A Political Breakthrough for Mental Healthcare Reform!

In one breathtaking stroke, Kamala Harris has just widened the contours of presidential campaign history and thrown light into the darkest corridors of shameful human suffering.

On Monday, Harris affirmed that America is in the throes of a mental healthcare crisis. And she backed up her ringing assertion by adopting all the major goals of advocates for enlightened mental healthcare and fairness in our nation’s policies and practices. While several of her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have put forth their own reform proposals, none matches the sweep of the Harris plan, and none has triggered such rejoicing in the ranks of reform advocates. 

In the words of the premier advocate-warrior DJ Jaffe: “Wow! Wow!” Jaffe added that the Harris plan embraced “everything we’ve been looking for to help [the] seriously mentally ill.”

With these gestures, Harris has frontally attacked a century’s worth of neglect, denial, obfuscation, and wasted spending that define the country’s medieval approach to its most helpless citizens.

Among her plan’s many, desperately needed virtues:

The Harris plan reinvigorates the concept of “justice” in dealing with the mentally ill; yet it implies a range of practical economic benefits as well. Her agenda attacks the widening cone of unnecessary social cost and structural blight that proceeds from the stricken individual through the community, the city, the rural landscape, and our vast failed archipelago.

In calling for a doubling of the nation’s psychiatric beds, for example, Harris opens a path to significant reduction of taxpayer money spent on the glut of afflicted people behind bars: Each year more than 2 million people with serious mental illness are thrown in jail, often because care centers have no room. Incarcerating an inmate with mental illness costs $31,000 annually, while community mental health services cost about $10,000. 

Harris’s recommendations are protean. They contemplate the needs of psychically damaged veterans; telemedicine as a resource in under-served rural communities; the elimination of foolish laws that prevent family members from learning the state of a relative in hospital care; an increase in crisis-intervention teams; criminal-justice diversion for people in psychoses arrested for a crime; education for a judiciary too often clueless as to the nature of mental illness, and “Medicare-for-all” coverage for the mentally ill.

And it calls for the abolishment of the evil known as solitary confinement. Other Democrats have attacked this scourge as well, though that is hardly a discredit. Solitary confinement cannot be excoriated too many times.

The Harris plan is not exactly sailing in calm political waters, of course. The cynicism and bad faith that now besmirch our civic discourse might well capsize this vessel of reforms. Some pundits will almost surely write it off as a desperation gesture from a candidate struggling to gain traction in the polls–or as a cosmetic ploy to soften Harris’s residual image as a remorseless prosecutor.

Such dismissal would be as shameful–as borderline-decadent–as is the present state of mental healthcare itself. Kamala Harris’s proposed reforms are what they are, without reference to the candidate. They cry out to be lifted up from the ruck of conventional campaign promises and examined (and re-examined, and debated, and circulated“, and published) on their own merits. 

And they are something beyond themselves, as well: they are a blazing collective affirmation of the power of witness: persistent, retail, on-the-ground political advocacy. To the politics of personal persuasion and response, if you like.

Leslie Carpenter and Kamala Harris Photo Courtesy Leslie Carpenter

Virtually every Democratic candidate who has spoken up about mental health-care reform has been educated on the soil of Iowa, face-to-face, by the phenomenal team of Leslie and Scott Carpenter. They and their fellow advocates–my friends and models of informed passion and persistence–are living testaments to the ideal of Making a Difference. Most of these people have struggled for years, in small groups, in letters and emails to the powerful, and against fatigue and hopelessness. Nearly every one of them is closely related to a victim of serious mental illness. 

Now, just maybe, is their moment.

LEST WE FORGET

Tyler West is in a prisoner in the Richard Handlon Correctional Prison in Ionia, Michigan. Mark Rippee, blind and severely disabled, as well as severely mentally ill, is at large on the streets of Vacaville, California, where he has somehow survived for twelve years. He is regularly beaten up and tormented by street punks. His sister Linda Privette told me that in addition to food and clothing, she recently provided him with his eighth walking cane in a twelve-month period–the other seven had been taken from him.

Mark Rippee

You may read about Tyler and Mark, and the grossly inhumane reasons for their medieval persecution, elsewhere on this blog. In brief, each is an unconscionable victim of an American state’s official contempt for the mentally ill, contempt that festers from ignorance, indifference, and a lack of organized public pressure to rescue them and their families from their living hell.

I’m sure that many relatives of the mistreated mentally ill would like to see equal attention devoted to their loved ones. My inadequate response is that there are not enough megabytes in cyberspace to tell the story of every American sufferer of mental illness who has been further victimized by our systems. We need to make mental-health reform a massive civil-rights issue. We need a revolution of conscience.

Tyler West

I am posting below a heartbreaking, eloquent message from Tyler’s adoptive mother, Kimberlee Cooper-West. (She submitted it to the Facebook site Circle of Comfort and Assistance Community, and I reprint it with her permission, and it bears close reading.) You can find comments from Mark Rippee’s sisters, Linda Privette and CJ Hanson, elsewhere on this blog.

KIMBERLEE COOPER-WEST

Wish I had good news to share with ya all’ Love my CCA family! Some have asked, so here it is! Today is our son Tyler’s 20th birthday! We were unable to say Happy Birthday, as he is in lock down for 5 days. We drove a little over an hour, to Richard Handlon Correctional Prison, in Ionia, Michigan. This was last Monday. He is number #113697. We had cake with him. He made a cake from 2 honeybuns, smashed peanut M&Ms(sprinkles) and a melted Snickers bar on top. He is inventive. We sang Happy Birthday to him. He is still our boy! Few mention him. Our heart breaks for what, we have lost. This Will be his 3rd year, away, for his Birthday. Next he will miss Thanksgiving and Christmas. He hasn’t been given counseling, education, training, or the proper medications. He was beat up 4 times, since he was incarceration. Why, couldn’t these mental health professionals, keep him, in an, inpatient psychiatric hospital? For the love of God, there was no good reason, to release our son. His safety compromised. No one responsible. He was nearly shot at for trespassing. He was inpatient, 5 days prior, to his arrest.. He was delusional and hearing voices. What is wrong with this country? Why is there, no long term treatment? This is a brain disease, ya all’ Maybe we should start locking up every Grandma and Grandpa who is violent, or disorderly from Alzheimer’s. Serious mental illness a disease. It is prodromal to Alzheimer’s. Prisons are corporations. Their goal is money. They need prisoners. Caught up in the system, it is a real thingl. We are receiving, a criminal justice system education. Months are now years. One caseworker, Ms. Williams, calls many people names like dumb, retarded, idiots and pedophiles etc. Everyone in Ty’s facility is either mentally ill or autistic. She told Tyler a 19 year old kid, who was only supposed to be there for 2 months, your doing 15 years. It leaves me to wonder, how many, have given up from her words.. He is not even provided an inhaler for asthma, and chronic lung disease. He has autism and a serious mental illness. When he was in school he was never suspended. He was a target for bullies, which was, Our main concern. Incarceration, never crossed our minds. Today on his birthday, I sent his appeal papers, certified to a judge. Hopefully he will give him an apeallate lawyer.

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