MATT GAETZ, WILL YOU STOP RANTING AND START HELPING?!

Here is an open letter to a divisive Republican Florida Congressman who yet might be of use.

Mr. Gaetz:

The July 16 edition of Salon reprinted an Alternet article that quoted some of the vilest, most callous and repugnant remarks I have ever read—and that’s saying something. The remarks were glazed in an oily hypocrisy as transparent as it was fraudulent.

Matt Gatez. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The remarks were yours, Mr. Gaetz. (I can’t bring myself to call you “Congressman” Gaetz, because “Congressman” is an honorific, and I have never discovered anything in your character that suggests honor. I think I’ll call you “Matt.”) You voiced them during a podcast on June 8. They were aimed at the bereaved Congressman Jamie Raskin, whose son Thomas, on New Year’s Eve 2020, committed suicide.

The podcast was hosted by your spirit animal, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie sat mooing with approval at your side as you spoke, occasionally belching out a supportive comment of her own.

Do you recall those remarks, Matt? I do. The thrust of them was that Jamie Raskin was no longer able to discharge his congressional duties. Because his son had committed suicide.

There are levels of inhumanity, Matt. There are levels of character destruction, of barbarism and bullying, of abusive self-degrading malice. You know these levels, Matt, because they are where you and your fellow congressional cretins live like feral cliff-dwellers. Your horde has pumped these rancid values into the public discourse over the last decade; you’ve done your best to normatize them. To an appalling extent you’ve succeeded.

And now you have broken new mud. You’ve hacked out a new bottom level. No slur, no lie, no amount of hateful falsity in your public past can match your soulless verbal mugging of Congressman Raskin, a man of rare high character and rarer courage who just now is performing the definitive public service of his life: holding to account the moral miscreants like you who thought, on January 6, 2021, that it would be a good idea to follow Donald Trump’s goading and vandalize the United States Capitol building in Washington.

Now you want Jamie Raskin out of Congress—you know, for his own good. Coincidence? Maybe.

You put on your Sigmund Freud pants, Matt, to explain to us laypeople why Jamie Raskin must retreat from the public scene:

“I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in the Congress to such an interwoven way that he’s unable to do the congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma . . . I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and severe ways.”

Is that what you like think, Matt? Your . . . analytical gifts are stunning. You kept your own hide safely distant from the violence that day, yet you somehow divined without evidence that it was a bunch of far-left (“anti-fa”) zealots who triggered all the trouble. Still, you were quoted as saying, “We’re proud of the work we did on January 6th to make legitimate arguments about election integrity.” Doesn’t this make you—oh, a proud far-left anti-fa zealot?

Jamie Raskin, U.S. representative for Maryland’s 8th congressional district

Here, though, is the nub of it, Matt: Congressman Raskin will surmount your venomous hypocrisy. Your real victims are the millions of Americans whose lives have been scarred by a child’s mental illness and/or suicide. Often these people are shunned into the bargain by a society that assumes they are crazy themselves, or somehow to blame. I speak from experience. Now they—we—Congressman Raskin—suffer a fresh round of gratuitous stigma, via your clueless and falsehearted claim that such bereavement robs survivors of the ability to function.

Statistics on mental illness vary, as do definitions of mental illness. The National Association on Mental Illness reports that more than 14 million people suffered serious mental illness (incurable brain diseases such as schizophrenia) in 2021. Lesser forms of mental illness affected a fifth of the population. Suicide rates are easier to pin down. Some 46 thousand Americans killed themselves in 2021. About half of these were mentally ill. The Raskin family courageously announced that Tommy, a Harvard Law School student, had suffered from serious depression for years. Depression is a leading symptom of chronic bipolar disorder.

The Raskin family made their announcement to combat stigma.

What was your own point, Matt?

History and common sense make you look like a fool, Matt, perish the thought. “And death shall have no dominion,” wrote Dylan Thomas, and for most bereaved people, this is at least partly true. They forge on. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln lost their beloved 11-year-old son Todd to typhoid fever in February 1862, in the midst of the Civil War. Less than a year later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Meningitis took the life of Susy Clemens, Mark Twain’s cherished daughter, while Sam and Olivia were away in Europe. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live” Sam wrote. Yet he did live, and wrote some of his more important works before his own death in 1910.

The list goes on to encompass the millions of unknown parents and siblings who bravely have forged on, electing to consecrate their lives and work to the memories of their lost loved ones.

Your intrusion into the Raskins’ grief was out of line, Matt Gaetz. Only those who have actually lost a child, to suicide or otherwise, are qualified to discuss the despair that descends, against their will, until “comes wisdom through the awful grace of God,” per Aeschylus.

The Alternet quotes you as saying, piously, “[Y]ou know, no one would ever want to lose a child, particularly to suicide,” and, “As human beings, our hearts go out to him.” How true and how touching. You could prove your sincerity and commitment to these remarks in many ways.

The American mental healthcare system is in shambles. This year, committees in both houses of Congress at last began to focus on solutions. The Senate Finance Committee has released a discussion draft regarding mental health care for young people in Medicaid. In May, President Biden released his draft for a comprehensive strategy. And less than a month ago, your body, the House of Representatives, passed the Mental Health and Well Being Act, and two other acts aimed at reclaiming those afflicted with madness and addiction.

These are essential yet tiny steps. Massive work remains to be done: reforming our medieval criminal-justice system as it relates to mentally ill prisoners; rewriting outdated and harmful policy mandates; training many more care workers; speeding up access to diagnosis and treatment; vastly increasing public education; perhaps even creating a cabinet-level office to unify these and all other operations. Oh yes: and reducing stigma.

Have you thought of taking a leadership role in some or all of these initiatives, Congressman Matthew Gates? Being a part of seminal reform in mental healthcare would give your legacy a priceless quantum boost. It might even get your thoughts diverted from political conspiracies—which, after all, as you might know, can be a sign of paranoia.

A Senate Candidate from Colorado Speaks Brilliantly for “the Movement”

Andrew Romanoff could be our long-awaited congressional beacon of mental healthcare reform–if the lifers among the Democratic power-brokers will give him the chance to shine.

I traveled to the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colorado, over the weekend, to flap my gums about reforming mental healthcare in America. And found myself listening to the most stirring talk I have ever heard about reforming mental healthcare in America.

Hint: it wasn’t mine. It covered much of the same ground, but with the riveting pace, passion and purpose that educates and inspires.

The talk was delivered without notes by a guy who came so late to the event that people were starting to walk toward the exits. When they spotted him coming through the door, they rushed back to their tables and shouted in unison: “You’re LAAAAAAATE!”

The shout was not hostile. It had been rehearsed: an affectionate scolding to one who was known and loved by the people there, who understood that he is deluged with speaking obligations.

The speaker did not disappoint. His remarks galvanized the audience, which erupted in a standing ovation at the conclusion. He had completely upstaged a certain gum-flapping speaker from earlier in the evening. The gum-flapping speaker hardly minded. He recognized that if the political will of Colorado voters were to move in the right direction, this late-arriving figure could well be the charismatic figurehead of the mental-health reform movement from the floor of the United States Senate.

If that should happen–well, better late than never.

The occasion was a gala honoring Heart-Mind-Connect, a new entrant in the expanding archipelago of grass-roots advocates for fixing our broken systems for reclaiming the mentally ill. H-M-C was recently organized by a small collective headed by the singer-songwriter Maree McRae, whose son Stephen was stricken with a rare disease known as common variable immune deficiency. CVID, a genetic disease, attacks antibodies that fight infections, and can produce schizophrenia-like behavior in its victims.

The galvanizing, late-arriving speaker was Andrew Romanoff, 53, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2020. Romanoff is campaigning to get past a crowded primary field that includes the former Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, so that he can take on the incumbent Senator, the Donald Trump-supporting Cory Gardner.

Romanoff’s resume bristles with achievement. He won four elections to the Colorado House of Representatives, serving from 2001 through 2009, serving as Speaker from 2005 until term limits ended that run. His causes included expanding the Medicare health program; supporting the “Green New Deal” to promote renewable Energy; championing immigration reform to ease the path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; and opposing special-interest funding of political candidates. He has rejected Political Action Committee donations for his Senate campaign.

Romanoff holds degrees from Yale and the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He has researched the Ku Klux Klan for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has taught English in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

He served as president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado from 2015 until 2019.

So naturally (according to Romanoff’s own accounts) the intrepid and visionary Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has done its best to make him disappear. Apparently the DSCC prefers the easy listenin’ strains of the incumbent to the reformist drums and trumpets of candidates such as Romanoff.

As Channel 4, the CBS affiliate in Denver, reported in August:

“The DSCC is a powerful political machine that spends hundreds of millions of dollars each election and Romanoff says it is threatening polling, media and other political consultants that if they work with him, it will cut them off.”
“The DSCC has endorsed John Hickenlooper. Romanoff says helping Hickenlooper is one thing, sabotaging his campaign is another.”
Via CBS Andrew Romanoff Accuses Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Of Trying To Push Him Out https://denver.cbslocal.com/2019/08/29/andrew-romanoff-democratic-senatorial-campaign-2020-cory-gardner/

What a waste of hope and vision that would be.

Romanoff’s focus on mental healthcare springs from personal experience–as it does for so many advocates and policymakers.

During his tardy appearance at the H-M-C gala, Andrew Romanoff spoke for about twenty electrifying and lucid minutes, sans suitcoat (the polar opposite of being an empty suit, it occurred to me), tie loosened, fingertips in his trousers pocket, crisply ticking off the goals and the challenges of the mental healthcare reform movement. I did not take notes–no one at the event had prepared me for the eloquence and accuracy and force of Romanoff’s words. I can guarantee one and all, however, that the standard-bearer we have all longed for within the halls of political power may be working his way there.

The emotional peak of his remarks came as Romanoff recounted the horrific story of a family member who put a pistol to her head in 2014 and pulled the trigger.

The victim was Romanoff’s first cousin. “I thought of as her my kid sister,” he said. The calamity occurred without warning, without advance hints that the young woman was disturbed. “Her mom and dad and I–the four of us–were celebrating New Year’s 2015 when she walked into the backyard and killed herself.”

Romanoff’s casual, wry demeanor changed as he briefly told this story. His eyes filled and he paused several times.

A cynical politician–perhaps a lifer on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee–might have seen this moment as calculated; a carefully rehearsed, twice-told tale manufactured to elicit sympathy.

I choose not to think so. As Huck Finn said, I been there before. I doubt that many readers of this blog, burdened in private by their own bereavements, would think so either.

I choose to believe that Andrew Romanoff is the goods: as a potential voice in the Senate for enlightened reform of our country’s shameful mental healthcare systems; but also as a voice for enlightened governance generally.

I wish him well.

Tweets by Romanoff2020

Tweets by MareeMcRaeSings

Beyond Denunciation

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.”
John Steinbeck

Vacaville, California, has a history of popular uprisings to confront the powerful as they violate the humanity of the dispossessed.

In 1932, organizers came to Vacaville to organize the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union, which fought the starvation-wage exploitation of farm and orchard laborers by the state’s powerful growers. The CAWIU went on strike that December–one of 140 strikes, some of them violent, that occurred between 1930 and 1939. These actions caught the attention of John Steinbeck, and triggered his impulse to write The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and contributed to his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Now Vacaville finds itself at the tipping-point of another defining moral struggle pitting society’s outcasts against entrenched power. The outcasts in the current showdown, the homeless mentally ill, are represented by James Mark Rippee, the blind, gravely brain-damaged street dweller of whom I’ve written extensively on this blog. The power centers that control his fate are the extravagantly named Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center, and the Solano County Board of Supervisors.

James Mark Rippee – Photo Courtesy Linda Privette

On Tuesday, October 8 (tomorrow, as I write this) one or both these institutions will render decisions that will either end Mark’s twelve years of unimaginable suffering on the small city’s streets, or cast him back into the chaos and brutality of those streets as if he were a leper from the slums of New Dehli.

Mark Rippee is 56 now; emaciated, sickly, and delusional, as he has been since the motorcycle accident in 1987 that cost him his vision, crippled him, and left bits of his brain scattered in an alfalfa field.

Winter is coming on. Mark has routinely been beaten and robbed over the years by random thugs who have taken a succession of walking sticks his sisters have provided him, as well as blankets that have been his only insulation against the cold.

His age and failing health augur against his surviving the cold months out-of-doors one more time. The ongoing, unfathomable indifference of the County board to his physical exposure, and the equally bewildering failure of Kaiser Permanente’s psychiatrists to find anything wrong with his psyche, augur against his rescue by those whose charge is the public health and safety.

The “policy” decisions on October 8 at the Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center and the Solano County Board of Supervisors, then, probably amount to a life-or-death sentence for James Mark Rippee. “Policy” explains why Mark Rippee remains homeless. The pertinent “policies” ensnarled in the maimed reasoning of brain-damage victims and in the equally maimed consciences of bureaucrats. “Policies” have constricted his sisters, Linda Privatte and C.J. Hanson, as they have struggled to gain simple shelter and medical care for their brother, whose fog of reasoning blocks him from giving necessary consent.

Mark is in the hospital because on September 14 he stumbled into traffic and was hit by a car as he wandered blindly along Monte Vista Avenue in Vacaville. The impact knocked his head against the concrete and re-opened an abcess. The pain overcame his delusional resistance to being hospitalized or treated (a common resistance, known as “anosognosia,” or lack of insight, in schizophrenia victims).

Mark Rippee’s hospital stay seems likely to end on October 8, when the Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center will release him to–well, it will release him. It is not the “policy” of the Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center to give much of a rap where patients such as Mark Rippee end up. “Policy,” you see, allows no moral dimension. It normally is accompanied, however, by a burning desire not to spend money.

And on this same day the bureaucracy known as the Solano County board of supervisors will hold yet another hearing to hear opinion on whether Mark Rippee’s sisters should, at last, be granted a conservatorship that would allow them to make decisions on his behalf. Conservancy, like hospital and psychiatric care, requires the expenditure of money. Such money is sometimes available through state and federal government. But then there is that annoying matter of consent by the patient.

One thing will be different, in Mark Rippee’s favor, on this Tuesday. Public opinion is at last beginning to coalesce in his favor. The sisters’ exhaustive efforts at rallying community support have started to pay off, in the form of rallies and an expected turnout at the supervisors’ hearing. Advocates around the country are on standby, alerted by Facebook postings. A T-shirt is available for purchase online. It bears Mark’s ravaged likeness and the declaration that he blurted out, surprising everyone, during his recuperation. It should serve as a manifesto for all his brothers and sisters on this country’s streets:

“I am NOT homeless! I have a home! My home is the United States of America!”
Mark James Rippee

On Tuesday, October 8, we will see whether the United States of America fulfills Mark Rippee’s cry of trust.

https://www.facebook.com/cj.hanson.908/videos/757849507989657/

https://www.facebook.com/kerri.whitney.52/videos/2291283497649873/

Trump to Homeless: Get Lost

The good news is that President Trump wants to do something about homeless Americans on the streets.

The bad news is that President Trump wants to do something about homeless Americans on the streets.

On Monday, newspapers and television networks broke the news that the President of the United States, whose name is Donald Trump, had at last swiveled the full attention of his very, very large brain to one of the most appalling crises confronting American cities: the crisis of homeless people on the streets.

Social scientists and others of sadly lesser intellect have noticed the crisis as well, of course, and analyzed it to the best of their limited ability: as a vast ongoing human calamity with dire implications for public health (the containment of hepatitis and opioid epidemics, for example); community and family stability, criminal justice and law enforcement, the control of dangerous drugs, productivity and the employment base.

These are vitally important but largely utilitarian considerations. They do not contemplate the profound moral/religious dimension of this malady: the obligation to reclaim disintegrating human lives.

Few agents of disintegration are more darkly effective than mental illness–serious mental illness (incurable brain diseases such as schizophrenia) in particular. A 2015 survey by the The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the latest available, reported that of the nearly 565,000 people who were homeless on a given night, fully one-quarter, or 140,000, suffered from a S.M.I. (Serious Mental Illness). Nearly half, or 250,000, were in the grip of some sort of mental disorder.

S.M.I. victims, their reasoning powers diminished or gone, are essentially helpless on the streets. Cut off from providers of stabilizing medication, they are prey to robbers, thugs, thieves, and sometimes rogue police officers. On rare occasions, they become predators as well: upon others, and upon themselves, via suicide.

That is the context of the societal predicament which, nearly three-fourths of the way through his term of office, has activated the engines of President Donald Trump’s very large intellect.

And here is the distillation of Donald Trump’s mighty cogitating, as explained in this July 1 interview conducted by his pal Tucker Carson on Fox News. The relevant part of the interview begins 3 minutes and 22 seconds in. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-tucker-exclusive-interview-homelessness

It is clear from this interview that Donald Trump does not see homelessness as a social-justice problem or a humanitarian problem. He sees it as a cosmetic problem. One that “started two years ago [sic]”

It is further clear that the homeless are inconveniences. Disgraceful pests who make beat-walking police officers sick. “I mean actually they’re getting very sick.” They are affronts to civic pride: human (or semi-human) obstacles to decent upstanding work-loving citizens. The homeless make it very difficult for office-workers to get to work, you see, and thus are ruining our cities. “You have people that work in those cities,” Donald Trump revealed to his pal Tucker Carlson not long ago. “They work in office buildings. And to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three [sic] years ago.”

–And let Donald Trump tell you something: the threats posed by the homeless reach far beyond those that menace nauseated beat-cops and nimble-toed office workers. The homeless strike at the very foundations of America’s might. Take Washington, D.C. (before Donald Trump got in): “When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the President of the United States and they’re riding down the highway . . . they can’t be looking at that [sic]. I really believe that it hurts our country.”

–Don’t get Donald Trump wrong. Nobody is more ruefully forgiving of the barbaric horde than Donald Trump. “San Francisco–I own property in San Francisco; I don’t care, except it was so beautiful.”

–Because, you see, Donald Trump is very, very educated about mental illness: In fact nobody knows more about mental illness than Donald Trump: ” . . . the people living [on the streets] are living in hell, too . . . although some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way; but perhaps they like living that way.” (Emphasis added)

No doubt! Just like those African slaves in the antebellum South were “happy with their situation,” as my innocently bigoted mother used to assure me.

–But not to worry. Donald Trump’s very large, very beautiful mind has not only identified the issue at the heart, as it were, of the homeless problem: bad cosmetics. He has fingered, as it were, the Masters of Evil responsible for the atrocity. “And this is the liberal establishment . . . When you look at some of these, they’re usually sanctuary cities, they’re run by very liberal people, and the states are run by very liberal people.”

–Donald Trump has clashed with these evil forces before–and sent them packing with a strategy that was stellar in its simplicity. “When I first became president, we had certain areas of Washington, D.C., where that was starting to happen. And I ended it very quickly; I said, ‘You can’t do that.'”

–And now Donald Trump is poised to expand that breathtaking solution into a national plan of action. As he told Tucker in the July 1 Fox News interview I have been drawing on here: “So, we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate [!]. Now, we have to take the people, and do something. We have to do something.”

Take what people where? And do what? one wonders with a shudder. The loyal Tucker Carlson didn’t ask, and Donald Trump didn’t say. But the national press, those damned “enemies of the people,” did not wait for the president’s second-favorite cliche, “You’ll see.” They checked some sources. Here are some of the headlines that resulted on Monday:

Trump pushing for major crackdown on homeless camps in California, with aides discussing moving residents to government-backed facilities (The Washington Post)

Trump Reportedly Wants to Destroy Homeless Camps in California. Officials Say He Doesn’t Have a Clue. (Vice)

Trump officials look to fix California homeless problem, state officials say back off (USA TODAY)

Below the headline of this particular article, a team of three reporters quoted the executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, as saying:

“My first reaction is that it felt like internment camps for people experiencing homelessness. The president doesn’t seem to have any grasp of the homeless crisis not only in California but around the country.”

It doesn’t take a very, very big brain to suss out Donald Trump’s entire, unabridged spectrum of thought about mental illness. (1) He does not know diddly-squat about the disease. (2) He doesn’t care diddly-squat about its victims. And (3) coming as they do from the lips of a self-styled “man of the people,” Donald Trump’s remarks are about as consummately elitist and plutocratic as you are ever likely to hear outside the Clarence Day Room of the Yale Club.

If you are homeless and mentally ill–hell, if you are homeless, period–you are to Donald Trump as a speck of acne on the Ivanka-like face of America.

You are an impediment; an inconvenience; an ugly flaw to be hidden under a cosmetic treatment. (The “cosmetic treatment” in this case seems to require “facilities.” Camps. And this much is true: Donald Trump does know a little about camps.)

But in a darkly intuitive way, Donald Trump may know what he is doing. Rounding up homeless m.i. victims and sweeping them away out of sight behind walls and locked doors would place his aims squarely on a plane with history’s first institution designed to, let us say, cosmeticize urban streets of “lunaticks,” “morons,” and “idiots”: the notorious Bedlam Asylum in London, which opened for business in the 13th century and brutalized generations of “patients” until it was closed in 1815.

Bethlem [Bedlam] Hospital, London: incurables being inspected, 1789. Credit: Wellcome Library, London CC by 4.0

Of course, that sort of barbarism is unthinkable in enlightened, humane, modern-day America. As unthinkable as separating small refugee children from their parents at our southern border and placing them in cages.

In case you thought I was making up or paraphrasing the Donald Trump quotes above, please carefully review the clip I posted above, from his July 1 interview with Tucker Carlson.

My next blog will focus on the impending public-policy threats–and promises–vis-a-vis the homeless population.

An Ongoing Barbaric National Disgrace

I have written about the state-enforced incarceration, torture (via solitary confinement), and medical and inhumane neglect of young Tyler West of Fruitport, Michigan, since I began this blog nearly two years ago.

I have included mention of this mentally ill, ridiculously over-prosecuted victim’s plight in nearly every talk I have given. I’ve contacted journalists, advocates, and elected federal and state officials in and around Michigan. (Senator from the neighboring state of Minnesota, sometime mental health reform advocate, and perhaps presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar, I am looking at you. https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/705052728171634688

Progressive Senator Debbie Stabenow of Tyler’s home state, Michigan, https://www.stabenow.senate.gov/about/issues/excellence-in-mental-health-act can you possibly have remained uninformed about Tyler’s and his family’s nightmarish ordeal?)

No one answers. Silence prevails among people in a position to rescue Tyler and elevate him to a national symbol of our debased mental healthcare systems: a silence as absolute as that which surrounds Tyler when he is repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement for reasons undisclosed to his parents.

No one. No one. No one, on the evidence, cares about crazy people.

It causes me lacerating psychic pain to think about Tyler West and his inexplicable Bedlam-like imprisonment. (For details, see my other blogs about Tyler on this site.) My helplessness, and his family’s helplessness, in seeking justice for him exhaust and infuriate me no end. I no longer write about him as much as I used to, as much as I should.

The one person in this world who sustains any shred of hope within me, and who inspires me to speak about about Tyler yet again, is his courageous mother, Kimberlee Cooper-West. Kimberlee is a religious and civic-minded woman; and although struggling with her own grief, she has never given up on her violated adopted son. I have quoted many times from her impassioned writing. And today, reading through the Facebook file of my colleague in advocacy Dee Dee Moon Ranahan, I came upon her latest cry from the heart. It follows below. Ms. Stabenow? Ms. Klobuchar? Detroit Free Press? National NAMI? In this season of love and charity and reverence and soul-reclamation, to paraphrase Atticus Finch: “For God’s sake . . . do your duty!”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? by Kimberlee Cooper West

Wish I had good news to share with ya all.

November 8 was our son Tyler’s 20th birthday. We were unable to say “Happy Birthday” as he was in lock down for five days. Days later, we drove a little over an hour to Richard Handlon Correctional Prison in Ionia, Michigan. (Tyler is number #113697.) We had cake with him. He made a cake from two honeybuns, smashed peanut M&M’s, and a melted Snickers bar on top. He’s inventive. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

He’s still our boy. Few mention him. Our heart breaks for what we’ve lost. This is Tyler’s third 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’s been beaten up four times since he was incarcerated.

Why couldn’t mental health professionals keep him in an inpatient psychiatric hospital? For the love of God there was no good reason to release our son from the hospital. His safety was compromised. No one was responsible. He was nearly shot at for trespassing. He was an inpatient five 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 is a disease. It is prodromal to Alzheimer’s. Prisons are corporations. Their goal is money. They need prisoners. Caught up in the system — it’s a real thing.

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. 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 in prison for two months, “You’re doing 15 years.” It leaves me to wonder how many have given up from her words.

Ty’s 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. On his birthday, I sent his appeal papers certified to a judge. Hopefully, he will give him an appellate lawyer.

http://www.soonerthantomorrow.com

Ty in prison -Credit Kimberlee Cooper West

Thank you, Deb Fabos, for posting this

Civil Rights Groups File Suit on Behalf of Man Intentionally Denied Mental Health Treatment in Jail, Man Was Abused by Tangipahoa Prison Officials

via ACLU.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Ronald K. Lospennato, Advocacy Center 504-208-4679

NEW ORLEANS – Two civil rights organizations, the Advocacy Center and the ACLU of Louisiana, joined forces to file a lawsuit today on behalf of Dennis Bargher, who, while suffering from schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses, was held at Tangipahoa Parish Jail (TPJ) for nearly two years without treatment. The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

TPJ officials knew that Mr. Bargher was severely mentally ill, that a court had ordered his treatment with prescription medications, and that without treatment, Bargher would quickly descend into psychosis. Despite that, they refused to treat him, held him in solitary confinement for weeks and months at a time, and denied him food until he had lost nearly half his body weight. Bargher’s abuse at the hands of jail officials continued for almost two years until late 2011, when he was discovered – psychotic, emaciated and enfeebled – by civil rights groups and transferred to a different facility.

Miranda Tait, an attorney for the Advocacy Center said “prison conditions are very hard on inmates with mental illness. Conditions of overcrowding, violence, lack of privacy, lack of meaningful activities, isolation from friends and family, and uncertainty about life after prison affect all inmates. These conditions are especially difficult for people with mental illness. The intentional withholding of medical treatment, with callous disregard for the inmate’s medical needs, is tantamount to torture”

According to Marjorie Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana, “Under the Constitution, prisons are obligated to provide inmates with adequate medical care, including mental health care. Officials cannot abuse or neglect inmates, deny prisoners essential treatment or allow offenders to physically and mentally waste away simply out of contempt or because they don’t understand the disease.”

With few psychiatric services available to the public, people with mental illness are increasingly funneled into a criminal justice system that is ill-equipped to address their treatment needs. Hundreds of thousands of men and women in U.S. jails and prisons suffer from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. “It’s past time for us to provide adequate care for those with illnesses,” continued Esman. “Dennis Barger was wrongly denied that care, and suffered greatly as a result.” Representing Dennis Bargher are Miranda Tait and Ronald Lospennato of the Advocacy Center, ACLU of Louisiana Senior Staff Attorney Justin Harrison, and ACLU Cooperating Attorney Ron Wilson.

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.

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.)

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.

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/

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.”

ANOTHER MENTALLY ILL INMATE DIES IN JAIL

In NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, I write, “Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.”

Here is one more among the unending examples of what I mean: Inmate, 23, who died in Orleans Parish jail Wednesday identified.