Here is a timely message for everyone, and especially for the afflicted among us.
Category: Uncategorized
A Father’s Cry From the Heart
Ray Weaver is a singer/songwriter whose daughter is afflicted. With his permission I am reposting his recent message on the private Facebook site CCAC. Never have I seen the many griefs and agonies of a parent expressed so compactly and so bursting with truth.
Ray’s words remind us, among many other things, that far too many Americans remain uneducated about the nature of serious mental illness. It is a genetic brain disease, beyond the control of the sufferer. Yet its effects can be stabilized by medications, therapy, and a loving environment.
Thank you, Ray, and peace to you and to her.
When you have a sick child, there is never a day off. Never. Every day. Waiting for the phone to ring. Trips to the hospital. Fear. Fear. Fear. Sadness. Regret. And yeah, anger. At them. At yourself. At the fucking world. My daughter tried to kill my own mother. Demons. She tried to stab them out to save mom-mom’s life. And so, my own family, my own sisters have washed their hands of her, and, because they cannot understand the sickness, the illness, they have turned their backs on me as well,
I understand. I am not angry.
I am just tired. So very, very tired.
Update on Jack Greene
Greene, whose impending Nov. 9 execution I condemned in my previous post, is likely suffering from one of serious mental illness’s most insidious and common “companion” affflictions, anosognosia. (The term is Greek for lack of insight, and is explained here: http://www.
The violent mentally ill comprise a small percentage of those afflicted. Yet they are among the most feared and despised of society’s scourges, and many people mistakenly equate schizophrenia with homicidal tendencies. http://depts.washington.edu/
The Arkansas prison administrators who may soon exercise their power to kill Jack Greene appear to be equally clueless about the general nature of brain diseases such as Greene’s. They are physical genetic flaws that cannot be cured. Their effects can be modified by proper medication. Untreated, their victims lose all power to understand reality or control their actions.
If the November 9 execution goes forward, Jack Greene will die, but the real culprit–the disease that destroyed his reason–will live on, doing unspeakable human damage. It will continue to operate under the cloud of ignorance that still obscures justice for the mentally ill.
Take Action
Please watch the video below to learn more about Mr. Greene and share his story with friends.
Click here to sign the petition to grant mercy to Jack Greene initiated by the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Arkansas poised to execute man amid fight over mental health
His lawyers want doctors to have a greater say in determining his mental competency.
via ABC News
Jack Greene’s lawyers say he’s severely mentally ill. The Arkansas death row inmate says they’re lying.
As Greene approaches a Nov. 9 execution date, his lawyers are raising questions about who should determine his mental competency. Arkansas gives considerable weight to its prison director’s opinion in deciding whether a condemned inmate has the mental capacity to understand his execution; Greene’s lawyers want doctors to have a greater say.
“The system is really quite antiquated,” John Williams, an attorney for Greene, said in an interview. “(Prison director) Wendy Kelley is an arm of the state. She doesn’t have the expertise to make that determination.”
Greene was convicted for the 1991 killing Sidney Jethro Burnett after Burnett and his wife accused Greene of arson. At least one court this week will take up Greene’s case.
The inmate hasn’t always made it easy for his attorneys. While pleading for clemency, he told the Arkansas Parole Board this month that his lawyers are wrong to call him “delusional” and that courts have routinely found him competent. He also told the board, “I knew what I was doing to him,” when he tortured Burnett for an hour before shooting him. When a doctor testified that Greene has done headstands during examinations and even in courtrooms, Greene told the panel that he does yoga to remain “functional.”
Williams says the seemingly lucid moments mask severe mental illness.
“A lot of people who are mentally ill don’t think they’re mentally ill,” the lawyer said.
The case has drawn the attention of both the American Bar Association and a collection of 28 mental health professionals, who wrote to Gov. Asa Hutchinson saying it would be “morally and ethically wrong” to execute Greene.
“Mr. Greene’s illness manifests itself in extreme physical contortions, in self-mutilation, and in delusional beliefs he holds about a conspiracy against him between his attorneys and prison officials,” the mental health professionals wrote.
Greene stood throughout his Oct. 4 appearance before the Parole Board, fidgeting and fumbling through documents that, he says, promised him a transfer to his home state North Carolina, where authorities say he killed a brother days before killing Burnett. Bloodied, rolled up strands of tissue stuck out of both ears and his left nostril; his lawyers say that is a symptom of Greene’s mental illness.
“If I could go back to North Carolina and get medical treatment, that would be great, but if not, let’s come on with this execution,” he told the panel.
Williams says Greene believes he’s being executed because he uncovered a purported (and to Greene, successful) conspiracy among guards and lawyers to torture the inmate and dissolve his central nervous system and spinal column.
“He thinks that the Department of Correction cannot send him back to North Carolina because he knows too much about what has happened to him in prison,” Williams said. “They won’t send him back to North Carolina, so they have to execute him.”
Baloney, state lawyers say. North Carolina sent Greene to Arkansas for his murder trial on the condition that he would be returned if he received any sentence other than the death penalty. Greene knows a transfer is a lifeline, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Henry said.
The governor said Friday that he was still reviewing Greene’s file after Parole Board members recommended that he not spare the inmate’s life.
Greene’s execution would be Arkansas’ first since it put four men to death in an eight-day period in April.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/
An Insane Consequence, and a Monstrous Violation-in-Progress
Unless a national petition sponsored by an Arkansas social-justice group succeeds (see the bottom of this blog), the life of a hopelessly insane man will be extinguished by the Arkansas Department of Corrections on November 9, less than two weeks away at this writing.
Jack Greene was convicted of murder in 1991. Greene’s lifelong history of suffering abuse, organic brain damage, psychotic disorder, and intellectual impairment amount to traditional grounds for being spared the death penalty. That history cries out for psychiatric attention and, yes, perhaps lifelong confinement. But not death. Yet, as this essay by Jessica Brand of Injustice Today reveals, Greene’s legal representation has been spectacularly clueless and negligent. The jury in his capital murder trial never received evidence of the manifold damages to his brain.
Jack Greene is the embodiment of what can (and often does) happen when a state criminal-justice system loses its fundamental sense of justice. But he is also a maimed human being who does not deserve to die for the violence impelled by a deformed brain.
Please sign the petition below, and repost this–and help in the effort to ward off what Brand rightly calls “a stain on our country’s moral conscience.”
Commentary: “It Is So Loud Inside My Head”
The words of a mentally ill man the state of Arkansas hopes to execute on November 9th
via Injustice Today
“It is so loud inside my head. It feels like electrical impulses are going through my head all the time. If you took that pen and tapped it on the table I can feel it all the way down my spinal column. It is so loud inside my head.”
Those are Jack Greene’s words. He is the 62-year-old man that the state of Arkansas hopes to execute on November 9th for the 1991 killing of Sidney Burnett. Greene suffers from crippling psychiatric deficits, a possible intellectual disability, and a mental illness so severe that there are questions about his competency. He received such grossly inadequate representation at trial that the jury that sentenced him to death never heard of his devastating mental illness — a refrain all too familiar in capital cases. The state is aware of the glaring problems in Greene’s case, but it still hopes to execute him next month.
Greene, for example, regularly stuffs his ears and nose with paper “to alleviateperceived (but delusional) injuries.” Sometimes he intentionally causes his nose to bleed, and guards discover his face covered with blood. He eats out of his sink; his toilet is his desk. He thinks his central nervous system is totally destroyed, caused by, in his words,
[t]he prolong and repeated injuries on me . . . by staff of the Ark. Dept. of Corrections with the deliberate permanent destruction of such vital bodily functioning organs that’s caused injuries so severe and traumaticly [sic] inflicted to my brain, head, left inner ear, etc. . . . for all of which is so painfully torturing and inhumane I can no longer humanly function properly and live with.
He believes that his ex-attorney, the prison warden, a nurse, and a prison guard have conspired together (in that “chronological order”) to destroy “these vital functioning organs,” and that they are also preventing him from being extradited to North Carolina, where he could receive adequate medical care. He thinks his looming execution is part of this conspiracy.
Doctors believe Greene has organic brain damage. He has had a serious head injury in the past, and neuropsychological testing reveals damage to his frontal lobes. Several experts who have examined him have diagnosed him with a psychotic disorder, and his current lawyers are certain he is not competent to be executed. He also might be intellectually disabled, a status that, like incompetence, would render him categorically ineligible for the death penalty.
Then there is the trauma and the familial mental illness visible in many of Greene’s relatives. Greene’s father killed himself when Greene was an infant. His mother would later overdose on pain pills, and his brother later shot himself. Greene’s grandfather physically abused him and his siblings, sometimes rubbing salt in the wounds he caused. Greene lived in a house with no running water, electricity, or plumbing. At eleven, his grandfather handed him over to a notorious state-run training school for boys. While there, Greene was sexually and physically abused.
The evidence described above is the type that often causes juries to spare someone’s life, according to the findings of the Capital Jury Project. But at Greene’s sentencing trial, his attorney did not put on a mental-health expert and he presented no other mental-health evidence, although the signs of his illness were readily apparent. Instead, to convince the jury to spare Greene’s life, his lawyer presented a measly 46 pages of testimony, 33 of which were read from a cold, emotionless, transcript from a prior proceeding.
What happened next is equally disturbing. During post-conviction proceedings, an expert found that Greene might be intellectually disabled but stated that he needed to do additional testing to confirm. Greene, insistent that his lawyers were conspiring to torture him, asked the district court to withdraw the claim. He accused the Federal Defender’s Office of “making [him] out to be some kind of incompetent retard to get their office appointed to [his] case and try and cover up crimes of inhumane injuries maim and torture.” The judge found Greene competent to abandon this potentially life-saving claim and withdrew it. No court has ever heard it.
Perhaps the most shocking thing in Mr. Greene’s case is that, with a little more than two weeks until the scheduled execution, he has yet to receive a hearing to determine whether he is competent for execution under U.S. Supreme Court precedent that bars the execution of persons who lack a rational understanding of the punishment they are to receive. Arkansas’s unusual statute gives the Director of the Department of Correction sole discretion in making competency determinations. This means that the same person who is in charge of carrying out Mr. Greene’s execution also gets to determine –without a fair and independent court hearing — if he is competent for execution.
If the state has its way, Jack Greene will join a group of four other men executed by Arkansas in 2017, a group that to a man suffered from the most debilitating illnesses and trauma and received the worst lawyers. Ledell Lee, who might have been intellectually disabled, had lawyers who tried to withdraw from his case, citing a “gross [ethical] conflict,” a drunk lawyer, a mentally ill lawyer, but never, until it was too late, a competent lawyer. Marcel Wayne Williams had a mother who pimped him out for sex at ten and who tortured him by pouring boiling water on him and covering him with tar; Kenneth Williams may well have been intellectually disabled; and Jack Jones suffered from extreme physical abuse, was brutally raped by strangers, and suffered from bipolar disorder. Juries never heard these stories because of ineffective lawyering.
What is happening in Arkansas is a stain on our country’s moral conscience. Under the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst, society’s most culpable. The prosecutors’ continued push for death in the face of severe illness and trauma, never heard about by juries, flouts that constitutional promise. And each time a court allows a state to carry out the harshest of punishments on the most impaired and least represented, it mocks the promise of justice. Will a court finally recognize this reality and intervene? Or will Greene become another tragedy in a system that is completely and utterly broken?
Take Action
Please watch the video below to learn more about Mr. Greene and share his story with friends.
Click here to sign the petition to grant mercy to Jack Greene initiated by the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Is the Tide Starting to Turn in the Battle for Mental Healthcare Reform?
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
These were Winston Churchill’s words to the British people after General Montgomery’s forces turned back the formidable German army under General Rommel at Alamein in November 1942.
Readers of this blog know that I see our present struggle to eradicate the terrible abuses of mentally ill people in terms of a war: a war against entrenched ignorance, apathy, denial, and abject cruelty within the institutions that exist to protect all citizens, especially the most helpless. Too many caregivers, jail wardens, and state governments (among others) remain clueless or unwilling to reform the atrocities that they perpetuate.
And yet hope endures. It is important to amplify and celebrate any example of enlightened hope overcoming dark chaos.
Here are three stories, linked below, that offer hope.
The first covers the efforts of lawyers in Illinois, representing a total of 12,000 mentally ill patients, demanding from a federal judge that Illinois face up to its “state of emergency” in Illinois prisons and move to eradicate poor psychiatric care amounting to “cruel and unusual punishment.” https://goo.gl/yaSvtq
The second addresses a barbaric practice that is near the top of my personal list for drastic action, solitary confinement. Written by the executive director of the Colorado department of corrections, it explains why the state recently ended the practice of long-term solitary confinement for prisoners. Colorado now limits stays in solitary to fifteen days. In my opinion, that is fifteen days too long; but it is a significant improvement over the state’s average length of two and a half years “and sometimes for decades.” https://goo.gl/c6SqTf
The third focuses on the Centers for Families and Children in Cleveland, a nonprofit group that has existed for years but has accelerated dramatically in its outreach under its young new executive director, Elizabeth Newman. I visited the Centers on Tuesday to give a talk at their annual luncheon. My typic skepticism burned away as I experienced the Centers’ zeal, the intelligence, and the broad scope of outreach, exemplified by the remarkable Ms. Newman. I will return to the topic of the Centers in an upcoming blog. https://goo.gl/Jczmsk
For now, let us celebrate what may be the end of the beginning.
In the (Sad) Scheme of Things, This May Count for Progress
Mental healthcare reformers (and many jail officials) have complained for years that our jails and prisons have become defacto hospitals for the mentally ill, however grossly inadequate. The Illinois Youth Center in Joliette, once used for incarceration, has recognized this baleful truth and is transforming itself into a . . . mental hospital for inmates.
Note that they are still referred to as “inmates.” But any little turn toward enlightenment helps.
Facility for mentally ill inmates to open in Joliet
via Chicago Tribune
Illinois Department of Corrections officials Thursday showed off what will soon be the state’s largest residential facility for mentally ill inmates.
The former Illinois Youth Center prison in Joliet has been transformed into a mental health treatment unit for male inmates with severe mental illness. The facility will be the largest of its kind in Illinois and will begin accepting inmates by year’s end. The renovation project cost $17 million, officials said.
Read the full story here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/news/ct-sta-joliet-residential-center-st-0919-20170918-story.html
The Psychic Toll of Being a Cop
The violent, trigger-happy policeman is a recurring actor in media accounts of mentally ill people meeting their doom on the streets, in their homes, and in jail. In NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, and on my blog, I myself have offered several accounts of unarmed victims of psychosis being gunned down by poorly trained, sometimes paranoid officers, and of the everlasting grief that descends upon the victims’ families.
The “killer cop” has become a stereotype to many in the mental illness “sub-nation.” All too often, the stereotype is true. Yet it is important that we recognize the unfairness of letting the stereotype stand for universal reality. The link below should be required clicking. It directs us to an essay written by Andy O’Hara, a retired 24-year veteran of the California Highway Patrol. The topic is the high rate of suicide among policemen in this country, and the police culture of silence that discourages these stressed-out men and women from seeking help.
I have retrieved this essay from the website of the excellent Marshall Foundation, a leading source of journalism about the criminal justice system.
It’s Time We Talk
About Police Suicide
More cops die of suicide than die of
shootings and traffic accidents combined.
RICHLAND COUNTY SHERIFF’S deputy Derek Fish was just 28 and had only been on the job six years when he committed suicide. According to reports, Fish was coming off a routine shift. He returned his cruiser to the lot at his station and there, at the lot, he shot himself with his service revolver. Fish was, according to his colleagues, an outstanding officer who had recently been promoted. His was the third suicide in his department since 2001.
Read the full story here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/10/03/it-s-time-we-talk-about-police-suicide
A TV interview re: NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE
Below is a link to an interview I gave a few days ago with the wonderful Gay Maxwell, continuing education manager at the Brattleboro Retreat–a premier mental-health and addiction treatment center in southern Vermont.
The interview is tied to the upcoming Brattleboro Literary Festival (October 12-15). I will be reading from NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE at 11 a.m. Saturday, October 14, at the Centre Church in Brattleboro.
An Activist Enters a Solitary Confinement Cell—and Struggles for Control
This riveting essay, written three years ago by a member of Amnesty International, remains among the most compulsively readable indictments of our most barbaric form of punishment.
By Tessa Murphy London,
14 October 2014, 16:07 UTC
Tessa Murphy is a British campaigner at Amnesty International
The breathlessness was overwhelming. Standing in that small, dark cell, surrounded by nothing but three concrete walls, a dank toilet, a small sink, a thin mattress, a concrete slab and a perforated metal door that barely let any air in, the oppressive claustrophobia was hard to control.
This was not the first time I had set foot in a US prison, but it was the first time I had experienced what an isolation cell can do to you.
Everything about that room – the lack of windows, or natural light, or fresh air, the very thought of not being allowed any human interaction – seems to be designed to dehumanise. The basic penal concept of reform and social rehabilitation is excluded inside those three walls.
In solitary, punishment is king. The mere thought of spending more than a few minutes in that place was almost unbearable.
And then, a prisoner told me and my colleague that we were the first outsiders he had seen in 22 years.
I was surprised even to be allowed into California’s infamous Pelican Bay Prison. Correctional authorities across the US are unwilling to allow anyone to see what happens behind those thick concrete walls. And with evidence that has emerged – from Pennsylvania to Arizona, of voices crying for help – it’s no wonder. Across the US, it is estimated that nearly 80,000 people are held in long-term isolation
The authorities describe the system as “secure housing units”, “administrative segregation” and even “restricted housing.” But these euphemisms do not describe the human reality of these units.
The departments of corrections claim only prisoners who are a threat to guards or to other inmates are placed in isolation, after all other measures to control them fail. But as indicated by the tens of thousands detained, isolation cells are routinely used as punishment for minor offences such as disrespecting a prison guard or disobeying an order. In California, for example, suspected gang members can be placed in those dimly lit cells, just for having a calendar with Mayan symbols, or certain tattoos, or for being in the possession of books or other “source items” – or just for speaking to a “validated” inmate.
America’s prison isolation regime is not unusual, but it is cruel. Prisoners across the country are effectively entombed for nearly 22 hours a day in their cells, with no access to any education or rehabilitation programmes, with warehousing for the mentally ill in Arizona, with a man in Louisana who has been held in solitary since 1972. Prisoners must take their meals in the confines of those walls and are rarely given a chance to have any meaningful interaction with another human being. At all.
The only time prisoners in isolation are allowed to breathe outside air is when they are taken, alone, to a small outdoor yard, or cage, for “exercise”. Exercise is the word used by prison guards to describe the chance to walk a few steps back and forth. In California, following a hunger strike, prisoners were frequently given a chin-up bar and a hand ball, if they were allowed any recreation at all.
Some prisoners have literally lost their sanity due to the lack of human interaction – and estimated 30-50% of all inmates in solitary confinement are mentally ill or cognitively disabled, and 20% of those are severely mentally ill. Others have completely lost skin pigmentation because of the extreme lack of sunlight. And still others have taken their own lives after having little else to fill the time but stare at a wall for more than 20 hours every day.
But despite the plethora of horror stories emerging from the solitary cells across the US, the system remains unabated, and thousands of people remain entombed.
Thanks to pressure from local activists, lawmakers and organisations like Amnesty International, some states – like Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, New York, Virginia and Washington state – have introduced some reforms over the last few years.
However, at the federal level, the US government is currently planning to expand the use of solitary confinement: the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) bought a correctional facility in Illinois two years ago, and this year’s BOP budget includes a proposal to reopen it as a federal supermax prison, potentially replicating the harsh isolation regime from its predecessor.
But how do these conditions of detention provide justice for anyone? This system prioritises retribution and warehousing of inmates over their rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
There is widespread national and international agreement about the harm caused by incarceration in isolation. The United Nations’ top expert on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment has called for solitary confinement to be used only in very exceptional circumstances, as a last resort, and for as short a time as possible. He has repeatedly requested to visit super maximum security prison facilities, but the US state department has not allowed this.
Violent crime is a real issue in the US and elsewhere. But incarcerating people for years and even decades in solitary confinement should not be the way forward for any country purporting to respect human rights. A prison management tool that has been lambasted by human rights bodies and is increasingly challenged by penal experts and others is costly, ineffective and inhumane.
The US should focus its energy and resources on ensuring conditions of detention are compatible with its obligations under international law and standards – that the penitentiary system works for the social rehabilitation of prisoners, instead of perpetuating an abusive and cruel regime that is an affront to human rights.
This op-ed was originally published in The Guardian.
For more information visit our news article Entombed: Life in the USA’s cruel isolation chambers
FREE TYLER WEST, AND ALL THE TYLER WESTS!
Remarks to the Cambridge NAMI
Thank you, Cambridge NAMI, for inviting me here. And thank all of you for coming tonight.
Schizophrenia has struck hard at the Powers family. In 2002, our younger son Kevin experienced the first of several psychotic breaks that worsened over three years despite intense counseling, hospitalization, and a regimen of medication until the voices in his head instructed him to take his life in our basement in Middlebury, Vermont, in July 2005, a week before his twenty-first birthday.
He had secretly stopped taking his medication several weeks earlier; and we are pretty certain that the voices, in the form of anosognosia, had a hand in that decision as well.
Kevin’s first break, by the way, attacked him just across the Charles river, at the Berklee Academy of Music. Kevin was a brilliant guitarist, as well as a kind and witty and untroubled young man: a golden-haired, blue-eyed burst of sunlight.
Sometime after that, Kevin’s older brother Dean started showing symptoms as well. He had his own series of breaks over a period of years. Dean has survived and stabilized, and is living with us at age 35. Honoree and I believe that Dean was spared a deeper psychosis thanks in part to an enlightened psychiatrist in our state.
This doctor understood the hazards of trusting a young sufferer to remain on oral medication voluntarily. So he arranged for Dean to report once a month to a clinician who would administer his antipsychotic med by way of a needle. For those of you who are interested, the medication is Haldol. If Dean missed an appointment, the doctor, as well as Honoree and I, would know about it.
In nearly four years, Dean has not missed an appointment. He has recovered much of the gentleness, the charm, and the intelligence that we’d thought had disappeared forever in the early months and years of his affliction.
You can find a lot more of the Powers family saga in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE. And you can see lots of photographs of Dean and Kevin, and listen to the wonderful guitar music they made together, on my blog, which is the title of my book, all one word, plus “dot-com.”
Now, I didn’t come here tonight to plug my book; or really to talk about my family. I offer you the information I’ve just given as a way of establishing my bona fides: the qualifications that have made Honoree and Dean and me eligible for citizenship in what I call the “sub-nation.” The mostly invisible realm of the seriously mentally ill and those who care for them. People such as you.
“Serious mental illness,” as most of you know, refers not to simple depression, or neurosis, or alienation from society. “Serious mental illness” refers to incurable, genetically delivered brain disease: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder; and, to a lesser degree of consensus, autism.
I come here tonight as an advocate. Advocates for mental-health reform are almost always people from the “sub-nation.” Beyond our borders, the country at large remains mostly oblivious to who we are. (We are their neighbors, quite often.) The country remains uninformed about the medical nature of the afflictions we battle. The country remains unconcerned about the abuses that victims of the disease suffer at the hands of untrained police, clueless judges and jail wardens, budget-cutting politicians, and moralists of all stripes who conflate insane behavior with bad character. To some extent, the ironic title of my book is accurate: Nobody cares about crazy people.
And this is what motivated me to become an advocate, above and beyond my family’s personal experience: I’ve been stunned by the education I received after my book was published last March.
I had thought I knew how bad things were. I wrote about how bad things were.
I didn’t know how bad things were.
Not completely. Not down at Ground Zero. Not in the daily life inside the sub-nation, where abominations pile up and travesties of justice go uncorrected and mothers of insane children plead for help and even mercy that fall on the deaf ears of bureaucrats and doctors and law enforcement. No matter how loud they shout.
My post-publishing education began when I stumbled into a domain where I could hear those desperate voices. I’m sure that many of you here tonight got there ahead of me.
I got there through the kindness of a reader of my book. She invited me to join a Facebook site dedicated to private and confidential conversations among the caretakers of the schizophrenic, the bipolar and the autistic. Nearly all of these site members are mothers. Go figure.
The rules are few, simple, and strictly enforced: no judgmental posts. No hostility or abuse. And no reposting of any material on the site without permission of the writer.
I have visited this site nearly every day; it’s called the Circle of Comfort and Assistance Community; and its founder, the educator and advocate Deborah Fabos, has given our sub-nation a precious resource.
I read these testimonies with shock and astonishment. I read them with a sense of grief. And I read them mounting outrage. I am keeping files of them written by mothers who have given me permission. I’ve used their stories in previous blogs, and this evening I am giving you a sneak preview of tomorrow’s blog. It is essentially the text of this talk. Its focus is on a family that is among the unluckiest, most damaged, most neglected, and most desperately in need of intervention and justice of any that I know of. And I know of a lot of such families.
This is the family of Dan and Kimberlee West of Fruitport, Michigan. Their story is one of frantic struggle: a struggle to rescue their schizophrenic stepson, Tyler West, from more than six brutal months in the Muskegon County Jail. Much of this time in solitary confinement. He has been severely beaten by a violent cellmate, and is in imminent danger—as we gather here—of another beating by another cellmate. The charge that landed Tyler in jail, and for which he has not yet been tried, is at once laughable and heartbreaking in its pettiness and meanness.
Here are some features that should make the Wests a poster-family for all that is wrong with our courts and criminal-justice system as they affect the mentally ill. And if I have anything to do with it, they will be.
Dan and Kimberlee West are pillars of the Fruitport community. They would be pillars of any community. They have four children of their own; they’ve taken in three other adopted children besides Tyler, and they have served as foster parents for several young refugees from the Middle East. Kim teaches Sunday school and volunteers for projects around town.
Tyler is about 5 feet 5 inches tall, and weighs about 150 pounds. His mother calls him a gentle boy, and a psychiatrist who evaluated him describes him as “sweet.” He plays five musical instruments, composes music, and is talented in computer design. His joys in life so far, and there have not been many, include playing timpani in his school marching band.
Tyler West has struggled with mental illness since birth. Dan and Kimberlee adopted him at age 7, knowing that he had already been diagnosed with pervasive development disorder, sensory processing disorder, and ADHD.
But if the life inside his head was a nightmare, the life outside it was as well.
Tyler is dark-skinned, and so his new schoolmates thought it would be a good idea to call him “nigger” and beat him up for it. He is small, so they called him a fag, and they beat him up for that too. Tyler does not process information easily and has trouble putting words to his thoughts, and that made everybody mad, so they beat him up for that as well. The beatings lasted through his high school years. His mother believes he has received more than a dozen concussions.
His diagnoses grew more severe: mood disorder at age 12. Autism and bipolar disorder at 16. The psychotic symptoms started showing up less than a year later. He has admitted to hearing voices. He has made several attempts at suicide, at least once by hanging himself. His parents took him to emergency rooms fifteen times in 2015 and 2016. At one care center, they pleaded for a long-term commitment, but they were denied, even though a psychiatrist admitted that Tyler could not understand the consequences of his actions. At another, a county-financed quote “wellness center,” Kimberlee and Dan begged for a civil commitment, through an assisted outpatient treatment program known as Kevin’s Law.
Brace yourselves for the “wellness” folks’ reply. They said they didn’t know how. And Tyler’s lack of critically needed treatment and medications continued.
So now we come to the sad part of the story:
At age 16, Tyler vanished for a few hours with a 14-year-old girl. The girl’s parents filed charges of statutory rape, even though a doctor found no evidence of sexual contact and both of the young people denied it. The Wests entered a guilty plea to spare Tyler the ordeal of a trial, because by then Tyler was speaking in gibberish and lapsing into catatonic states. His attorney was later allowed to withdraw the plea. Yet the imprint of this episode
Shortly after that, police found Tyler in a neighbor’s garage. Despite clear evidence of psychosis, a judge decided that the boy was sane, because he had taken his shoes off before entering. One could of course argue exactly the opposite.
Tyler did 90 days in the Muskegon County jail. Ten of them were in solitary confinement. After that, Tyler’s reasoning capacities were pretty well shot, and so was his reputation with the Muskegon police and court system.
This brings us to the wee hours of February 16 of this year, when Tyler’s fragile world came fully crashing down.
Sometime in that night, Tyler, in yet another state of psychosis, wandered across the family lawn and onto the property of another set of neighbors. This couple was sleeping upstairs. Tyler opened an unlocked door, walked over to a sofa, and fell asleep himself. When the neighbors discovered him, the wife insisted on calling the police, and Tyler was arrested on a charge of home invasion.
Back to the Muskegon County jail for Tyler, where he has remained ever since—more than six months. He is awaiting a trial that always seems to need getting postponed, or continued, or otherwise put off. The latest promise is a jury trial set for November 28th. If he survives. He has been moved back into a unit that houses violent offenders, and his new cellmate is awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery. For no particular reason, he has had four additional visits to solitary confinement: in many experts’ opinion, and mine, the most destructive, barbaric, unnecessary and probably unconstitutional form of legal torture available in the United States. During his last stint, he could be heard beating his head against the wall.
Kimberlee and Dan West are at the point of nervous exhaustion. As Kimberlee said in a recent email, “Ty still is not well. He is having chest pains because they refuse to give him acid reflux meds. I believe has a staph infection on his foot. We have bought every cream known through the commissary. Not one works. [The nurse] refuses to look at it. He needs antipsychotic meds that work. They refused him an MRI for his head injury [suffered in the fight]. No psychiatrist has looked at him. The [jail] doctor serves 600-700 inmates. He is there only on Fridays.”
Kimberlee concluded: “Presently I believe it is God’s grace that has kept him alive.”
Pardon me for sounding irreverent. God seems to need a little backup. It is up to us to provide it. We sure as hell can’t count on the State of Michigan. Michigan is possibly the most benighted state in the Union when it comes to enlightened mental health care.
Tyler West psychiatric the minute he entered the Muskegon County Jail But as we’ve seen, this jail has no mental health officers and no crisis intervention teams. In fact, Ty should not have been sent to jail at all; he belongs in a psychiatric hospital. But good luck with that. Michigan is a national leader in psychiatric bed shortages. Experts believe that fifty psychiatric beds for every hundred thousand people is the minimal acceptable number. Michigan offers ten beds per hundred thousand. That is about 680 beds for five thousand patients in psychosis.
About twenty years ago, the Republican governor of Michigan, like so many clueless governors, decided that his state had too many mental hospitals and not enough patients to fill them. He started shutting them down. In the six years leading up to 2003, he closed 12 of the 16. Today the number is down to nine. The state saved a lot of taxpayer money. And it now provides the sixth-lowest number of psychiatric beds per capita in the nation. Michigan is hardly alone, of course. America has a collective shortfall of 95 thousand such beds.
But what the Michigan system lacks in psychiatric care, it more than makes up for in vengeance. Michigan has 93 county jails, with a total inmate capacity of more than 18 thousand. Most of these people have not been convicted of anything. Like Tyler West, they are awaiting trial. About two thirds of them have some form of mental illness. And they are not getting help. No treatment. No meds. But lots of pain.
We are talking here about one of the most obscene facts of American life and American public policy: the criminalization of mental illness. This criminalization is built of many shameful parts. One is fiscal greed: shut down those expensive hospitals and don’t waste money on jailhouse shrinks. Another is denial: Tyler West took his shoes off, so he had to be sane when he entered that garage. Still another is plain human cruelty: build more jails, and throw psychotic kids like Tyler West into them and put ‘em in cells with violent criminals, and let’s see what happens.
But there is one element that underlies all these shameful parts and makes them possible. That element is ignorance.
Widespread, ironclad, and probably self-willed ignorance. Ignorance not only among the public, the electorate—but ignorance among those who have the responsibility to know better: federal and state legislatures. Judges. Jail wardens. Police departments. Professional caregivers.
Every category I just mentioned had a chance to help save Tyler West. And all the Tyler Wests in all the hellhole jails in this country.
Every category failed.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am angry.
I’ve felt angry and helpless since Kevin died and Dean was stricken. It’s taken me a while to figure out what to do with these feelings, but I’m getting there. The book was one step. My advocacy is another.
I challenge you to join me. Join me in focusing the anger we all feel, and shrugging off the helplessness.
I challenge you as individuals and as members of Cambridge NAMI. And I call out a challenge to national NAMI, to frankly get off your butts and work hard to make Tyler West a national symbol: a symbol of all that is defiled and broken in our country’s mental healthcare system.
Write letters: write to Michigan governor Rick Snyder. To Circuit Court judge Timothy Hicks. To Muskegon County Sheriff Michael Poulin. (These names will be in the text of my talk on tomorrow’s blog. Noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com.
We will secure justice for Tyler West. And when we’ve accomplished that, we will move on to the next Tyler West. And the next, and the next. You may follow my blog for the names and stories.
I challenge all of you to join me. And for those of you who may doubt the value of our effort, I will close with the words of a man who used to live and work around here:
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
Thank you.
