The Slaughter Goes On

Several weeks ago, I suspended this blog, largely out of lingering psychic exhaustion after the completion and publication of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.

Since then, I have noticed that the problems I covered in the book have not been suspended. The ones most troubling to me include the appalling indifference–by public policymakers and by the society that elects them–toward the ongoing obscenity of throwing mentally ill young people into county jails, where many are deprived of essential medication, beaten by guards and inmates, and thrown senselessly into solitary confinement, a form of torture on a par with waterboarding. This obscenity is largely a factor of the massive bed shortages in our vanishing psychiatric hospitals–juicy targets for budget-cutting legislatures, and a problem that has not been adequately addressed since the catastrophe of deinstitutionalization.

Another problem–one that loomed suddenly while the book was in production, with the election of Donald Trump and the inexplicable wave of cruelty that has hardened amidst the Republican Congress, is the threat to the existence of Medicaid support for the seriously mentally ill along with many other categories of sufferers.

Yet another is the perceived softening of the National Alliance for Mental Illness–NAMI–in its outreach to the seriously mentally ill. The powerful activists Dj Jaffe, Janet Hayes (https://www.facebook.com/JanetHaysNOLA), Teresa Pasquini (https://www.facebook.com/teresa.pasquini.3), Lauren Rettagliatta (https://www.facebook.com/lauren.rettagliata), Mary Zdanowicz (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1296146654)  (so many determined women! So few men!) and the nonpareil blogger Pete Earley (http://www.peteearley.com/blog/) have commented on this with varying degrees of concern. The common criticism is that NAMI is pulling away from outreach toward victims of serious mental illness–incurable brain afflictions transmitted through the genes–and concentrating its resources, and its funding opportunities, on a “big tent” approach that emphasizes “mental wellness,” or “mental health.” The plight of these sufferers, most but not all of whom fall under Freud’s term, “the worried well,” deserve outreach. But that outreach is being supplied by several other organizations formed specifically to answer their needs.

I share others’ concern and outrage over all these issues. What disturbs me most acutely these days is a recent surge in the brutalization, often fatal, of mentally ill young men at the hands of police and prison guards. I append a few links to these atrocities below.

I believe that this brutalization, fed largely by the twin jail/hospital crises mentioned above, is a stain on our national character, and that we must mobilize a movement to reform it.

As some visitors to the blog know, I speak as the father of two schizophrenic sons, one of whom took his life in 2005, and one of whom lives on with us in a condition of stability if not recovery. As awful, and as enduringly heartbreaking, as their fates, each was spared the dehumanizing horrors of falling into the criminal-justice system. In my surviving son’s one encounter with the police, in our hometown of Castleton, Vermont, the officer acted with tact, humanity, and restraint. I feel that it is my mission–exhausted and often in despair as I am over these ongoing crises, to do what I can to ignite the conscience of Americans and those whom they elect to protect and enhance society, especially its most helpless citizens.

(Okay, full confession: I just re-read that last sentence, and it sounds pompous as hell. Sue me!)

Links

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/07/15/his-parents-said-just-needed-sleep-swat-team-came-instead/1sTWdBw2MNqqFGCOUfLnHL/story.html?s_campaign=breakingnews%3Anewsletter

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/05/03/released-video-depicts-fatal-struggle-washoe-jail/309046001/

https://www.hopexchangenonprofit.org/blog/our-minds-are-not-our-only-prison-where-is-the-social-justice-for-the-mentally-ill-when-far-too-many-are-coming-out-of-jail-in-body-bags-or-receiving-humane-treatment

http://www.wbrc.com/story/35819522/what-happened-to-jamie-lee-wallace#.WWJPUm5TXw8.facebook

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8gy4/the-prison-system-is-designed-to-ignore-mental-illness

THANKS FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT!

Announcement

With this message, I will be ceasing new entries on this blog related to my book, NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE. I will leave the blog online for an indefinite period so that I might be of help for those of you looking for connections with others in the sub-universe of mental illness.

I thank the many people who have viewed and responded to my entries over these months. You have been thoughtful, brave, and generous with your responses and ideas regarding mental illness–your own, and those of people whom you love. And your kindhearted reactions to the music, photographs, and stories of and about my sons Dean and Kevin have warmed Honoree and me immeasurably. I hope that my essays and reportage about the scourge of mental illness has brought solace and encouragement.

I suggest that those of you seeking support and a safe place to share your stories will consider the private Facebook site Circle of Comfort and Assistance. Membership requires a sponsor, but I will be happy to consider sponsoring any of you who write to request it. I would like to thank my team of editors and publicists at Hachette, the publisher of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, for believing in my book and committing themselves full-out to its success.

Speaking of books, I highly recommend that you seek out and purchase Dj Jaffe’s powerful, informative new work, INSANE CONSEQUENCES: HOW THE MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY FAILS THE MENTALLY ILL. It is a treasury of informed advocacy journalism and practical guidance for those whose lives have been disrupted by the afflictions I’ve been writing about.

I thank my blog administrator Beth Jones for her unfailingly prompt and professional work. And I thank my literary agent, Jim “Agent Jim” Hornfischer, for doing whatever it is that agents do. Seriously, Jim, you are a writer’s dream of an agent and a close friend. Without your encouragement and guidance, my book would never have happened.

NEW CBS WEB SERIES ON MENTAL HEALTHCARE

The crisis in mental health care is rapidly becoming a featured topic of mainstream journalism.

CBS News has commendably chosen to spotlight this subject as the launch-point of its new experiment in long(er)-form video journalism, making use of its online digital resources. To quote from the network’s announcement: 

CBS Evening News Uncharted: State of Mind” is a new five-part digital series airing in May with new episodes released every Wednesday. The series will examine the state of mental health care in America in conjunction with Mental Health Awareness Month. More than 43 million Americans suffer from mental illness.”

The first episode aired last night, and I repost it here. I was among the contributors, along with Congressman Tim Murphy, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and Dr. Glenda Wrenn, the psychiatrist and the director of behavioral health for the Satcher Health Leadership Institute.

Rep. Tim Murphy
Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy
Dr. Glenda Wrenn

 

 

 

 

Not surprisingly, the most compelling figure in this episode is an embattled mother: Rocky Schwartz, whose two sons are afflicted with chronic mental illness.  (The National Alliance on Mental Illness has estimated that 60 percent of Americans suffering from mental illness don’t receive the care they need.)

Rocky Schwartz

Battles with un-cooperative health insurance companies have cost Ms. Schwartz and her husband more than $300,000, draining their retirement, college savings, home equity loans, and other personal savings.

Roman Feeser

 

The series was assembled by a young production team headed by the gifted and determined associate producer Roman Feeser. I am honored to have been a part of the first and some of the succeeding installments in this bellwether experiment in immersive journalism.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mental-health-where-are-we-uncharted-state-of-mind-episode-1/

NIKKI’s AND KEVIN’s STORY

Here is another look into the frantic “sub-universe” of families whose lives have been deformed by the presence of mental illness. It is a story of what can happen to a patriotic veteran who returns home to find himself overwhelmed not only by psychotic tendencies, but also by the bumbling ineptitude and bureaucratic rigidity of hospitals–in particular, in this case, a Veterans Administration medical center in Ohio. The story is told by Kevin Landis’s devoted wife Nikki.

NIKKI’S STORY

Nikki and Kevin Landis

I’m in that terrible place where I’m watching him fall apart, completely lost and separated from reality, and nobody seems to believe me.”

This is Nikki Landis speaking. Nikki Landis is a 37-year-old wife and mother of 16-year-old twins and three younger children. In her Facebook postings and in her communications with me, she comes across as a blithe spirit: bright, vital, endearing, fond of travel and books, an embracer of life, and devoted to her family.

I’m married to the most amazing, intelligent, strong, caring man in the world,” she has told me.

And yet her marriage has pulled Nikki Landis into a grotesque and broken realm: a parallel universe that that entraps people at random and imprisons them in a morass of nightmarish cruelty and suffering, and muffles the sound of their voices when they try to call for help. It is a universe mostly invisible to the mass of “normal” people who brush against it every day, and yet one that diminishes the “normal” as well, in insidious ways they seldom notice or suspect.

It is the parallel universe of the mentally ill, and, too often, of the loving relatives who try to help them.

“Why does nobody listen?” Nikki Landis asks. “Why does everybody insist, ‘It will be OK’?”

Nikki’s husband Kevin, who’s 39, is in the grip of psychotic behavior. He has suffered psychotic episodes for the past ten years. None of the support or treatment systems designed to help people such as Kevin seem able to do anything for him. In Nikki’s view, no one cares.

“I don’t understand why it is so difficult after 10 years of this for people to understand that I’m not being dramatic or exaggerating. But these same people will question, two weeks from now, why I didn’t do more. Why I didn’t react differently. Why I didn’t say the right thing that could have stopped all of this.

“Even the doctors act oblivious. ‘Why didn’t you tell us he was doing this or that?’ they will say. And I do. I tell them, and nobody hears the words coming out of my mouth. Then somehow everyone finds a way to blame me.”

Adding to Nikki’s burdens is the fact that her twins suffer from autism.

 

Kevin was Nikki’s high-school crush in Germantown, Ohio (pop. 5547), but Kevin, two years ahead of her, didn’t notice. He joined the a police department after he graduated. Nikki went off to college. A day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Kevin showed up at the town recruitment center to enlist in the Army. After basic training, he was deployed to Kuwait as a machine gunner in February 2003 with the elite 101st Army Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles.” A month later he was in Iraq.

Near the city of Al Hillah in Babylon Province, Kevin’s company was ambushed. Enemy soldiers were firing at him from 30 feet away. “He can still feel the bullets zinging past his head,” Nikki told me. “A grenade rolled right past him.”

Somehow Kevin escaped injury—combat injury Other enemies were attacking him more subtly. Iraq is a sub-tropical region, and, like many combat troops in Iraq, he was issued a weekly dose of Mefloquine, a drug in tablet form that acts to prevent malaria transmitted by mosquito bites. Mefloquine can trigger side effects in some users, such as depression, severe anxiety, and psychotic symptoms associated with schizophrenia. 

After his three-year tour was up, Kevin returned to Germantown, where he and Nikki began dating in 2006. Kevin resumed his career as a policeman in another department. The two were married a year later. They started their family. Along the way, Kevin began behaving erratically. Sometimes his words and behavior terrified the children, and his wife as well. The assumption at first was that the young veteran was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kevin has never been violent toward Nikki or the children. But his paranoia induced him to scream terrible things at his wife. “I’m the bad guy,” Nikki told me. “He shouts at me all of the things he wanted to scream at his parents thirty years ago. He mixes me up with his mom in his mind. He has left the house to live in his car more than a hundred times in the past ten years. Right now he is living at his parents’ house because I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch.”

And, in Nikki’s view at least, the agencies of therapy and restoration have refused—or have been ill-equipped—to help Kevin, or her.

 

In April 2016, after years of resisting treatment, Kevin agreed to be examined at the Lindner Center of Hope, a leading private treatment center in Ohio. There, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder—one of the “family” of brain diseases that include schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

The doctors prescribed Depakote, a sodium-based medication used to treat seizures and bipolarity, and the couple returned home. The Depakote worked well for a while, then began losing its efficacy. By October, Nikki said, her husband was out of control. He had been ramping up to a big dysphoric mania, and the second week of October he blew. He raged like I’d never seen. He was sweating so badly that he looked like he had just stepped out of the shower fully dressed. He was raging and panting and very scary. I knew he was suicidal.”

 

By now, Kevin was off the police department and out of work. The Landises, fearful that their medical plan would not cover inpatient stays (they later learned that it would) turned to the federal agency created precisely to protect and restore combat veterans such as Kevin Landis: young patriots who would not hesitate to risk their lives when their country was under attack. This was the Veterans Administration—specifically its medical center in Dayton, Ohio.

 

The couple had avoided the VA because they had heard the horror stories that reached scandal proportions just a few years ago: waiting periods so lengthy that some patients died before they could receive treatment (the average backlog at one point reached 115 days); falsified documents; negligent care. But now they felt they had no choice. At least Nikki did. She called upon a desperate tactic to persuade her husband. “I told him if he didn’t go to the hospital, I would have to divorce him. I’d said this before, but this time it worked.”

It turned out that the stories they’d heard about the VA were a little on the rosy side.

 

“The Veterans Administration has been nothing short of evil in helping him,” Nikki says. “worse than I can describe. I have a hard time talking about it still.”

Kevin Landis entered the VA hospital on a Friday night in late October and remained there for eighteen days. During that time, Nikki said, psychiatric doctors refused to allow Kevin to discuss his combat experiences in Iraq. Given that most combat veterans have to be coaxed and cajoled to break their silence about what happened to them—a necessary “first step” on the road to recovery—this doctor-enforced gag imposed on Kevin seems to defy reason.

As for his diagnosis of bipolar disorder from the private hospital, it cut no ice with the VA, Nikki told me. “The VA has a policy that they don’t accept outside diagnosis.”

(My online check of Nikki’s assertion led me to an NBC News story filed on May 22, 2012. It detailed the frustrations of a veteran of the Afghanistan war named Daniel Hibbard, and contained this passage: “Hibbard, who lives in Louisville, Ky., has been twice diagnosed at Veterans Affairs facilities with post-traumatic stress disorder since 2010. But something unexpected happened last month: Hibbard received a letter reversing his PTSD diagnosis. His new diagnosis, which was assigned without an in-person examination or assessment, is personality disorder.”)

(“‘It makes me feel like I’m being called a fraud, a fake,’ Hibbard said of the diagnosis. ‘You might as well go ahead and burn my record and say I was never in the military.’”)

On the following Tuesday morning, Nikki received shocking news. “The doctor met with him for about ten minutes. He was in a paranoid state and told her that I had been researching bipolarity for years, and had a shelf full of bipolar books so that I could convince doctors he was bipolar and drug him up to control him and ruin his career.”

Kevin swore to his wife that he didn’t say this. “But to be honest, he very well may have.” Whatever the case, “she ‘undiagnosed’ him. She then spent days defending her actions, refusing to look at his chart from his outpatient doctor, and accusing me of terrible things.”

Nikki sensed that something was not right. “A nurse told me that this doctor went out of her way to make sure patients were labeled ‘malingerers’ so that they couldn’t get VA benefits. This doctor started saying he didn’t have PTSD or bipolar; he had a ‘personality disorder.’ On his chart she wrote that she believed both of his parents had personality disorders (she never met either one), and that I had a personality disorder as well.

“I googled ‘VA’ and ‘personality disorder’ and learned that there had been several VA scandals in which doctors were told to diagnose mentally ill veterans with personality disorders. If the VA says you have a personality disorder, it disqualifies you from VA benefits for mental health. When I brought this up to her, she accused me of being paranoid. And she wrote in his chart that he was doing all of this for money, and that his police pension would be big. In fact, Kevin just got approved for his police pension on Wednesday and it puts us below the poverty line.”

“In the end,” said Nikki of the doctor, “she sent him home on Effexor, which is one of the worst possible drugs for bipolar. It took four months and two more hospitalizations to detox him from the Effexor.

“It’s so hard for me to think about that time, how he was treated, the phone calls I got when he was crying, him not even knowing where he was or how long he’d been there. And the doctor treating both of us the way she did. It was exhausting and emotional, and just devastating. My kids saw me crying, my kids missed their dad, and my 8-year-old son said, “Mom, I’ll never be in the Army because they make the men fight and then don’t take care of them.”

 

Nikki Landis’s love and support for her troubled husband has never wavered. She does not deviate from her insistence that she is married to the most amazing, intelligent, strong, caring man in the world.

“But sometimes that man goes away. His body is there, but his ability to laugh, to be kind, to care—it’s gone. His ability to know who I am—it’s gone.

“His own kids don’t recognize him, and say things like, ‘Why is dad laughing so much when nothing is funny?’ Or, ‘Why does Dad think bad things about you?’ Or, ‘Dad doesn’t look like my dad.’ It’s heartbreaking. Literally, you feel the pain physically inside and it doesn’t go away.

“He hates me right now. It’s not the first time, but it never gets easier. And sometimes I hate him too. I hate the sick him, the illness that convinces him that I am hurting him or out to get him. I hate the part of him that can’t fight back.

“I’m pretty sure we are headed for another hospitalization but our insurance runs out in 20 days. I don’t know what I will do then. I’ve applied for Medicaid and we haven’t heard a word.

“It’s very lonely. I’m only 37. I loved to travel and explore and LIVE! I’m a fly-by-night, wild child, creative type, earthy sort of person. Kevin was the down to earth responsible one. I’m not cut out for this, but I’m doing the best I can. Most of all I miss my husband. My kids miss their dad.”

 

In January of this year, thanks to a generous extension of Kevin’s insurance coverage by a former police chief, the couple was able to return to the private hospital for a new diagnosis.

 

The psychiatric doctors found that Kevin was now suffering from schizoaffective disorder—the worst known variant of schizophrenia, combining this disease’s symptoms with the added ingredient of paranoia.

 

At this writing, the Landises are awaiting a hearing with the state agency that handles his disability pension. It has been postponed a time or two. Meanwhile, Kevin is on meds. Some sorts of meds.

 

On April 23, Nikki emailed me:

 

“He woke up today just fine. Completely the old Kevin. I won’t hold my breath, but I pray it lasts a few days. I cling to these brief respites.”

 

“This is torture.”

 

 

 

 

 

Another Solitary Confinement Atrocity

This horrific story, originally reported by the excellent Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and picked up by Slate a couple days ago, is yet another demonstration of my assertion in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE that “too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.” Terrill Thomas’s death by slow, deliberate, guard-induced dehydration while in solitary confinement at a Milwaukee County jail is an abomination, and a part of a larger national abomination. Our society must demand an end to solitary confinement!

Via Slate.com

Guards Who Left a Prisoner to Die of Dehydration, After Water Was Cut for Seven Days, Could Face Charges

Read the full story here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/04/24/guards_who_left_milwaukee_prisoner_to_die_of_dehydration_in_cell_could_face.html

Voices From the Sub-Universe

Today I introduce a new, occasional feature to my blog. Please see below:

Ron Powers

Voices from the Mental Illness Sub-Nation

Near the beginning of my recently published book about mental illness, “No One Cares About Crazy People,” I write: Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.

I grew convinced of this over the three years of my research into schizophrenia and its related brain afflictions that include schizoaffective disorder and extreme bipolarity. My examples in the book cover the spectrum of atrocity: mis-diagnoses (often “drug overdose”) by doctors; judges who order young victims into jail instead of treatment centers; beatings, deprivation of medications, and the torture of solitary confinement behind bars; death on the streets from bullets fired by untrained police; the daily fog and helplessness of the untreated insane.

These and some other areas—arenas—pretty much covered it, I was convinced. The spectrum of atrocity suffered by the mentally ill in America.

I was wrong.

I had limited my investigations to the barbarities visited on the “crazy people” themselves. Only after the book’s publication in March did a companion realm swim into focus for me: the realm of ordinary people whose lot is to care for the afflicted. These include mothers, fathers, siblings and friends of the helplessly impaired thousands whom our social bureaucracies have neglected and rejected and crushed. In many ways, these family members are damaged and abject as the loved ones they seek in vain to rescue.

No one cares, to coin a phrase, about those who care about crazy people.

This realm rushed at me in emails to my Facebook page and to the blog I created that related to the book. It swelled up within certain websites that I, as a writer about mental illness, was invited to join. These sites are closed off to anyone but relatives of madpeople; an enforced set of agreements keeps their conversations private unless they grant specific permission.

The writers on these sites are almost exclusively mothers—a fact that in itself merits contemplation. Mostly middle-class, they span several income, educational and racial categories. They are seldom “natural” writers, yet no one could mistake what they have to say. They write with the rare pitch of truth-telling passion that James Agee memorably described as “the cruel radiance of what is.”

What they have in common is a collective story more urgent, more morally devastating, more viscerally real, than be expressed by the modes by which outsiders receive information about mental healthcare: statistics and news items and policy statements and political press releases, delivered in detached, passionless prose.

Today, this blog commences an occasional compilation of these mothers’ voices (and those of other relatives as they are available). I have obtained permission from each source quoted, and have withheld identities, although some gave permission for that as well.

My hope here is twofold. One is that the reader will feel the same emotions as I have: shock and indignation that such chaos and neglect exist in America’s mental health-care systems, causing such a vast archipelago of misery and terror. The other is that these voices will encourage others to throw off fears of stigma and shame and begin hurling their own voices, their own testimonies, into the world. Only by putting human faces and voices upon the statistical morass of this ongoing atrocity can we hope to begin decisive, lasting reform.

 

We will begin with an example of the commonplace indifference and buck-passing at the community level that makes a mockery of the very phrase “mental healthcare system.”

 

“I have only enough strength this morning for a few lines. [My daughter] was discharged in 2011 with no psychiatric follow up appt. We scrambled to find someone, but before we could, she was readmitted to a second hospitalization. She had to drop out of school for a second time. She was too far behind. The [caregiver] had put her on a drug that literally made her bang her head on the wall. Then she was hospitalized another two weeks, and upon discharge the social worker made no referrals or linkages for her in the community, and would not respond to my inquiry about her diagnosis. I asked and her response was, ‘What does that matter?’

“She came home with us, and for the next two months, it was awful. In February, she was psychotic again, and ran out of the emergency room when I tried to get an evaluation. She was noncompliant with meds, and thought she was pregnant. She spent two weeks in one hospital and I threw a fit about her being sent home to us again because I had a 14-year-old at home to protect. She had become physically aggressive as well. They sent her to a state hospital after my totally pissing them off, and she stayed there for two months.

“My biggest frustration is no linkages, no follow-up, no support, etc. We were treated like nosy people wanting to meddle in our child’s life but, she was sent home to me to deal with every time. And, each and every time, I felt more inadequate to help her and to protect my other child. [Her sister] was terrorized and slept with her bedroom door locked. She also became angry with me, her mom, for not being able to protect her from her sister.”

 

 

Sometimes the afflicted family member is not a child, but a parent. Whether or not that parent has consented to treatment—and often they have not—the strain suffered by the spouse and children can be overwhelming. This eloquently written post offers an example:

 

“I must say that helping my kids to navigate their life in relation to their Daddy’s serious mental illness is serious emotional work. Tonight I held my 10 year old ‘Baby’ girl as she opened up and told me that sometimes she just starts feeling sad and then ALL of her sadness comes over her at once. I held her as she sobbed and sobbed. ‘Why can’t we have a normal family?’ ‘Why can’t we live in our own house where I could have my own room?’ ‘Why did my Daddy have to get sick?’ ‘Will it ever be okay?’ ‘Why can’t the doctors just fix this?”

“I want to know too.

“She voiced the little girl version of the questions that claw at my own heart and mind. The grief and loss come at us in waves. Tonight we sat and cried together. Her tears streaming down my chest and mine in her hair. . .”

 

 

 

The mother below and her son are casualties of grotesque, yet pervasive laws that place the “civil rights” interests of a person in psychosis above the right of a doctor or psychiatrist to order antipsychotic medication and/or involuntary commitment to a center for treatment. In most states, such a patient may be treated against his will only if he “demonstrates a danger to himself or others.” Given that virtually the only way to “demonstrate” such a danger is to enact it, this misbegotten law often has the effect of pushing psychotic young people into criminality.

 

“When my grandson was 11, we begged for help to keep him safe and out of trouble. Several psychiatrists later and many tears and meds for him, we were told: wait till he gets in trouble with the law. Then he will get help. His school told us the same thing. No one understood that what they were telling us was our fear!! We didn’t want this sweet soul of a kid getting into trouble with the police! We were not that kind of family, he was not that kind of kid! We were not going to let that happen! We would fight, pray, restrict him, take him to every doctor we could find. . .

“When mental illness takes hold of our kids we have no control. Mental illness wins over and over again. He is now 20 and hanging with some more worldly friends, friends whose families must have said and fought for the very same things. We must fight and tell the world how our kids didn’t have a chance. They did not pray for mental illness any more than one would pray for cancer. We need to fight for hospital beds in which to keep our kids safe. Our kids need to be able to have safe places to live, affordable meds, support and understanding of their illness. God hear my prayer!!!”

 

 

 

From this message, and others, it is clear that not even psychiatric doctors can be automatically trusted to have the competence and temperament necessary to help their patients.

 

“A bad day at the doctors. Our city had to basically shut down [its psychiatric care center] because of diverted funds, but after waiting a year, my loved one got an appointment, which was today. In the past year, we had seen a private psychiatrist who didn’t [ participate in my state’s Medicaid program], but would prescribe anti-anxiety meds to help [forestall involuntary confinement]. But she would no longer see him.

“The appointment started off badly as this new doctor called for security before my son even went into the office—possibly because of [troubling] paperwork he had filled out or because of his unusual look. In any case, the security thing set him off more than usual and the doctor made him leave and he is not allowed to return. I listened to the usual four-letter tirade all the way home, my son saying he would never go to another doctor again and don’t ever ask him to. He got out of the car before I came to a full stop at the house. I am so not looking forward to what will happen tonight. De-escalation armor on.”

 

 

 

And then there is the judicial system. As with psychiatrists and doctors, judges are commonly assumed (by outsiders and families of the afflicted alike) to be specifically educated in the neuroscience of chronic mental illness. They are assumed to recognize their moral duty to proceed with exceptional care and knowledge in adjudicating the fate of the most helpless people on earth. Doctors and jailers, of course, are bound by the same expectations.

 

A special test of that duty is their understanding—or lack of it—of the fact that the single most destructive action against a mentally ill inmate (in fact, against any inmate) solitary confinement, which quickly trigger and/or deepen psychosis.

 

Judging by the content of this mother’s message, her schizophrenic son has been failed by everyone in this chain. Both he and his mother have paid the price.

 

“My son’s court case is tomorrow. What’s tragic is the fact I begged for help since November 1. I faxed over a Do Not Release letter stating he was a serious harm to himself and me. Now, my son has spent three months in jail and has been allowed to deny all medications. My son suffers from anosognosia [a clinical term meaning “lack of insight into one’s mental illness”]. So, tomorrow, he learns the painful truth that his competency evaluation came back not competent to proceed.

“My son believes he aced [his mental competency test] and is coming home to me. But the doctor found him incompetent. No shocker there! If they had only listened to me back on November 1, he wouldn’t have had to spend three months and counting in jail! Plus, I wouldn’t have been severely beaten and cornered in my own bathroom [by him] for a second time. Now, my severely delusional child has been off all medication for a month. Talk about starting from ground zero!

“What he will experience tomorrow will be criminal. He will learn he’s incompetent, while wearing shackles and handcuffs. I fucking hate our system!!! He doesn’t understand his illness. His rights will be taken away. He will suffer from the phases of grief even though it is he who is lost to us. He will be left in a jail cell awaiting placement in the state hospital, which could take one to three months because the waiting list is so long.

“I begged with my son to call Disability Rights to represent him but he said he didn’t have a disability even though he’s received Disability for 5 years! What’s even more fucked up is that Disability Rights said they could only talk to my seriously delusional child. That is why he had to call! What a joke! I know so many parents who have lost their children with a serious mental illness in jail. So, please pray and send out positive messages into the universe that he makes it through, and finally receives the help he deserves!

 

This mother’s son was a small and thin 17-year-old, when local police arrested him for trespassing. The mother writes that, in a psychotic state, he had wandered into a neighbor’s house and fell asleep on a couch. The neighbors called police, and who, instead of taking him to a care facility, put him in jail. The mother has repeatedly called for compassion and treatment for him; so far, her calls have been ignored.

 

“Today is another day. It’s so hard to move forward with my life. We are stuck in this insane limbo. My son called today [from jail], and says mommy, ‘the inmates that hand out the trays they took most of the food off my tray. The guards were standing there. They said I have to pay a debt. They say I have to pay them if I want to eat. Put money in [X]’s commissary Account so I can eat.’ Over the past month, our son was in solitary confinement for almost two weeks. They stopped his antipsychotics cold for four days. He has psychosis, and is hearing voices. After the assault [by inmates] two weeks ago, he has a concussion.

“He’s been denied an MRI, or an emergency-room visit, despite my pleas. His vision is blurry, headaches, and nausea. He is emotional from the head injury. They will not wake him for his morning antidepressants. Now tonight he has informed us they are trying to extort money by starving him. So he was crying again tonight. We hope next month he sees the forensic psychiatrist.

“[The jailers] extort money for visits, commissary, basic necessities, phone calls, fees, per-day jail incarceration fees, fines, restitution, medicines, doctor fees, etc. Our son was charged as an adult at 17. The boy who dances like Michael Jackson, and plays 5 instruments. He hears voices. He has auditory hallucinations, and Asperger’s. Fifteen times, I tried to hospitalize him. Instead He went to jail where he spent weeks at a time in solitary confinement. He was beat up, his vision is still affected. He still had not had an mri.,. Tonight he sits in jail at just 18. He is not a hardened criminal. He’s a good, sweet kid, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Every day I pray he will come out of this alive. My heart is shattered!

 

 

Here is another example of solitary confinement used as a blunt instrument—to effectively punish the victim of a jail beating.

 

“I just got off the phone with my son. He was beaten up two weeks ago [by inmates], and the jail’s answer was to put him in lockdown [solitary confinement] for 23 hours a day by himself. I had him agreeing to meds but they gave him the wrong meds and now he won’t trust them. He has been in the county jail for six months, and finally saw a judge for the first time last week. Now they need six weeks’ revaluation. Meanwhile, they keep him alone in lock up. He can call me on his hour out. He just called screaming and crying to get him out. I can only tell him he needs to hang in there and we are doing the best we can. But he’s slipping more. And nobody in the courts seems to care. My heart is breaking. His birthday is Wednesday. I am a single parent, and he’s my youngest.” 

 

And here is another example of the foolish inadequacy of “danger to himself or others.” Given that virtually the only way to “demonstrate” such a danger is to enact it, the law generally does more harm than good.

 

“The doctor told me, “‘Wait, N—, he’s not bad enough yet, he hasn’t committed a crime!’ [And then he said], ‘Your son is an adult. He has the right to be crazy if he chooses.’ 

My son has slipped through the cracks in every instance. There’s no consideration for families living with an untreated psychotic person except when it’s too late. We live in fear of our own son.”

TRUMP’S SHADOW FALLS UPON “CRAZY PEOPLE”

The president’s likely choice for a new fox to watch over the mentally ill henhouse summons the sardonic old joke: “‘Cheer up,’ I was told. ‘Things could be worse.’ So I cheered up, and sure enough. . .”

via The Wall Street Journal

The Trump administration is struggling to fill a top mental-health post, a job created last year to coordinate the efforts of far-flung federal agencies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-latest-pick-for-mental-health-post-has-helped-prosecutors-secure-convictions-1492554280

 

PRINCE WILLIAM AND LADY GAGA DISCUSS MENTAL ILLNESS

ANOTHER SIGN THAT PUBLIC DISCUSSION OF MENTAL ILLNESS IS GROWING

via NBCNews

Prince William and Lady Gaga may seem like an unlikely pair, but they have joined forces to encourage young people to talk about mental health issues: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/prince-william-lady-gaga-join-forces-mental-health-issues-n747671

THE JAILHOUSE CRUELTY NEVER ENDS

Thanks to my friend Teresa Pasquini for alerting me to this. Not until you read fairly deeply into the story will you discover that Andrew Chaylon Holland, the helpless victim of this savagery, “began to manifest schizophrenia in his 20s,” that he had faced nine criminal cases between 2014 and 2016 for assaults “directly related to his mental illness,” that he had difficulty staying on the medications that stabilized his behavior, that in rational moments he declared his wish to continue psychiatric treatment and rehabilitation, and that even though a superior court judge had recommended treatment for him a the county’s mental health inpatient unit, he died after suffering through 46 hours in a restraint chair inside the county jail. Case closed.

The Dark Ages live on in contemporary America’s treatment of its seriously mentally ill. They will not end until American society faces up to this ongoing pageant of atrocity. Faces up and demands that, like disembowelment, drawing and quartering, keelhauling, slavery, child labor, forced sterilization, and burning at the stake, jail and prison abuse of the mentally ill (and every other prisoner) cease!

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article144057364.html

BANISH THE OBSTACLES TO COMMON-SENSE INVOLUNTARY COMMITMENT–A REFORMER’S CALL

Dj Jaffe is one of the two or three most important advocates in America for mental healthcare reform. His powerful new book, INSANE CONSEQUENCES, catalogues his many well researched indictments of our nation’s tattered apparatus for helping those with serious mental illness, as well as his proposals for overhaul. I am honored to reprint his essay in Cato Unbound. It calls on policymakers to recognize the disastrous over-reach of “civil liberties” rationales that prohibit caregivers to intervene in a resisting person’s “psychotic break”–the exact moment in which medication and hospital treatment can do the most good and prevent the most harm.

I urge state and federal political leaders, psychiatrists, and parents of the afflicted to read this and join Dj Jaffe in his demand for reform!

Letters: A Libertarian’s Proposal to Reform Involuntary Commitment

August 22, 2012

Editors’ note: DJ Jaffe is the Executive Director of MentalIllnessPolicy.Org. We are pleased to publish his letter below.


Current civil commitment policies protect neither the liberty of persons with mental illness nor the liberty of the public. They have increased government intrusion, increased public costs, and are inhumane. Changing to scientifically based commitment procedures can increase the liberties of individuals with mental illness, increase the liberties of those without mental illness, and help downsize government. Therefore, improving civil commitment laws should be a goal of libertarians.

I have a relative with schizophrenia. Having said that, I agree with Herschel Hardin, a former leader of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union, who has a son with schizophrenia, the diagnosis commonly found in people subject to civil commitment. He wrote:

The opposition to involuntary committal and treatment betrays a profound misunderstanding of the principle of civil liberties. Medication can free victims from their illness—free them from the Bastille of their psychoses—and restore their dignity, their free will and the meaningful exercise of their liberties.[1]

Because of the inadequacies of our current civil commitment practices, 5,000 individuals with mental illness commit suicide annually.[2] Another 200,000 are homeless.[3] Of course, those are not primary concerns to libertarians, most of whom believe that individuals have a right to kill themselves or live homeless.

Costs of the Status Quo

But as a result of our current restrictive commitment procedures, persons with mental illness kill 1,000 individuals annually, roughly 10% of all homicides.[4] The most likely victims are family members,[5] police, and sheriffs.[6] Take the parents of mentally ill Eric Bellucci in Staten Island. They were so fearful of their son, who had been hospitalized and involuntarily committed multiple times, that they locked him out of the house. So he camped in their yard. They begged to have him civilly committed, but the law required Eric to first become “dangerous.” So he did. On October 13, 2010 he stabbed both his parents. They are dead and Eric will be permanently incarcerated. Hardly a victory for individual liberties.

Other individuals with untreated mental illness kill so many they become famous and earn sobriquets like “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and “Fort Bragg Assassin” Aaron Bassler. Their families tried to get them treatment before they became killers. James Holmes, Seung-Hui Cho, and most recently Thomas Caffall each killed innocents and lost their own lives. But civil commitment laws don’t help prevent dangerous behavior, they require it.

Because of restrictive civil commitment laws, individuals with serious mental illness are regularly shot by law enforcement who believe their erratic and irrational behavior is putting their own safety or that of the public in immediate danger.[7] People with severe mental illnesses are killed by police in justifiable homicides at a rate nearly four times greater than the general public.[8] The recently released videos of Kelly Thomas being beaten by police in Fullerton, California[9] and Michigan police shooting Milton Hall are the latest examples.[10]

Another concern of libertarians is that our current system is causing massive incarceration. As Amanda Pustilnik noted, 300,000 individuals with mental illness are now behind bars, due to the inadequacy of civil commitment laws. 15-25% of all prisoners have a mental illness.[11] With reformed civil commitment laws, many may have avoided incarceration. As a result of poor commitment laws, we now have a jail-based system for the most seriously ill. That creates a major drain on local law enforcement.[12] And it is expensive to the corrections system. The Department of Justice estimates that it costs $15 billion to incarcerate the 300,000 mentally ill.[13] That hardly counts as small government.

The lack of better civil commitment standards puts government itself at risk. President Ronald Reagan was shot by mentally ill John Hinckley. President James Garfield was killed by mentally ill Charles Guiteau. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were shot by persons with mental illness. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot by mentally ill Jared Loughner.

Clearly, the status quo is not serving the liberty needs of people with mental illness or the public safety needs of those without. It is also contributing to growth in government. Changes are needed that are grounded in science.

Knowledge about Schizophrenia Needed to Make Informed Changes

Untreated schizophrenia and untreated bipolar disorder are two of the disorders most likely to be represented among civilly committed populations. I’ll limit this discussion to schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a real disorder.

Dr. Schaler asserts, “’Mental illness’ generally refers to how certain people behave.” Not exactly. There is not yet a chemical marker that can diagnose schizophrenia. But claiming that schizophrenia doesn’t exist because there is no test is like saying colon cancer didn’t exist before the invention of colonoscopy. Schizophrenia, like Parkinson’s, is diagnosed by analyzing the resultant behavior. For Parkinson’s, the behavior is arm movement. For schizophrenia it is delusional speech and psychotic behavior, among others.

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey collected research proving schizophrenia is a real disorder. Individuals with schizophrenia have enlarged ventricles,[14] a reduced volume of gray matter[15] more neurological abnormalities,[16] more neuropsychological abnormalities,[17] and decreased function of the prefrontal area[18] compared to controls.

Schizophrenia Causes Impaired Thinking

John Stuart Mill’s introduction to On Liberty stated, “It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the “maturity of their faculties.” He was wrong. Some libertarians need reminding.

Science shows some individuals with schizophrenia are not in the “maturity of their faculties.” They don’t always have the faculties to formulate opinions although they almost always retain the ability to speak. Neurocognitive impairment is a core component of schizophrenia and is likely associated with the neurobiology.[19]

In the case of my own sister-in-law, this neurocognitive dysfunction was startling. Before schizophrenia, she was a bright college student. After developing schizophrenia, she became so cognitively impaired that she could not figure out that to change her pants, she had to first take off her shoes, because the pants wouldn’t fit over them.

Schizophrenia also causes individuals to have delusions.[20] John Hinckley shot President Reagan when he was off treatment because he “knew” it was the best way to get a date with Jodi Foster. Russell Eugene Weston Jr. shot two guards at the U.S. Capitol when he was off treatment so that he could find the “Great Safe of the U.S. Senate” where the “ruby satellite control” time reversal system could “sweep him away” to a time when he would not be deceased. When asked if he has a mental illness, he denies it.[21] Rather than being in control of his brain, his brain was in control of him.

Schizophrenia causes some individuals to hallucinate and hear voices. Walk down the street of any major city and you will see psychotic individuals screaming at voices only they can hear. Sometimes these voices command them to do things. Bad things. Being schizophrenic is not an exercise of free will that should be protected. It is a barrier to exercising free will that should be removed.

Schizophrenia prevents some people from even knowing they are ill. Anosognosia is being so sick you don’t know you are sick. It is common in schizophrenia because the brain, the organ charged with insight is impaired.[22] Because it also appears in bipolar disorder, many people have experienced it directly in the grandiose ideation of bipolar friends who are in the midst of an untreated manic stage. “Winning” as Mr. Sheen would say. People with anosognosia can truly believe they found a plan to save the world or that they are the Messiah. Why accept treatment when you’re the Messiah?

Individuals with schizophrenia think differently when treated than untreated. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their attitudes towards civil commitment. While, by definition, 100% of individuals who are civilly committed were opposed to it at the time of commitment, multiple studies show around 80% retrospectively express gratitude.[23]

The proper goal of libertarians should not be to ensure individuals who “lack maturity of their faculties” remain locked in “the Bastille of their psychosis.” Libertarians should work to restore free will and liberties.

Untreated Schizophrenia Is Associated with Higher Incidence of Violence

Nowhere is the debate over civil commitment less informed than when it comes to answering the question “Are people with mental illness more violent than others?”[24] It is largely irrelevant, because civil commitment is not aimed at the 25-40% of Americans some claim have a “diagnosable mental disorder”—your friends on Prozac.

But there is a subset of about 5% who have a very serious and persistent mental illness like schizophrenia.[25] The subset of the 5% group who go off treatment are more likely to become violent than others.[26] This is particularly true when medications that have previously prevented them from becoming psychotic, hospitalized, or violent are stopped. This is the tiny group civil commitment should be designed to help.

We now know that past violence is a good predictor of future violence in individuals with serious mental illness. So is abusing substances. Commitment for seriously mentally ill individuals who have a history of violence or substance abuse should not be as burdensome as commitment for those who don’t.

Medications Reduce Violence in People with Schizophrenia

By reducing hallucinations and delusions, and by restoring “maturity of faculties,” medication reduces violence. This should be readily apparent because almost everyone civilly committed because they were dangerous is eventually released—because they are no longer dangerous. The difference between their pre-commitment state and post-commitment state was the administration of medicines. From a libertarian perspective, it doesn’t make sense to allow someone who is known to need medicines to stay nonviolent to go off medications and become violent. Going off treatment imposes an obligation on the citizenry to pay taxes and expand government so they can be incarcerated. Incident of violence in someone who has mental illness and at the time was compliant with treatment are almost unheard of.

Persons with mental illness who have been stabilized on treatment don’t deteriorate instantly when the treatment is stopped. The medications stay in the blood for a while. As will be seen later, this knowledge opens doors to commitment venues that are less restrictive than inpatient commitment.

What is the current commitment law and how does it work in practice?

Individuals with mental illness are allowed to refuse treatment and cannot be treated in the community system unless they volunteer. For the most seriously ill, this is often an insurmountable hurdle because of their anosognosia, neurocognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, and delusions. Individuals who need the community mental health system the most cannot get in.[27] They are allowed to deteriorate to dangerousness and then become subject to the involuntary commitment system.

But getting into the involuntary system is harder than getting into the voluntary system. In general, many states require individuals to be imminently provably dangerous to self or others.[28] Other standards exist, but they are rarely used and often so narrowly interpreted as to be similar to the “dangerousness” standard. If committed, the individual is confined to a locked ward, which is the most restrictive setting short of incarceration. Once someone no longer meets the standard, he or she is released and free to go off medicines and become dangerous again.

Because the voluntary and involuntary systems are so hard to access, most of the seriously mentally ill who refuse treatment wind up in the criminal justice system with all rights removed. 300,000 are incarcerated, five times as many as are hospitalized. And those incarcerations were likely the result of infringing on someone else’s rights by committing a crime.[29]

Surely there is a better way. Surely this is not what libertarians want to defend.

What Should Be Done?

From a libertarian’s perspective, successful civil commitment reform would use commitment less, use it only when needed, steer individuals away from the most restrictive forms of commitment to less restrictive forms, and place greater reliance on the systems that require the least amount of government. We know how to do that.

The “danger to self” or “parens patraie” commitment standard is the one most likely to be considered problematic by libertarians. But they are presupposing the individual has the cognitive ability to avoid danger to self if he or she wanted. As the previously cited research shows individuals with schizophrenia become a “danger to self” because they develop delusions and hallucinations combined with anosognosia and neurocognitive impairments that prevent them from accessing treatment. While 5,000 mentally ill individuals commit suicide annually, and while libertarians can defend that, many more become dangerous to self by eating out of garbage cans, sleeping on the streets, letting wounds fester, and other activities their dysfunctional brains lack the ability to avoid.

The “danger to others” or “police powers” commitment standard is accepted by almost all, including libertarians. Quoting John Stuart Mill, “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”[30] But Mill doesn’t tell us when to intervene. Should we intervene to prevent harm to others when the hallucinations start, when the person goes off medicines, when the person becomes psychotic again, when the gun is purchased, when the bullet loaded, when the gun is fired, or when the bullet hits its target?

The standard is now interpreted so narrowly that it does not apply until after the bullet is fired. As such it ignores the fact that individuals with serious mental illness may become predictably dangerous long before they become imminently dangerous. Because we prevent intervention until after dangerousness, we have to rely on the most restrictive form of commitment: inpatient commitment.

This fact was underscored to me in a West Virginia case where I recently testified. Linda R. Artimez, Director of the Supreme Court’s Division of Mental Hygiene, stated that while West Virginia allows the placement of individuals who are civilly committed in community settings like group homes, it almost never happens. Why? No judge is going to determine that an individual is “dangerous” and simultaneously put them in anything other than the most restrictive setting: a locked ward.[31]

The Advantages of Adding Other Standards for Commitment

Preventing the mass civil commitment and incarceration of people with mental illness requires lowering the commitment hurdle to something below imminently, provably dangerous. Lowering the hurdle would shorten commitments because the longer that treatment is delayed, the longer it takes to stabilize and restore the “maturity of their faculties.”[32] Lowering the commitment standard would also allow use of less onerous forms of commitment like outpatient treatment.

Libertarians may object, fearing that more people will have their rights removed. That is not true. The failure to use a lower standard results in 300,000 people having all their rights removed via incarceration and almost everyone who is committed, being committed to a locked ward.

Libertarians may point to abuse of civil commitment in Stalinist Russia or the United States. Those were due to the inefficacy of treatments and the lack of due process. Treatments are better now[33] and obviously all civil commitment systems need to include vigorous due process protections including independent administrative or judicial review; access to representation; and the ability to submit evidence, question witnesses, appeal decisions, and file habeas petitions. Maintaining strict due process does not increase the size of government. Commitment process uses fewer judicial and legal resources than incarceration. It’s not just a wash, it’s a net savings.[34]

Other Standards That Should Be Used

Once we understand that treatment can prevent violence in those prone to it and that the “choice” to go off medications is not being made of free will but because the brain is impaired, the libertarian objective should be to restore free will, not stand back so violence can occur.

Many standards accomplish that. A “grave disability” standard allows intervention when a seriously mentally ill person becomes “substantially unable, except for reasons of indigence, to provide for any of his or her basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, health or safety.” Few libertarians would let someone with Alzheimer’s or developmental disabilities go without treatment simply because they can’t fend for themselves. We should take the same position towards people with schizophrenia.

The “capacity standard” allows intervention when someone as a result of their “serious mental illness is unable to fully understand or lacks judgment to make an informed decision regarding his or her need for treatment, care or supervision.” This is the “lacks maturity of faculties” standard. If someone “due to mental illness, is unable to understand the advantages, disadvantages, or alternatives to a particular treatment, or is unable or unwilling to apply them to his or her situation and requires such treatment to prevent severe mental, emotional, or physical harm”[35] they too “lack the maturity of faculties” and libertarians should not object to their treatment.

By using these lower standards we can intercede with people who are likely to become violent, lose their own liberty, and infringe on the liberties of others or lose their own life due to their illness. By using civil commitment to restore free will, we can prevent massive incarceration of people with mental illness and the resulting bloating of government courts and corrections systems. We can send people to less restrictive forms of commitment, reduce the time in commitment and do a better job protecting the public. In other words, achieve libertarian objectives.

Use Less Restrictive Forms of Commitment

Some alternatives to inpatient commitment, in order from most restrictive to least restrictive, are guardianship, parole or conditional discharge from hospital after involuntary commitment, and Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT).

Guardianship procedures allow courts to assign someone else to make all decisions for the person appointed a guardian. He or she is in essence committed to following the guardian’s instructions, which could include staying in treatment. It is very intrusive, but unlike commitment to a locked ward or incarceration, it does allow community living. It is less expensive than incarceration or hospitalization and requires no expansion of government. Guardianship is used most frequently for those who have Alzheimer’s or developmental disabilities. Persons with serious mental illness would rarely need something this restrictive, but the lack of it sends people to something much more intrusive, restrictive, and expensive—like incarceration or inpatient commitment.

Parole and conditional discharge from a hospital after involuntary confinement allow individuals to leave locked facilities—jails and hospitals—and live in the community as long as they meet certain conditions. For mentally ill parolees, conditions could include the requirement to stay in violence-preventing treatment. Likewise, rather than releasing a mentally ill individual from involuntary commitment and allowing the individual to go off treatment again, we could release them with the requirement they stay in treatment. It is not overly expensive and allows individuals to maintain almost all their rights with very little government intrusion except in the narrow area where there is a community interest. Both should be used more frequently.

Assisted Outpatient Treatment is the new kid on the block and the most important and useful. Forty-two states have Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT), but no state uses it sufficiently. AOT is a court order to stay in treatment as a condition for living in the community. It is usually limited to those who have a past history of at least two incarcerations, involuntary commitments, or needless hospitalizations.[36] It is palatable to libertarians because it is only used after unfettered liberty has proven unsuccessful. The patient is monitored in the community and can be put in an inpatient setting if they fail in the outpatient setting.[37]

AOT furthers the libertarian goal of preventing people from being sent to more restrictive environments. Research on individuals treated under New York State’s AOT law, called “Kendra’s Law” found 83% fewer were arrested, 87% fewer were incarcerated, 77% fewer experienced psychiatric hospitalization, and length of hospitalization was reduced 56%.[38] In California, where AOT is called “Laura’s Law,” it cut incarceration 67% in one county and 78% in another. AOT cut hospitalization 46% and 86% in the same counties.[39]

AOT helps further the libertarian goal of preventing persons with mental illness from infringing on the liberties of others. In New York, after enrollment in Kendra’s Law, 46% fewer damaged or destroyed property and 43% fewer threatened physical harm to others. Patients who were more violent to begin with were nevertheless four times less likely to perpetrate serious violence after undergoing treatment.[40] The odds of arrest for a violent offense were 8.61 times greater before AOT than they were in the period during and shortly after AOT.[41]

AOT furthers the libertarian goal of keeping government small. In California, it saved $1.81 for every dollar spent. In New York, where approximately 1,800 individuals are under AOT it has been estimated to save $73,800,000 in incarceration costs and $36,000,000 in hospitalization costs for a total of $109,800,000.[42] Libertarians should support use of these less restrictive commitment venues.

Conclusion

Current civil commitment practices fail to result in the libertarian objective of having fewer individuals incarcerated, public safety protected, and government growth restrained. Using lower commitment standards combined with less restrictive treatment venues can reduce the number incarcerated, shorten length of commitments, improve safety of the citizenry, and reduce the size of government. Reforming civil commitment practices can free people with serious mental illness “from the Bastille of their psychoses—and restore their dignity, their free will and the meaningful exercise of their liberties.” There is a strong libertarian rationale for reforming civil commitment laws.

DJ Jaffe

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/08/22/editors/letters-libertarians-proposal-reform-involuntary-commitment

https://www.amazon.com/Insane-Consequences-Mental-Industry-Mentally/dp/1633882918

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