A Penetrating Review From a Dear Old Friend

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?

In No One Cares About Crazy People a father addresses his sons’ mental illness

COURTESY RON POWERS
Ron Powers’s sons Dean, left, and Kevin, right, pictured here as children, both later suffered from schizophrenia.

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.

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A STUNNING REVIEW IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL!

When Your Sons Are Schizophrenic

 

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.

Photo: Getty Images

 

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.”

 

GUNS FOR THE MENTALLY ILL!

You may have missed it, given the uncapped pipeline of news raging out of Washington, but on Friday, February 28, President Trump signed into law a Republican-backed measure to restore gun-owning rights to people afflicted with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia. The rollback would relieve some 75 thousand mentally ill people from accountability to background checks.

Photo by Mika Järvinen (originally posted to Flickr as M4gery) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Trump’s action struck down a congressional regulation spurred by President Obama as a response to the notorious 2012 massacre of 20 young schoolchildren in Newton, Connecticut. That particular butchery was carried out, via a (legally purchased) semiautomatic Bushmaster XM 15-E2S assault rifle, by the 20-year-old Adam Lanza in Newton, Connecticut. Lanza had begun that morning by putting four bullets into the head of his mother at their home with a (legally purchased) .22-caliber Savage MK II-F bolt action rifle. Then, carrying the Bushmaster and two (legally purchased) handguns, a Glock 20SF and a 9 mm Sig Sauer P226Lanza climbed into the family car and drove off to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School. He used the Bushmaster to shoot his way through a locked front-entrance door, then stalked the corridors and classrooms, gunning down children and teachers in small random clusters. In addition to his tally of 6- and 7-year-olds, Lanza murdered the principal, the school psychologist, three teachers and a teacher’s aide, and wounded two teachers. At least two of the teachers had been shielding children with their bodies when the Bushmaster’s bullets struck them. The dead teachers included the school psychologist and a part-time behavioral therapist.

Lanza, who had methodically paused to reload in the course of his meandering spree, then withdrew the Glock and shot himself in the head as police closed in.

A search into voluminous police reports later revealed that the young man underwent consultation at the Yale Child Study Center as an adolescent, and had been prescribed an antidepressant. The files revealed no diagnosis of serious mental illness.

Obama’s measure had infuriated Republicans and the National Rifle Association from the outset. (Technically, the rule required the Social Security Administration to inform the FBI about disability insurance recipients with mental impairments—and who needed a third party to manage their benefits–effectively disqualifying them from buying guns.)

Sam Johnson image via Wikipedia Commons

It was the Republican congressman Sam Johnson of Texas who introduced legislation to block the bill. (Around this same time, in late 2016, Johnson, in his role as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security, also released a plan that would drastically reduce that program’s benefits.)

Johnson’s GOP colleagues (along, of course, with the National Rifle Association) had condemned the Obama order as unconstitutional. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, according to one report (https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2017-02-14/senate-wants-to-block-rule-on-guns-and-mentally-ill), went so far as to predict that before you knew it, the order would be keeping folks with eating and sleeping disorders from buying guns! (This line of reasoning might qualify as a suitable Republican party motto in its Latin form, Reductio ad Absurdum.)

Sen. Grassley image By United States Senate [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
All of which is by way of saying—brace yourself—that yet another of the most morally fraught public crises of our time, the question of powerful firearms in the hands of the mentally ill, has been distilled into ideology.

Let me acknowledge the two most formidable arguments posed by those who agree with the congressional GOPs who voted to roll back the rule.

One argument involves the impossibility of determining who, among the mentally ill, is a threat to commit deadly violence, and who is not. Homicidal schizophrenia is not predictable. Mental illness itself is not predictable. Sandy Hook was not predictable. (See Adam Lanza.) Therefore, the Obama rule was prejudicial, to the disadvantage of nonviolent people with serious mental illnesses. Or so one may persuasively argue.

The other argument restates the familiar Second Amendment case held by gun-rights advocates: restricting firearms possession by anyone is unconstitutional. Period.

Is there a logically airtight counter-argument to these positions? If there is, you won’t find it here. I am not by temperament an absolutist—not on any topic. Dammit. I kind of envy those who are, though I don’t much care to be around them. Absolutism, like carpet-bombing, gets rid of a lot of thorny impediments. It just ain’t my style.

And yet I believe that the new Trump law is wrong; an unnecessary risk to public safety, including the safety of people with eating and sleeping disorders; and an affront to those trying hard to invest the troubled American mental healthcare scene with clarity and moral purpose. I’ll explain, in my timorous, hanky-twisting way:

Schizophrenia is different. Guns are different. Each is different from its category on an order of magnitude that sets it apart from recourse to fixed ideas. Each poses a unique menace to safety, to the Self, to human life. When combined—when a firearm is made accessible to a schizophrenic person—these menaces increase in potency, even though any given afflicted gun-owner is statistically unlikely to commit violence.

Let’s take guns first. What is there left to say? Guns are instruments of killing. Increasingly, rationalizations aside, they are manufactured specifically to kill people. In this they are categorically different from (more intentionally lethal than) any other consumer product. The ideology of unconstrained firearms ownership has survived and hardened in the face of every interrogation of the Second Amendment’s ambiguities, every conceivable appeal to moral restraint, the safety of children in the household, common sense, self-evidently sensible safety measures. No argument I can make here will shift one grain of sand in that desolate desert. I might mention, for example, that my younger brother Jim, in the midst of a marital crisis in the 1970s, turned his hunting shotgun on himself and blew a hole in his head, leaving a widow and two young daughters. (Jim was untreated for any mental illness, and I do not take up his suicide in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.) The responses to such tragedies from the gun-rights people are inscribed in the cosmos: Tough titty. These things happen. Shoulda seen a shrink. Law-abiding citizens’ rights. The only way to deter a suicidal man with a gun is with. . .

So let’s move on to schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia (along with its related afflictions such as bipolarity) is a brain disorder without parallel in human history. It is not a mood, reparable by therapy or good fortune. It is not an attitude, responsive to correction or coercion. It is not curable, though in many of the afflicted its symptoms may be controlled by antipsychotic medication. Such medication is resisted by a great many sufferers, whose judgment is crippled by the frequent companion scourge known as anosognosia, or the incapacity to understand that one is ill. The potential calamities enabled by anosognosia are self-evident. Thus, at least as it seems to me and thousands of others, schizophrenia victims require care and treatment that is different—more case-specific, more morally nuanced and always more undergirded with psychiatric insight—from treatment given to “normal” people in crises. This may mean, amidst hundreds of other considerations, keeping firearms out of the reach of certain mentally ill people—say, disability insurance recipients with mental impairments and who needed a third party to manage their benefits.

For understandable reasons—furthering fear and stigma, for instance—mental-illness advocates hesitate to emphasize or even admit the fact that psychosis and guns can combine to spread carnage. (This is one reason why the lessons of Sandy Hook have remained tragically muted.) Yet, as D.J. Jaffe, the outspoken director of the Mental Illness Policy Organization, has written: “. . .4 percent of those with mental illness are affected by serious ailments, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, causing them to hallucinate or become delusional and psychotic. When these people go untreated they do have a higher incidence of violence than the general population. http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/violence-statistics.html It’s an unpleasant truth that the mental health industry has encouraged politicians to ignore. Without recognizing the problem, policymakers won’t take steps to fix it.”

 

And so here we are, preparing to cope with one more feckless and gratuitous disruption of the arduous project to make society safer—not only for potential victims of people in violent psychosis, but for the mentally ill themselves.

I will not pretend to vouch absolutely for the nosological claims I have advanced here. No one can. That is due to schizophrenia’s properties as different.

But enough disclaiming. I believe that mixing guns and serious mental illness is an abomination.

ANNIE DON’T WAKE THE DAY

Dean and Kevin recorded this rollicking ballad in 2004. It is among the best of several pieces the two of them produced over that summer, a happy time for both of them, when Kevin visited his older brother in Dean’s Colorado Springs apartment. Kev’s schizophrenia had forced him to suspend his music education at the Berklee’s Music School in Boston, and the ensuing year would be his last. But this summer was filled with creative effort and close loving friendship between the two brothers.

Dean wrote and sings lead on “Annie Don’t Wake the Day.” He also created the visual montage that accompanies this song on YouTube. At about the 1:45 mark, the boys launch into blazing alternating guitar solos: Dean/Kevin/Dean/Kevin.

TO MY FRIENDS WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG

Beginning in a few days, I will be posting, on this blog, some audio and, later, video tracks of my late son Kevin in performance. These will showcase his more mature work–if “mature” is the right word to describe a gifted young musician who, in the fog of schizophrenia, took his life a week before his 21st birthday in 2005. I’ve published a few pieces before this, but they feature Kev mostly as an early adolescent, sometimes in duets with his older brother Dean–who also was struck by schizophrenia, but who is stabilized at age 35.

kevin-powers-guitar
Kevin’s hands

I have mixed feelings about offering up these audios and videos. From a personal standpoint, it is still difficult for my wife Honoree and me to hear Kevin’s music sixteen years after he left us. Until this past weekend, I had not been able to bring myself to look at the videos–recorded mostly at the Interlochen Academy for the Arts, where he spent his prep years–since his death. Last week I finally braced myself, dug the cassettes out of storage, and brought them to a technician in nearby Rutland for transfer to the MP4 format, which enables editing and sending the material to my blog administrator. On Saturday, notified that the transfer was ready for viewing, I returned to the studio. I made myself stand beside the technician and watch the monitor screen as it shifted from blue to footage of the Interlochen jazz ensemble, with a T-shirted Kevin pumping out one of his glorious solos. I held it together. At this writing, Honoree has not viewed the tapes, but she has signaled her determination to do so.

The second reason for my mixed feelings is related to the first. This blog is followed by many parents who have lost children of their own to the awful scourge of schizophrenia. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that many of these good, bereaved people will experience the pain of recovered memory as they watch. For this, I am genuinely sorry.

Yet my reason for posting these sounds and images of Kevin has nothing to do with indulging my own sorrow, nor of activating anyone else’s. It certainly has nothing to do with promoting Kevin as somehow more deserving of attention than the countless other young victims of brain disorders. Quite the opposite: my goal is to celebrate the tremendous joyful life-force that was Kevin–and, by extension, the equally precious, and unique life-forces within all his brothers and sisters who have been taken or diminished by serious mental illness.

Every parent or other surviving relative of a mental-illness casualty harbors rich memories of a child in the full exuberance of his or her life–a time of hopes and dreams unlimited, until the unthinkable occurred.

Kevin was nothing if not generous and humble–he was “notorious” for giving up his own solo time to fellow musicians who yearned for a little spotlight. He would have held these young people in his big-handed embrace. He would have insisted, correctly, that each one of their lives was as precious and filled with potential as his own. He would have insisted on consecrating his music to all the beautiful young souls who seldom if ever enjoyed the pleasure of a “solo,” yet enriched the earth around them, each in his or her own way.

So, please: if you can, enjoy Kevin’s music in the same celebratory spirit that he played it: the spirit of life, and laughter, and friendship, and of giving up a solo to a friend every now and then.

DEAN ON CAPRI

This is one of my favorite photographs of Dean. I took it during our visit to Italy in 2008, three years after Kevin’s death. Honoree had dreamed of a family visit to Italy for years, and we finally made it–but not in time for our younger son to enjoy the splendors of the country with us. Dean was 27 then, still devastated by the loss of his brother–perhaps more than we realized–but still resilient, even as the “prodromal” phase of his own affliction with schizophrenia was advancing. I made this photo through the window of a cafe beside a harbor on Capri, where Honoree and I were having a light lunch. Dean, who was still capable of joy and discovery, had decided to take his notebook and pen outside, where he positioned himself on the rocks by the water, in the sunshine, and channeled his inspiration into his journal.

Dean was then two years from his own psychotic break, triggered by romantic loss, but really the inevitable result of several years of accumulating stress, including his beloved brother’s suicide. As of today, Dean is still fighting gallantly to regain the equilibrium he maintained on that sunlit vacation. He lives in the warm embrace of our household in Vermont. My account of his saga–described in NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE–is a testament to all the unknown battles being waged by victims of this horrible scourge who still can muster the mental resources, and the deep wells of character, to carry on their daily struggle for a meaningful life.

I admire Dean and his late brother more than anyone I have ever known or known about–including heroes of politics, war, literature, or any other field of endeavor. I know that many thousands of young men and women struggle as ardently as my sons, in anonymity, away from public recognition and perhaps scorned and feared by the strangers who encounter them. My book, besides being a journey of inquiry into the long history of mental illness, is meant to be an affirmation of Dean’s and Kevin and their brave brothers and sisters

I never glanced into the journal entries that Dean created in the exhilaration of that sunlit day on Capri. He didn’t volunteer to show us what he’d written, and Honoree and I respected his boundaries, and did not ask.

But I know that the words Dean set down are irradiated with his loving ardency and eloquence. Maybe someday I will look.

A Report from Dean’s Soul

Dean March 2016
Dean March 2016

A little while ago, I idly clicked on my son Dean’s Facebook page and found the stunning post below. As I told him a bit later, my heart was still pounding. And it still is.

On the surface, this is an account by Dean of his attempted suicide about four years ago. (Our family had lost Kevin, Dean’s younger brother, to suicide in 2005 after his three-year struggle with schizophrenia deepening in to schizoaffective disorder.)

This at least is the surface account—which Dean has never talked about until this morning. On a more profound level, it is an extremely rare glimpse into the soul of a schizophrenia sufferer, written with blazing clarity and candor. In NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, I narrate that terrible day from Honoree’s and my point of view, as we realize that we have lost phone contact with him, then learn from police that his truck had been found beside Lake George, some thirty miles to the west of us, and then sit helplessly for hours, trying to absorb the possibility that we had lost our remaining cherished son.

I am inexpressibly proud of Dean for giving us this. He was a promising young writer until misfortunes in his life began to multiply, culminating in a psychotic break a few years after Kevin’s death. This essay tells me that Dean is working hard and fearlessly to regain and re-master his gifts. To which I say, Godspeed, my good son.

But the significance of the essay goes well beyond my fatherly pride for Dean. It should be read by anyone who believes that mental-illness victims have lost their humanity; that they no longer are capable of insight or of reaching out to the “normal” world.

And it should be read by sufferers themselves. One of your brothers has held out a lamp to illuminate the richness that remains in you.

__________________________________

“Three years and several months ago: i texted my buddy and boss as my gps led me to the wrong spot. “I’m lost.”

I saw a truck that looked like mine parked beside a trail. I parked there and started walking down the trail. Snakes got startled, several of them, slithering away as i walked past them as though they were frightened by me. As i walked i felt the tedium of daily life weighing on my shoulders.

I came here knowing there was danger only to face it and meet my fate. As the steps drew on and i felt tired bugs started swarming around my head. I had a vision in that moment of me several thousand years ago drunk and staggering and lonely. Death sounded like comfort.

I turned around and walked back as a crossed a small wooden bridge i saw trash in the water and my Eyes started to tear up as it crossed my mind that we are trashing this gift God gave to us. Then a low flying plane flew directly over head as if God was telling me you made your appointment i see you and all is well.

Then i got back in my truck and drove to Lake George. My eyes scanned my surroundings at a red light and they settled on a “no right on red” sign. I gunned the throttle and turned right on red. I pulled into the parking lot, left my wallet and my phone in the truck.

I got out walked to the beach took off my shirt socks and shoes and got in the water. It was July. There were other people in the water. It felt good. I walked out a little ways till i was waist deep and took a plunge. Suddenly i felt this wonderful energy running through my arms and chest as i held my knees to my chest. I was going to turn into a school of fish and swim off into open freedom. It was like i could breathe under water.

But before i took my first breath an off duty new York state trooper pulled me out of the water. My arms opened up wide like i was on the cross myself staring up at the sun as he dragged me out of the water and put me on my back on the beach. I wondered if God could see me. Then i looked down at the water and saw a boat, the Minne Ha Ha. It was as though some competing force was telling me the world is mine haha. Then a helicopter swooped over head. It was like a movie.

The first thing i said to him was, “it’s in the eyes.” His eyes were hazel. Then all these competing arguments about the origins of the world and God flashed before my eyes. My heart beat rapidly in panic. I saw Ireland with its eyes never closing even as europe fell asleep during a card game. This gave me hope that it wasn’t all as bad as it seemed. Then before even a second elapsed I was put on a stretcher and put in an ambulance with two emts with blue eyes and i panicked again.

“All i want to do is rest in peace,” i said to them. “Oh we hear you,” the man said to me. He flicked the lights above me on and off several times. Then they took me to the hospital and i heard birds chirping and saw lights flashing when i blinked my eyes.

Eventually they put me in the psych Ward and i got pissed that i was getting locked up again. 5 guys and i were standing around in a circle. I said “nobody here has any authority.” Then they bowed their heads. They bowed their heads as if the authority was spiritual. Then they all laid hands on me and put me on my bed and shot two needles in my butt. And i said “those shots better kill me.” The medics head jerked as i said this as he plunged the medication home.

Later as i reflected on it i thought to myself, “they pulled me out of the water.” Baptism, evolution, pirates. “They pulled me out of water.” I was baptised into my true spirituality by an off duty new York state trooper. It also symbolizes our journey out of the ocean and onto land. And if i had walked the plank it’s like they threw me a rope to pull me back on board.

And if he hadn’t pulled me out i might have breathed and i might be dead. I don’t even know his name, but i want to thank him.”

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