No One Cares About Crazy People
The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America
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/
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/
Via Buzzfeed
A psychiatric hospital and its director that are under state investigation. Riots that end with pepper spray. Staff who can’t begin to contain the violence. And patients as young as 5: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosalindadams/shadow-mountain?utm_term=.hjOgkR5RE&ref=mobile_share#.sx1wjLNLB
Mike Miner and I were inseparable buddies in our last year in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. In those lamb-white days of spring 1963 that meandered innocently toward the world-shattering assassination of the following fall, we rollicked through the kind of friendship that has mostly gone missing in the present world of dread and suspicion and the bristling arsenals of hip.
We played some college pranks. One of them I think involved a football in a classroom; I can’t remember much more than that. We covered sports together for the J-school daily newspaper, we got permission to resurrect the campus humor magazine, Show Me (recently banned for, horrors, profanity). We saved our quarters and pooled them to treat ourselves once a month to a $1.50 pizza in town. We went to the movies and entertained grateful patrons around us by shouting wisecracks at the screen. We showed our Brando-esque wildness (“What are you rebelling against?” “Whadday got?”) in other ways: by sliding saltshakers across restaurant table surfaces, hoping they would hover on the very edge, until one didn’t and the waitress rushed at us.
You know. Wild stuff like that.
And we talked and talked. About the “future.” About what we would “be.” And we wrote and wrote. Newspaper articles, jokes for the humor mag, stuff.
We kept the friendship together after graduation. Mike went into the Navy and I wangled a magazine assignment to Hawaii that coincided with his ship docking at Honolulu, and we did that town. (Saw the John Wayne/Patricia Neal navy movie “In Harm’s Way” together; walked out of the movie theater verklempt, although we’d never heard of that word then. Drowned ourselves in chocolate milkshakes.) Then I went back to Chicago and Mike went off to the South China Sea.
He made it through. After his tour was over, we newspapered together in St. Louis and then Chicago. Toured Ireland and London, and my easy, delightful companionship tested the limits of Mike’s capacity to long-suffer.
And then. . .you know. . .time is the longest distance between two places. . .I headed to New York; Mike stayed in Chicago.
I always believed that Michael was destined to be the major writer between us. He knew theater, and knocked out several good plays and wonderful poems. His wit was sly and dry, and his literary gifts even then were enormous. He was better than I ever was. Still is.
And lo and behold, he did become the major writer. At a weekly paper called The Reader, he has built a name for himself as an institution of superb, intrepid reporting and a writing style that could keep company with Ben Hecht, Mike Royko, all those Windy City giants. Whereas I was kind of a nomad, Mike committed himself to a place, and mined it deeply for story. Some other pretty good writers have done that. Faulkner.
We kept in touch a little. Facebook made it easier when it came along. Still, it was sporadic.
In July 2005 the “future” arrived for me. Right between the eyes. My younger son Kevin, deep in schizoaffective disorder, hanged himself in the family basement.
A decade later I got it together enough to write my book about mental illness: NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.
And then, this week, my old friend Mike showed up again. In the form of the review that you will find below.
You talk about verklempt. You talk about friendship.
Thanks, Mike. Game of saltshakers sometime?
As you read No One Cares About Crazy People you might think it’s two books or you might think it’s one. There’s the book author Ron Powers tells us that he set out to write—a critical history of societal responses to mental illness—and there’s the personal story that compelled him to write this book—the raising of two sons who became schizophrenic, one of whom killed himself. An agent told Powers that to write one he must write the other. And so he has.
For a time beginning in college and continuing to the Sun-Times—where he won a Pulitzer Prize for TV criticism in the early 70s—Powers and I were close and had the forward-looking conversations young men have. Never—I repeatedly thought as I turned the pages of Crazy People—did anything cross our imaginations close to what lay in wait.
Crazy People is his response to that rendezvous. It draws on the wit and anger I remember, on research compelled by circumstance, and on paternal devotion then untapped in either of us. Powers has collaborated before—with Ted Kennedy on Kennedy’s memoir, and with James Bradley on Flags of Our Fathers. In Crazy People, Powers, the reporter and stylish writer, collaborates with himself, the father with a story.
The social history of mental illness, no reader will be surprised to learn, is doleful.
“The world of mental illness,” Powers writes, is everywhere; it hides in plain sight. “Its camouflage . . . little more than the human instinct to reject engagement with the pitiable, the fearsome, the unspeakable.”
Rather than illness we’d see witchcraft; rather than humans in need we’d see menace, and we’d feel a duty not to assuage agony but to hide it from sight. The places where the mad were hidden gripped the public imagination for their gothic mystery. Powers tells the centuries-long history of the London madhouse known as Bedlam; in Saint Louis, as he surely remembers from his years there, an institution for the mentally ill was known to one and all simply as “Arsenal Street.”
You kept your distance from Arsenal Street.
Mental illness can hide in plain sight because we don’t like to think about it. But take your own inventory as I take mine. Two members of my book group have grown schizophrenic children. One daughter’s closest childhood friend is schizophrenic; another daughter’s grade school Spanish teacher lost her husband when he was stabbed to death during a psychotic breakdown by their schizophrenic son.
Powers and his wife, Honoree Fleming, raised sons Dean and Kevin in Vermont, where Powers wrote and Honoree, a professor, taught biochemistry and did research. Both sons were bright and creative, and Kevin was a guitar prodigy. The instructors his parents found for him soon threw up their hands—they had no more to teach him. But he was not yet 21 when he hanged himself in the basement of his family’s home.
Do madness and creativity go hand in hand? Powers devotes a chapter to this ageless question, to which there are correlations to be cited but no clear answer. Asked by a teacher in grade school to identify human needs, Kevin wrote, “I need music.” He inhabited, his father tells us, an “inaccessible” inner world of music, though the yield of that world can still be sampled today, as in a concert at Interlochen and an album the two brothers recorded together.
Powers places emphasis on the power of stress to trigger psychosis, and much less emphasis on the role of genetics, though years earlier his own younger brother had killed himself. Creativity and stress were palpable presences in the young lives of Dean and Kevin, and it’s those lives that preoccupy their father.
One Friday night toward the end of Dean’s junior year of high school, he took a curve too fast and his car slammed into a tree. The understanding around town was that Dean had been drunk, though he wasn’t. The girl next to him suffered injuries she was years recovering from, and her parents crusaded to see Dean thrown in prison. The high school principal banned Dean’s picture from the yearbook. Awaiting sentencing, prison a clear possibility, Dean wrote, in an essay, “my life is like a river and I am being swept away helplessly.”
And in Crazy People his father writes, “These were the days and months and events, I am convinced, that launched my eldest son into his rendezvous with schizophrenia.”
But today, Powers reports, Dean’s last psychotic episode a few years behind him, “he seems in possession of himself, aware of his limitations, and ready to live on his own in the wider world.”
Powers also introduces readers to a word I’d never heard or read before: anosognosia, or, “the false conviction within a person that nothing is wrong with his mind.” Powers calls it a “cruel joke.”
I’ve always supposed the joke is that when the meds work they make the patient feel so clear-headed he decides he doesn’t need them any longer. So he hides his meds, as Kevin did, or flushes them down the drain. Then he reverts. Confronted, he lies. But Powers says changing a patient’s ways isn’t as simple as screaming sense at him or waiting for him to learn from experience. He says anosognosia is actually a physiological condition disrupting the brain’s ability to recognize the condition it’s in; it shows up in 50 percent of schizophrenia cases and 40 percent of bipolar cases.
As his book concludes, Powers puts anosognosia to use as a symbol of obliviousness and denial—our own. He has seen what the mentally ill ask of the world—which is simply a place in it.
“The mentally ill people in our lives, as they strive to build healthy, well-supported, and rewarding lives for themselves, can show us all how to reconnect with the most primal of human urges, the urge to be of use,” Powers writes. “To put it another way: the mentally ill in our society are awaiting their chance to heal us, if we can only manage to escape our own anosognosia and admit that we need their help.”
Does putting the shoe on the other foot this way seem a sentimental stretch? I would say yes—if Powers were writing only about a set of issues he wanted to wrap up in a fancy ribbon. But the project’s too personal for that. He’s told us stories about the mentally ill burned at stakes, chained in dungeons, flogged and lobotomized, and treated to à la mode theories that they’d do just fine if turned out onto the streets, that they aren’t really ill at all because crazy people are the only sane ones. This is the history of society’s predisposition not to give a damn about Dean and Kevin!
And Powers won’t have it. They speak and we must listen. They are his sons.
In “No One Cares About Crazy People,” Ron Powers writes of parental love, bewilderment and rage at the vagaries of biological fate. John Donvan says it is one of the most engrossing accounts of raising a family he’s ever read.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize is one kind of writer’s dream. Nearly a year on the New York Times best-seller list is another. A third: when the best seller becomes a movie with a big-name director. Ron Powers is among the few to hit this particular trifecta. The onetime newspaperman won the Pulitzer for TV criticism in 1973, and “Flags of Our Fathers,” the immensely popular Iwo Jima history he co-wrote, arrived as a film in 2006, directed by Clint Eastwood. Mr. Powers’s newest book is a memoir, covering many of the years during which he scored these wins. A victory lap, however, this book is not. The story he relates—with searing humility and deep respect—concerns his two sons and the mental illness that flowered within them. “No One Cares About Crazy People” is a chronicle of deepening devastation recorded by a father able to do little in response to his boys’ suffering other than to witness and to love.
Mr. Powers’s memoir is the culmination of both those processes, and is motivated by his insistence on making us care—not just about his two boys, Dean and Kevin, but about all individuals and families wrestling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, acute depression and other forms of mental illness. His title signals his grim recognition that this will be an uphill battle. He pulled the phrase, verbatim, from an incident unrelated to his main story: In 2010, the future governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was still serving as the Milwaukee County executive when a scandal erupted over the abuse of patients at the county mental-health hospital. Subpoenaed emails revealed Mr. Walker and his aides worrying about damage to his political future. In the midst of these exchanges, one aide, who later went to prison, attempted to reassure another member of the team with the blunt political assessment that “no one cares about crazy people.”
Unfortunately she was right—mostly. Few of us care about the challenges of mental illness until the emergency is inside our own homes. Mr. Powers didn’t—until his sons began showing symptoms as teenagers, which is usually when these conditions clearly manifest. But once he was awakened, the world he had entered frustrated and enraged him.
Mr. Powers gives away the climax of his story in the preface: Both his boys, starting at different times, were beset by schizophrenia, and for the younger one, Kevin, the illness proved fatal. At 20, after three years of struggle, he hanged himself, at home in the basement, while his parents slept upstairs. Mr. Powers’s decision to put this stunning revelation on his first page was a gesture of respect to his son’s memory. There would be no storyteller game-playing with Kevin’s life—no ominous foreshadowing, no false hopes for a happy outcome planted along the way. If anything, the author risks scaring away readers uncomfortable with darkness. But those who stay will learn not only what the stakes are but also why they are on this journey.
The stay is worth it, for what unfolds is one of the most engrossing accounts of raising a family I have ever read, one in which Mr. Powers makes universal his themes of parental love, bewilderment and rage at the vagaries of biological fate. At the start, he was just a dad, and his wife, the scientist Honoree Fleming, was just a mom. Neither had any experience in raising children with mental-health challenges. They weren’t experts in schizophrenia. Nor did they need to be, for the first 15 years or so. Mr. Powers’s early chapters conjure his family’s time of pure ordinariness—a quality he cherishes all the more because it was lost. He seems tormented by these recollections—his family’s “before” years—but also blessed by them. And by sharing them he lifts his book into something more elevated than a eulogy for Kevin.
Instead, Kevin lives again in Mr. Powers’s poignant portrait, which he pieces together from excerpts from middle-school essays; quotations from father-son bedtime conversations that sound as fresh as last night; and, most powerfully, Mr. Powers’s descriptions of Kevin’s musical talent. The young man was a true prodigy on the guitar, playing since age 4, and was on his way to making a career as a singer. You can find at least one of his teenage performances on YouTube, and his dad’s right—Kevin Powers was going to be great.
All of which makes his deterioration, with its declared inevitability, more moving and painful to observe. Mr. Powers, in the middle of it all, had no idea where his son’s life was heading or how to keep him from slipping deeper into trouble. Medications were tried. And hospitalizations. But Kevin eventually wanted no part of treatment. The laws limiting involuntary treatment made it difficult to counter Kevin’s preferences—a reality Mr. Powers laments. In a way, Kevin had moved past his parents’ help, which is one of the things that still eats at the father even now.
Another thing is the sorry history of American society’s response to mental illness over the past two centuries. Mr. Powers thumbnails this history in chapters alternating with his sons’ stories and aims his anger at the seemingly natural impulse most of us possess to shun the mentally ill, much as we do the severely developmentally disabled. There is a loneliness to being in either of these categories, a loneliness that also afflicts the families of affected individuals and that is exaggerated by the “solutions” developed, over time, for “dealing with the problem.” Thus Mr. Powers relates the many remedies put forth over the years by usually well-meaning people who, in profound ways, missed the mark. He covers the eugenics movement; the many decades when the severely mentally ill and developmentally disabled were warehoused in so-called asylums; and the scandal that followed the deinstitutionalization movement, when a benevolent assertion of civil rights led to the shuttering of mental-health centers, but without adequate provision for former residents’ continuing need for treatment or even basics like food and shelter. The result: a swelling number of homeless and the transformation of the prison system into a custodial program for people who should be getting help, not doing time.
The real scandal of Mr. Powers’s exposé—and he knows this—is that he is not revealing anything new. These failures have been described many times, by muckrakers and reformers, since the mid-19th-century. But each time the outrage proved short-lived, swallowed up by renewed indifference or perhaps mass amnesia. As the author keeps finding, society’s impulse to “other-ize” the mentally ill is constant: These individuals are politically voiceless and therefore easy to marginalize.
The most uplifting chapter in “No One Cares About Crazy People” is its brief epilogue, focused on the present. Mr. Powers talks about getting visits in his dreams from a guitar-playing Kevin, and he reports that his older son, Dean, who was given the same diagnosis as his brother, is now “doing fine.” Dean has acknowledged that he needs help. He is, says Mr. Powers, “in possession of himself, aware of his limitations, and ready to live on his own in the wider world.”
Still, you can hear the caution in those words. Mr. Powers seems to sense that the progress is provisional; that Dean, now 35, will always be at risk; and that his own fathering remains on trial. Assuming the best, though, Dean will outlive his parents, who are his current chief protectors. That is when he will need the rest of us to be on his side—his and all of those among us who face similar kinds of struggle. That’s why this book was written: to get us to understand, to empathize, to identify. In short, to make its title a lie.
—Mr. Donvan is the co-author of “In A Different Key: The Story of Autism.”
Here are the other three pieces that Kevin and Booby recorded in Florida during that sublime all-night session in 2000 with his pal and bassist Peter Rogers and the promising young drummer Scott Shad.
Scott’s life ended in tragedy only a few weeks later. I lay out the details in Chapter 5 of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE:
Kevin’s voice was leaden when he called home in March. Scott Shad, the gifted young drummer who’d sat in on that magical recording session in Jacksonville, was dead. Scott was a diabetes sufferer. On March 6, he’d been caught without a needed dosage of insulin at the worst possible time.
Kevin explained the details in an email:
Subject: hey
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 00:13:12
From: “Kevin Powers” <hoist@hotmail.com>
To: hfleming@adelphia.net, ropo@sover.net
hey guys-
. . . we found out that scott had a free period at school so he went to get a cd and on the way back I guess he had a seizure while he was driving on the highway and went across the lanes and into a building wall.
I’ve never known anyone as well as him who has died so its really weird. its just really really shocking on so many levels. how is dean? give grammy my love and I’ll see you guys in a week or so
Kevin
He wrote another, even more heartfelt letter to the Cleveland novelist, screenwriter, musician and family friend Scott Lax. Scott was among the first to recognize Kevin’s talent, having met him and the family at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in the 1990s. Scott formed strong bonds with both Dean and Kevin. He wrote to Kev after I had told him of my son’s devastation. Kevin replied:
Hey Scott-
Thanks for writing. Its unbelievable how powerless I felt when it happened. He was such a great guy and so inspirational. I’ve never lost such a close friend before. I think you’d like him-Never once had a negative thing to say all smiles and incredibly modest just an all around good kid. He was a divine talent on the drums. He played in another band that just got signed and has been together since Jr. High. I don’t know what to do I know that I have to be strong but its hard knowing we won’t have a chance to play or just hang out anymore. So it will be hard but I’ll have to cope with it. But memories are everything, he was a happy kid so he had a happy 18 years which is the most important thing.
I hope we can keep in touch and if you have any advice on ways to deal
with this I’d like to hear it,
Kevin
Kevin himself had less than five years to live.
From time to time on this blog, I’ve lamented the uncounted family members—mothers, mostly—who are aware of the hideous abuse their mentally ill children suffer in jails, and sometimes in care centers and by law enforcement; yet who choose to keep their voices muted for fear of stigma and possible retaliation by the abusers.
On Sunday I persuaded one such mother to let me share the latest of several testimonies that she has written and posted on a members-only website for families of SMI (serious mental illness) victims. I have withheld her name. It is the details, after all, that matter; not the specific identity.
This woman is hardly a malcontent: she is a Sunday-school teacher at her church, has had years of experience as a foster parent (including for refugee children) and is civic-minded in many other ways. What you will read below is not her first plea for help and understanding. Her son has been mistreated in all sorts of unthinkable ways: by the community and by “care-givers” as well as the violent inmate who attacked her son on Saturday night.
So, here is a rare public accounting of the ongoing private hell routinely suffered by those trapped in the sub-universe of mental illness. (I should note that this message has received a tremendous outpouring of concern and offers to help from fellow members on the site.)
Our society needs to hear many more such voices: enough voices, and enough response to those voices, to disprove the ironic title of my forthcoming book, NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.
“Ty is a victim again. Tyler our 18-year-old son was beat up last night in jail. The guy was a lot bigger than Ty. No one stopped it. Saturday night is commissary night. No one called the guards. They didn’t want to get locked in before they received their commissary. There are parts of it he doesn’t remember. They asked him a few questions, then he fell asleep. Thank God he woke up this morning. No one checked on him during the night. Why would you put a kid, who never has hurt anyone in with violent offenders? He has a headache and a black eye. He’s nauseated, feels drunk and tipsy. He was never checked on by a nurse or doctor. They don’t have a doctor, on weekends. This is concussion number 5 or 6. All have been severe. Another Traumatic brain injury! Getting beat up is nothing, new for my baby. This might not help his other problem, as he hears voices. If only they would have kept him in the hospital for long term. Out of 15 ER visits in under 2 years. Ty has only spent 2 weeks total inpatient. He’s been hearing voices for at least a year and a half. He’s never been stable. Hope they take him to the hospital to get him an MRI. Is that wishful thinking? He’s is going to see a forensic psychiatrist next month. Prayers, ya all! It’s us again! One song Ty is playing every instrument seperately, then mixed, in ghostbusters. The other song is my grandson, singing and Ty is playing. Ty wrote this song one Sat. afternoon In 15 mins., then played it for the first time. Titled ‘We are all God’s people.’ Just wish everyone else realized this!”
Kimberlee Cooper-West is an unassuming mother, a Sunday-school teacher, and a civic volunteer who lives in a village of about a thousand people on the western border of Michigan, the state where she was born. (Not all that far, as I think of it, from the Interlochen Arts Academy, where my late son Kevin spent three happy years before succumbing to schizo-affective disorder.) Photographs on her Facebook page show her wreathed in family members, or busy at a Catholic charity event. She has had extensive experience as a foster mother. In short, she is one of the countless quiet pillars of community upon whom the cohesion of society depends.
It is a pretty safe bet that Kim West has never thought of herself as intersecting with a moment in history. And yet this intersection seems a possibility.
Kim West is the woman who a day ago gave me permission to reprint the post quoted at the top of today’s blog: a post that detailed the beating her young mentally ill son Ty endured in a jail cell from another inmate on Saturday night.
Kim had submitted her post to a site called the Circle of Comfort and Assistance, one of many “closed,” or private websites whose members are assured anonymity, and who in turn agree not to publish others’ writings without permission. She has been a sadly regular contributor.
I came across Kim West’s (latest) essay during one of my frequent visits to the CCA page. I could hardly contain my outrage, even though this kind of atrocity-account is hardly new to me. It was the accumulation of cruelty and neglect suffered by the boy that prompted me to intervene: years of unresponsive “care-givers,” draconian court decisions, hostility to the West family from within its community, and a string of prior beatings behind bars.I wrote and asked her for permission to reprint on this blog. I have made similar requests to other contributors in the past; have been turned down; and have honored their understandable wishes for privacy. Kim agreed. And this morning (Monday), she advanced farther out of the cold, into the light. She gave me permission to go public with her name, her family’s location, and more particulars of her son’s horrific–but not uncommon–treatment by the “normal” world around him.
I should also mention that Kim West’s fellow CCA members were also stirred to fury and compassion. A long thread of reactions to her complaint offered equal measures of sympathy, excoriations of the region’s mental-health “system,” and generous helpings of advice: get a lawyer. Contact the ACLU. Call the governor and your representatives in Congress. Alert a newspaper or three to what is going on. Raise hell. At least one of them, Marie McAuley Abbott, of Pontiac, Michigan, the mother of a mentally ill son named Kyle, decided today that she would join with Kim. She posted, and gave me permission to re-post:
“Kyle has been without any power since last Wed. No one from CMH or his guardian has called to check on him! My daughter picked him up and kept him for awhile and now I have him. I live an hour from him! He could be laying somewhere dead and they would never know. They are in charge of him! I’m sorry for all the other people in his complex with no one looking out for them!”
Until Kim West, and now Marie Abbott, decided to step out of the cold and into the light—into what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is”—calls to action from within the world of the afflicted have largely fallen on deaf, or at least closed ears.
For decades. For centuries.
Families and friends of the insane do not want to talk about their, and the victim’s, problems. They choose to draw a protective blanket of silence around themselves, for the same reasons of combat veterans have done, and families of cancer victims.
The reasons have to do with the dread of stigma and shame, and even reprisal.
For veterans:
If I tell the truth about what I saw and did in the war, my buddies will call me a rat. And a crybaby. If I talk about my night-sweats and nightmares and heavy drinking, they’ll laugh and say I couldn’t take it. Coward. And anyway, it’s unspeakable.
Or in the case of cancer:
If I talk about my husband’s cancer or put that into the obituary when he dies, my friends will find it sickening and turn away. Or they’ll think maybe I’ve got it too, and it’s catching. And anyway, it’s unspeakable.
Or in the case of severe mental illness:
If word of this gets out, people will think my daughter is a monster. They’ll think my son is a criminal. Or that I gave it to him. Or they won’t think at all; they’ll just want her put away somewhere, out of sight. They think crazy people aren’t even human anyway.
Or bigotry to that effect.
This silence has devastated mentally ill individuals, and it has devastated the sub-universe of the insane. The silence has erased mad-people’s human identity and rendered them mere abstractions. What’s the problem with slashing public spending for. . .abstractions? Why be concerned if an abstraction gets beat up in jail, or left homeless, or shot dead in the street?
Because of this pervasive self-inflicted silence, the persecution of the mentally ill has not changed in many ways since the opening of Bedlam Asylum. Seven hundred years ago.
And now a quiet church-going community volunteer and family woman in a Wisconsin village has said to herself and to the world,
No more.
I am going to be silent no more.
This is the way mass movements begin. With a quiet mother deciding, No more. With a mild assistant department-store tailor deciding that she did not want to move to the back of the bus. With a sickly woman visiting insane asylums in Massachusetts and coming back to report on what she had found. With a tiny legal representative decided to march two hundred forty-one miles from the Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi, on the coast of the Arabian Sea, in India, to pound salt.
Lest anyone think that the possibilities I’m imagining here are overblown, let us be clear: as I write, the interests—including the survival interests—of insanity victims in America are in extremis. The Republican president and the Republican-controlled Congress seem to have it within their grasp to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and with it, the most important source of funding for hospitals, care centers, doctors, and medications essential to these victims’ continuing status as human beings.
The mighty lords of politics in our time could not care less about any of this. It is going to be up to the small, quiet women of our society, the unacknowledged pillars of our little communities, to save the insane.
Kimberlee Cooper-West, Marie Abbott—this is your moment. History is waiting.
Watch “Got us Fallin In Love Again, Usher, by Ty West” on YouTube
Watch “Ghostbusters, remix by Ty West” on YouTube
Watch “We Are All God’s People, written by Tyler West” on YouTube
In my previous post, I speculated on the dangers of the GOP congress’s rollback of President Obama’s strictures on permitting the sale of firearms to serious mentally ill people. Here is an example of what can go wrong: A warning, a gun sale and tragic consequences
This article by Natasha Tracy in Huffington Post spells it out, folks: the menace that every parent and caretaker of a mentally ill victim has dreaded since Donald Trump (and Paul Ryan and others before him) gained power in national Republican politics. Our helpless, blameless charges are being pushed to the edge of a precipice.
So much of the money needed to combat serious mental illness and safeguard its victims is enfolded into the Affordable Care Act. Its repeal–perhaps not likely, but eminently possible–would be tantamount to a brutal eviction notice slapped on the millions of people who now live in some degree of humane circumstances thanks to mental hospitals, community care centers and other forms of supervision and medication. Back into the streets. Back into the mercies of predators. Back into deepening psychosis unchecked by medications and counseling. Back into their centuries-long prospects of incomprehension and early death.
It is clear that Donald Trump has not paid a seconds’ worth of attention to the realities of serious mental illness, and this fact increases the likelihood of a reign of terror upon these victims. In this, he is hardly alone among politicians. Recall that only a few weeks ago, Chris Christie was blithely opining that solitary confinement was just fine with him as a means of punishment–or emergency shelter. (The consensus among psychiatrists is that solitary confinement, even for brief periods, is the most catastrophic of all remedies in the criminal-justice system; it not only degrades the mental stability of “normal” prisoners, but drives those in psychosis deeper into irrecoverable madness.
I urge you to sign every petition, join every march, telephone every congressperson, take part in any coalition that has a voice in preserving Affordable Care. The alternative is a new Bedlam.
Read the full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mental-health-care-in-a-trump-administration-devastates_us_58b5944ee4b0658fc20f9a25
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.
