You don’t hear much about mental illness reform these days. Has mental illness suddenly evaporated, like the coronavirus?

Not really. It has quietly infiltrated and normalized aberrant public behavior in our deranged national landscape.

It is now front and center in the streets.

And in the ravings of pre-eminent news personalities.

And within the highest levels of a major party

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.

It Could Be Months. . .

. . . 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.

https://kjzz.com/news/officer-involved-accountability

Months. Perhaps more than a year.

Months? Why months?!

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.

Bring a book of crossword puzzles or something.

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

“I DON’T FEEL GOOD. TELL MOM I LOVE HER.”

Below is a link to a body-cam video of the Salt Lake City police shooting of the autistic 13-year-old Linden Cameron on the night of September 4. The footage was released on Monday, Sept. 21.

Linden’s mother, Golda Barton, had made the mistake of calling the police to get the boy, who was in a psychotic state, to a hospital. Linden survived the tender attentions of the police and remains in serious condition.

The video contains graphic content that viewers may find disturbing. (Actually, viewers SHOULD find it disturbing!)


I counted eleven shots–eleven!–from the policeman’s service revolver, a count also reported in local news coverage.

It is dark, and so you cannot see Linden being shot. But as the clip ends, you can hear him say: “I don’t feel good. Tell Mom I love her.”


This could have been either of my sons. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/09/21/bodycam-shows-salt-lake/

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

“You know what mommy, they didn’t hurt me. I didn’t feel it. I’m a Superman.” –Linden Cameron

. . . But Linden will suffer for the rest of his life. Most of the bullets fired by Salt Lake City police on September 4 into his 13-year-old body–shoulders, intestines, bladder–are still there and may never be removed. The shots that shattered both his ankles apparently didn’t lodge.

Linden Cameron. Photo Credit: Wesley Barton

The “investigation” into the cops’ behavior drags into its tenth day. Salt Lake City police promised the release of body-cam footage by “10 business days after the incident.” That would be Friday.


For background on Linden’s story–which has drawn international media attention–see more of my blogs on noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com


For recent updates, click on the links below:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/linden039s-medical-bills


https://meaww.com/unarmed-autistic-boy-13-shot-by-salt-lake-city-cops-has-bullets-in-his-body-lifelong-injuries


https://heavy.com/news/2020/09/golda-barton/ 

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

WOW QUE SORPRESA!!!

(As they say in Old May-He-Ho)

Sorry; still steaming, still sarcastic.

The story below confirms what I suspected from the outset: the Salt Lake City police chief is going to smother the investigation into the Linden Cameron atrocity–13-year-old autistic boy shot several times by a cop–as long as he can get away with it, which may be forever.

Linden Cameron

Somehow it didn’t pull at my heartstrings to read that the chief discussed the shooting in a radio interview with “emotion clear in his voice.” It has been eight days, at this writing, since Linden was drilled. Is the chief waiting for the deadeye officer to finish writing his memoir?

KSL News Radio interview with Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown and former chief Chris Burbank

Actually, the chief has announced that there will be four investigations (he said three, but then added another): one by an “outside police agency,” one by the district attorney’s office, and an internal investigation into whether there were any policy violations. (Duh.)

If there turn out to have been no policy violations, perhaps the policy could use a rewrite: Nix on firing several bullets into an unarmed panic-stricken boy.

The fourth investigation will be conducted by a “Citizen Review Board.” Such boards have earned respect in many cities, but police unions tend to detest them.

Maybe those four separate probes will produce a unified conclusion that shooting Linden–whose mother had called the police to help calm the boy during a psychotic spell–was an unnecessary and borderline criminal action.

Maybe, but don’t count on it. The more “investigations” pour into an incident like this one, the better the chances of a compromised finding: especially when at least two of those “investigation” entities share institutional DNA with the perpetrator. 

Still, at least one former law-enforcement officer has criticized the “investigation” delay. Here is a significant pullout from near the end of the Deseret News story by reporter Amy Donaldson:

“[F] ormer Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank, who appeared on the Dave and Dujanovic show immediately after Brown, said police could be more transparent if they wanted to, and it wouldn’t compromise investigations.

“This is the mistake being made across the country time and time again. The nation has stood up and said, we have a problem and we need to discuss this. And the response from policing locally and across the nation is, ‘Well, we’re going to talk about it, investigate it, and we’ll tell you about it later.’ That is not satisfactory.”

Brave and eloquent words from a former police chief, as Linden’s story spreads around the world. Let’s see how much weight they carry in his hometown.

Mother of Linden Cameron speaks out: ‘Why didn’t you just tackle him?’

https://noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com/?s=linden+cameron

AMERICA LOST A HERO ON SUNDAY

I almost wrote, “the mentally ill people of America lost a hero on Sunday,” but that would not have been nearly adequate to contain this giant’s significance to our country.

Dj Jaffe, who succumbed to leukemia and other cancers at age 65 after stoically battling them for fifteen years, was a human beacon of hope and guidance and enlightenment to those who suffered from chronic brain diseases (“chronic” meaning genetically inherited and incurable). And to their caretaking relatives, mostly mothers, in practice; to their often overmatched doctors and therapists; to uninformed policymakers and corrections officers.

Dj was among the three most influential advocates for the mentally ill in the brief history of that calling, along with the author and blogger Pete Earley and the pioneering statesman of advocacy, E. Fuller Torrey, author of many books and the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center. The TAC website is the largest, most diverse compendium of m.i. information online.

Dj Jaffe was a skinny force of nature the likes of which the cautious mental healthcare world had never seen, and not everyone liked him. He walked away from an obscure career in advertising after the sister of his wife, Rose, was stricken with mental illness thirty years ago. Razor-sharp and pugnacious when he had to be, he transformed himself into an expert on the nosology, neuroscience, politics and policy issues surrounding the disease. Wearing his unrepentant bluejeans, ponytail, and oversize glasses (and a wrinkled suit when he had to), Dj mastered libraries of information, then cycloned through public hearings, press interviews, and panel discussions, rising to challenge the dignitaries who did not know what they were talking about—or didn’t care. He delighted in getting thrown out of hearings. Opponents were infuriated by his refusal to back down from a stance or a demand. Truth to tell, he was not always right.

Congressman Tim Murphy.
Photo Credit: Timmurphy / CC BY-SA

He was right often enough. Boring in on our slipshod structure of criminal justice for the insane, he was instrumental in pushing the act known as Kendra’s Law, which allows courts to order treatment for certain mentally ill and perhaps dangerous patients even if they resist it. He worked with the Pennsylvania Republican congressman Tim Murphy to achieve the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. He demanded, and largely achieved, a long-delayed recognition that “chronic mental illness”—genetically inherited and incurable brain afflictions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—differs on a quantum level from such lesser complaints as depression, alienation, alcoholism, and drug abuse.

In 2017 Pete Earley distilled the reasons why this distinction is essential:

“The problem, according to Jaffe, is that the focus, money and attention in our nation is focused on helping nearly everyone but those ten million [with chronic m.i.] and the result is at least 140,000 SMI Americans being homeless, 392,037 in jails and prisons, 755,360 on probation or parole and at least 95,000 who need hospitalization unable to find a bed.”

His politics were less doctrinaire than fluid, tuned to the needs of the dispossessed who consumed his passions. He founded the nonpartisan Mental Illness Policy Organization.  As an adjunct fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, Dj spoke at a White House summit on mental illness in December 2019. His countless articles and appearances across the media spectrum testify that he was a zealot not for ideology, but for enlightenment and hope.

Dj joined Fuller Torrey and TAC in 1998. He drew on Torrey’s collaborative expertise and on TAC’s informational and advocacy riches for his important 2017 book, Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the  Mentally Ill (Prometheus Books). Torrey acknowledged his friend and disciple’s stature in a statement released this morning:

“Since 1998, when we first started making plans for what became the Treatment Advocacy Center, Dj has been the single most effective advocate I have worked with and a close personal friend. His dedication to improving the treatment of people with serious mental illness, based on his experience with his sister-in-law, has been extraordinary. The amount of time and energy he has invested in this mission, first at TAC and then at Mental Illness Policy Org, is legendary. Even as he knew he was dying, DJ said nothing and continued his advocacy efforts.”

On a personal note:

It took me a while to get comfortable with the idea of meeting Dj Jaffe. His reputation as a controversial know-it-all firebrand put me off. But when we did meet, the rapport was instant. We discovered that we could make one another laugh. (I nearly lost it in a hotel coffee house in New York when my friend got embroiled in an argument with the waiter. This was no ordinary waiter-customer spat: the waiter was yelling at Dj!) Over several breakfasts, dinners and drinks in New York, Washington, and in the Powers home in Vermont, and in many lively emails, we kept up a bantering style that could segue seamlessly into explorations of our passions and ideas.

His just-beneath-the-surface humor proved the key to Dj: The firebrand was a necessary tactic, not a character flaw. In fact, Dj Jaffe was an extraordinarily loving man, as his career shift after his sister-in-law’s illness demonstrates. He enjoyed a longstanding marriage to his wife Rose, a lovely, laughing woman whom he adored. When Rose died two years ago, his friends expected that Dj would be devastated with grief. He may have been, but he was back to his advocacy work in a day or two. He never mentioned his feelings.

He met a woman named Paula about a year and a half ago, via a dating app. She was the one who reached out to him, friends say. Dj probably knew at the time that he was dying. Paula and Dj were married on Friday in his hospital room. Paula wore white pajamas and stomped on a Styrofoam cup. By all accounts, the marriage was a happy one. Because that’s the kind of guy Dj Jaffe was.

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