get back to me. I doubt it.Meanwhile we sit here trying to figure out where we will come up with the money to bring our son home and have s memorial for him. Death is such a money making business and for a fee if $250 we can buy 30 minutes if time to see our sons dead body and tell him goodbye . …that is if he is in viewable condition. if not, for an additional 800 they will make him viewable.”
At age 15, in 1998, Kip Kinkel gunned down his parents and two school classmates and wounded twenty-five more people at a school in Oregon. Today, serving a life sentence, Kinkel has broken his long silence. Will his insights penetrate the fog of ignorance and indifference toward serious mental illness? It would be pretty to think so.
I was transfixed when I opened up the Huffington Post on June 13 and found the story that I attach below. I had mostly forgotten about Kip Kinkel; but I had built the first chapter-draft of No One Cares About Crazy Peoplearound his psychotic murder-spree of twenty-three years ago, near the dawn of our present mass-murder era. More specifically, I’d built it around the coverage of that spree on a 2000 edition of PBS’s Frontline.
Kip Kinkel being escorted by police officers. Image: WikiMedia Commons
I eventually discarded that draft in favor of a new beginning. I realized that starting my book with a description of such an atrocity would risk reinforcing the myth that serious mental illness is synonymous with violence. Yet I kept the draft in my files. That draft also is attached.
A lot has happened in the world of mental illness over those twenty-three years, by no means all of it good. Yet to re-read the HuffPost story–centered on interviews with Kinkel over several months–is to be reminded how primitive public perceptions of schizophrenia remained near the turn of this century.
One year after Kinkel’s rampage, teen-agers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold slaughtered fifteen people, including themselves, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
I listened to news accounts of Columbine on the radio of a rental car in my home town of Hannibal, Missouri, where I had returned to gather material on a pair of cold-blooded killings by teen-aged boys for my book, Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore. Several commentators attributed the Colorado murders to the fact that Harris and Klebold . . . wore trenchcoats. Two years after Columbine, I published a piece in The Atlantic about the Zantop murders in New Hampshire. Two adolescent boys from a small town in the northern part of the state knocked on the door of a beloved Dartmouth academic couple in nearby Etna, whom they did not know, and stabbed both to death. In none of these stories, including my own, were the terms “schizophrenia,” “psychosis, or “serious mental illness” mentioned. Those who do not remember the past . . . https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kip-kinkel-is-ready-to-speak_n_60abd623e4b0a2568315c62d
You can find Debbi Anderson’s wrenching cry from the heart farther down this post. I have left the two parts exactly as I found them on a private Facebook discussion site. They are long and messy. That’s the thing about mental-illness narratives. They don’t clean up well. They shouldn’t clean up well. “Polishing” them, “editing them down,” “trimming” out “wordiness,” “sprucing up” bad diction—these are forms of murder within this genre. This kind of sanitizing leaches out the violated humanity in the original words. It distills the raw passion down to journalese.
And that is a core problem with writing about mental-health issues, whether quoting from a frantic mother or composing expository prose about the nature of brain disease: it comes out either too long or too sterile.
Debbi Anderson
Here I am going to risk both the former and the latter. I’m going to give you the context of Debbi’s two messages. (There is some repetition.) And then I am going to turn things over to Debbi, who has given me her permission. In a later post, I will examine some of the public-policy roadblocks to relief for her and her stricken son.
Set aside some time. But please try to read every word of Debbi’s stream-of-consciousness burst of despair. At a minimum, it will (re-)introduce you to a world that most people shrink from even thinking about. If a miracle occurs, it might infuriate you into joining the ranks of the reform advocates.
Debbi Anderson is a working-class woman who lives in Wichita, Kansas. Her son Devin has spent 18 of his 36 years in a fog of severe schizophrenia, and the voices in his head have driven him again and again to the streets (see the “missing” poster link below), to addiction, to jail, and to at least ten suicide attempts: “dangerous” behavior. Dangerous “to himself and others,” as the bloodless bureaucratic bromide has it.
Debbie, whose photographs show a blonde woman with large, penetrating eyes, has stood with her son all this time, tortured with worry as he has shuttled in and out of “care centers”—another bloodless bromide. (Some work well; others—well, read Debbi.) She has divorced his father and remarried, to a man who means well for Devin yet understandably lacks a clue as to how to maintain a bond of trust with him.
Things have hit rock bottom. Devin has been evicted from his latest hovel, a “rat drug infested apartment” in Debbi’s description, that his latest caseworker found for him. Why? Because he is uncontrollable. He is uncontrollable because the voices in his head ordered him to go off the stabilizing medication that once worked for him. The bloodless bureaucratic bromide-term for this condition is “anosognosia”—lack of insight. The bedraggled bailiwicks of American mental healthcare are suffocated under bureaucratic jargon and acronyms. And this is probably one big reason that no one cares about crazy people.
Here is Debbi:
I have attempted to post something about three times on here and every time I deleted it! I have ADHD, so if I jump around on here you’ll know why LOL I feel like you need to know that before you read this!
My son was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18 is 36 now most of my family was worried about what the neighbors would think! My mother was extremely narcissistic  so I know I get no support there! It has been 18 years of hell! he has a severe case! When he was diagnosed I was relieved in a sense I could finally put a name to what was attacking my son!! But I went from saving him from himself to having a gun pulled on me trying to get him out of a motel I was young and stupid back then that isn’t gonna happen again! but phone calls at night needing a ride because got beat up dont know how many times going out on the streets panhandling staying in the worst dirt bag place you could find. He had at least 10 suicide attempts when he goes off his medication the voices just torture him! Constantly went missing here in Wichita Kansas and then got so delusional and manic he thought that $.50 the rapper stole his lyrics He tried three times to make it to California and the third time’s a charm! Made it to California went missing for over a year.
I searched every day it was hell! I was not sleeping throwing up malnutrition losing my hair (I’m sure some of you have been thru this!) After the year was up my mind was taking over like it was trying to prepare me for that awful phone call or knock on the door we all dread! And then a phone call came in, from a hospital in south-central LA it was my son finally someone called me and asked me if I had a son named DEVIN! How he ever survived that i’ll never understand it had to be a God thing! He wanted to stay there! So in order for me to get the help that he so desperately needed I had to give up my rights so we could be a ward of California by the way one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make doing that! He started the revolving door in California just like he did here in Wichita Hospital group home run away hospital group home you know the routine for years and until he met a doctor that really helped him! Who would’ve thought an old-school drug like haladol would help him so much one shot monthly XR! So he’s in the same group home for quite a while he started making phone calls to me back home in Kansas and he sounded more like MY SON!! than ever since the day he was diagnosed!!! Still had attitude problems but nothing like it used to be not going out on the streets and doing God knows what and doing things that I wish I never new about! He was somewhat stable so he decided he wanted to come back home! Everybody else was thrilled I was scared don’t get me wrong I miss him so much! But the thought of having him back here in my face and going through hell again I wanted to believe that everything was gonna be OK so desperately! deep down inside I knew it wouldn’t be! I have been with an amazing man going on eight years he is my support system he is my world he just could not understand why I wasn’t so excited I felt guilty don’t get me wrong I want to see him so bad I really missed him it had been over seven years since I saw my son! so I set up a meeting with his group home and we had a plan the team met and we had an exit strategy I laid down my boundaries and my rules you know nothing too terrible no drinking in my house and no drugging and you will let me know where you’re at! Because I have worried enough through the years to last one person 20 lifetimes! But the first several months went really well I’ve bonded with my son since the first time he’s been diagnosed we were getting close he still had some issues but like I said nothing like before! Then when he got comfortable back home he started getting Like he had ants in his pants!
When ever he had money in his pocket the streets with Would call him! countless nights talking him out of using drugs the voices telling him to stop taking his shot then he meets a girl that’s an alcoholic and all goes downhill from there starts taking off I have no clue where is that then he decided to ask his case worker for an apartment and they put him in the most rat drug infested apartment they could find he got evicted because he can’t even take care of himself he’s so delusional because he’s been off of his shot for quite some time now which should’ve already been in the case file at the mental health place that he goes through I know there’s like a huge file on him but nobody bothers to look at that it’s already been proven he can’t live alone he can’t shower now he doesn’t even know he needs to! he barely eats! out on the streets living homeless panhandling for money and doing other things on the streets I don’t even want to talk about they are so horrible! This is what happens when the voices told MY SON not to take his monthly shot The mental health services here has told me they’re going to quit him if he doesn’t make contact with them and work on his goals. My son is out of his mind right now! he doesn’t even believe I’m his mother! How can an irrational person do what their supposed to do?!
I need help before the suicide attempts start again! By the way I am off his release so that makes it twice as hard! I know that we all have different issues and that we’re all on different levels my son is on an extreme level right now he’s very sick! He puts himself in the most dangerous situation he can find! I call that a danger to yourself I still can’t get him hospitalized! He’s been back for a year and a half and stayed on his medication for probably half the year since he came back and he’s only been hospitalized twice and never got to stay they sent him home and he was still delusional well they didn’t send him home they dumped him off at a shelter!! The system is so broken they have nothing to protect our severely mentally ill!!
(Later post)
Yes! I was on the website today advocates for the mentally ill on Facebook and I read the blog with the sister that had a mentally ill brother and when I read it it was like I was reading about my sons life! I posted on there several times about my son and I think you even commented on one of the posts my son is 36 he was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia When he barely turned 18 so I have been doing with this hell for 18 years! When I read that she said she’s been doing this for 33 years i was like oh my god that’s gonna be me! I have been told has been the worst case of voices a doctor in California told me that several years ago! I’m from Wichita Kansas and my son was delusional and off meds several years ago thought the rapper 50cents stole his lyrics, so he tried three times to make it to California It scares me to think what he would’ve done if he did find him he was missing for over a year I searched every day he was found over a year later in south-central LA how he made it that long alive I will never know!! so anyway he decided he wanted to stay in California which they have a better mental health system than Kansas and more funding for the mentally ill so he stayed there a few years and decided he wanted to come back home because he was stable finally found medication that would work Every month he is supposed to take a shot of haldol XR it is The most lucid I have ever seen my son! But eventually those damn take over and they tell him not to take the medication! We have done revolving door run away , state hospital group home Rinse and repeat! you know throw in a couple jail times in there! I have spent his entire life practically saving him from himself I have had a gun pulled at my head shot at trying to get him out of a dangerous situation with gang members! Did that when was when I was young and stupid LOL that won’t happen again! I’m just blown away he got that far Wichita Kansas to south-central LA On Greyhound bus But he was manic and full of energy as he’s gotten older his illness so much worse! Attempted Suicide at least 10 times he gets off his meds for a long period of time voices are going to take over and literally torture him he will shoot anything in his veins there any kind of drug because he’s convinced it makes the voices go away when in reality it makes it amplified! He has a CaseWorker I’m not on any release he refuses to sign it! Years ago I wouldn’t be able to get him talked into going to the hospital as he’s gotten older he acts like I’m not his mom and he literally tells me you’re not my mom I don’t know who you are he doesn’t know who I am he’s so far gone he told my daughter the other day several months ago that he was an alien and he can’t ever take a shirt off because he has a hoses all over his body! He says he doesn’t even know his name he said he is black when reality he’s white The Services here we have for him are horrible They been just been letting him fend for himself he has met criteria for a danger to himself several times over but here it’s not actually trying to commit suicide they don’t think it’s a danger to himself when in reality he’s doing a slow methodical suicide he doesn’t care if he lives or dies! If he was walking down the street and there was a bunch of mean guys with guns and on the other side it was a bunch of nuns wanting to help him he would go over to the bad guys with them every time! Straight now he doesn’t shower and clean he was living in filth downstairs to meet her but he left the door unlocked one day and it was ungodly the mental health passivity here in Kansas has hardly any funding so they find a cheap drug infested apartment the last place in today well he got evicted there and now he’s on the streets hustling money running around with murderers prostitutes and drug dealers They all take advantage of him he won’t let any of us near him he runs from a course I am like the devil because I’m the one that wants to get him help when you’re that ill anyone who wants to get him help is the enemy! It’s heartbreaking he gets worse every day anyway there’s so much more but I’ll stop there I know it’s rambling and confusing I’m sorry also that’s why I want to him on the shot because he wouldn’t take his regular tablets but now he won’t even show up to get a shot it’s time for his shot this month again he has not been on it for four or 5 months The voices in his head Literally torture him! If he stays off his meds for too long he starts contemplating suicide! it’s been 18 years of hell! But I’ll never give up! The mental health care facility here where his caseworker is told me yesterday that if my son doesn’t start taking his medication and working towards his goals and if he doesn’t stop missing all his appointments they were going to take him ofc there caseload and he will no longer be a part of their agency they are worried about liability because he’s out there on the streets if something happened! unbelievable! I am so upset about that it seems like the more severe they get the worse they’re treated legally community wise and everything else! No so he can’t think rational how would he even know to go to his appointments he doesn’t even think I’m his mom! So tired of everyone thinking that they’re capable of talking or thinking rationally at this point! Thank you again for letting me share it’s good to get the stuff out of me I cry a lot I feel so defeated!
If you follow this blog, you know that I’ve written many times about the tragedy of Mark Rippee of Vacaville, CA. Here is a powerful essay by one of his two indefatigable sisters, written in May 2020 and reposted by her today, that says it all, and better than I have: https://www.catsvisions.org/post/no-apologies-by-catherine-j-rippee-hanson
. . . And perhaps more than a year before reviews of the Linden Cameron shooting by Salt Lake City police are completed. (Linden, a 13-year-old victim of Asperger’s syndrome, absorbed eleven bullets from a policeman’s service pistol on the night of Sept. 4, yet survived and remains in serious condition.)
Linden Cameron
The link below, to the latest update on Linden’s story, discusses this likelihood. The story was reported and written by Heidi Hatch and Mackenzie Ryan of KJZZ television in Salt Lake City.
Mundane reasons. Case backlogs. Scant resources to investigate them. That sort of thing. Since January of 2011, the Salt Lake City area has seen one hundred four shootings by police. Of these, only eight have been ruled “unjustified”–a fair microcosm of the national picture. Charges were filed in just three of the eight “unjustified” shootings, Hatch and Ryan report.
All three of those cases were dismissed.
Nine other unreviewed cases are piled on top of Linden Cameron’s.
And so Linden and his mother Golda Barton will wait. And wait. And wait. The state of waiting and its attendant stress, for one bureaucratic reason or another, is familiar to thousands of families trying to safeguard a mentally ill loved one, or to seek justice for that victim.
Below my September 22 blog on Linden’s case, a reader posted: “I will wait to see all the evidence.” I respect this reader’s sense of fairness. Yet we may never “see all the evidence.” That blog included a murky 36-second excerpt of body-cam recording released by the Salt Lake City police department. It shows a wandering pool of harsh light (presumably the camera light) surrounded by darkness. Linden can be glimpsed walking away from the camera before he disappears into the dark. We hear gunshots when the pool of light finds him again, he is writhing on the sidewalk. Then he turns over onto his left side and stops moving. We can hear him say,
“I don’t feel good. Tell Mom I love her.”
The body-cam footage below apparently covers the full length of the police video. It lasts 1 minute 40 seconds, some of the extra length showing police leaving their patrol car and yelling at Linden before the gunfire. It was posted on YouTube by the website RAW.
This footage also shows that Linden broke into a run after walking a few paces. The police pursue him in a 45-second footrace, yelling for him to “Get on the ground.” Then the shots and the boy’s moaning voice as he lies wounded on the sidewalk.
And that’s about it.
So: Linden Cameron and his mother, not to mention the police officers involved, probably will have to wait for up to a year, and maybe longer, before the investigative bureaucracy gets around to this case.
The great 19th-century British prime minister William Gladstone is credited with the maxim, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Gladstone should have stuck around.
In a year’s time, pending investigations often lose their initial urgency. Public opinion and news coverage dissipate. The indignation of civic leaders cools. The cop shooting of a mentally ill boy, which initially drew international attention, grows stale in the files. The investigative bodies–in this case, they include an outside police department and the Salt Lake City department as well–tend to lose whatever incentive they may have had to render judgment against their own. The Linden Cameron case becomes something of an abstraction. Besides, it was dark. The camera dances around. Who, really, can say what happened? (Who, really, by this time, cares?)
“I will wait to see all the evidence.” A reasonable and honorable suspension of judgment.
