Pete Earley

(5-13-16)

The air in C wing stinks. It is a putrefied scent, a blending of urine, expectorant, perspiration, excrement, blood, flatulence, and dried and discarded jailhouse food. When the jail’s antiquated air conditioning breaks down during the summer, which it often does, some officers claim C wing’s pink walls actually sweat. It’s decades of filth and grime bubbling up, rising through coats of paint.

Those few lines are from my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness. They describe the barbaric conditions that I observed when I spent ten months inside the Miami Dade Pre-Trial Detention Center  (downtown jail) where inmates with serious mental illnesses were beaten, neglected, abused and treated little better than animals.

I observed the horrific conditions in the jail and troubling events during 2004/2005 and for the first time since then, I returned earlier this week to Miami to see what has transpired since my book was published.

What I observed was nothing short of a miracle. In the twelve years that have passed since I first walked into the jail, Miami has been transformed from being one of the worst examples of how prisoners with mental illnesses were treated into a model system that the rest of the nation should follow.

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(5-10-16) How many more horror stories need to be told?

It’s time for us to stop the inappropriate jailing and imprisonment of persons with mental illnesses.

On April 17, CBS 60 Minutes broadcast a segment that showed how prisoners with mental illnesses were being neglected and abused at Rikers Island in New York.

On May 2, The New Yorker published MADNESS by Eyal Press, which tells how mentally ill prisoners in Florida have been tortured, driven to suicide and killed by correctional officers.

The nurses said that Rainey had been locked in a stall whose water supply was delivered through a hose controlled by the guards. The water was a hundred and eighty degrees, hot enough to brew a cup of tea—or, as it soon occurred to Krzykowski, to cook a bowl of ramen noodles. (Someone had apparently tampered with the T.C.U.’s water heater.) It was later revealed that Rainey had burns on more than ninety per cent of his body, and that his skin fell off at the touch.

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(5-6-16) “How does a family member get the cooperation of a loved one who happens to be mentally ill?”

Senator John Cornyn (R. Texas) posed that question during a recent U.S. Senate Committee on Finance hearing entitled Mental Health In America: Where Are We Now?

He raised it after explaining that he had read my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, and had been intrigued by how difficult it was for my family to get help for my son because he didn’t think he was sick and didn’t want to take medication that had helped him. I had no idea that Senator Cornyn, who invited me to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, would mention my book or our struggle. It was very kind of him.

While other senators talked about how difficult it was for families to access help, Sen. Cornyn added that compliance also is an issue that must be addressed. He mentioned the effectiveness of Assisted Outpatient Treatment and he specifically talked about how jails and prisons have become our new mental asylums.

Cornyn reminded his colleagues that Congress is currently considering several bills, including his — the Mental Health Safe Communities Act of 2015, which calls for expansion of Crisis Intervention Team training, jail diversion and mental health dockets. He urged his fellow senators to take advantage of what he described as a “magic moment” in Congress by taking their different bills out of their individual committee “silos” and working together to get a consensus bill passed.

As Senator Majority Whip, Cornyn wields tremendous clout and having watched him several times at hearings and listened to him speak, I am impressed by his commitment to getting legislation passed this session, his call for non-partisanship,  and his sincerity in wanting to stop the use of jails and prisons as de facto mental facilities. Sadly, partisan bickering and game-playing continues to threaten a consensus, especially during an election year. Here is a link to the committee hearing. Senator Cornyn’s comments begin at 1:46:49.

At that same hearing, Linda Rosenberg told the committee that “we know what to do” to help most people with mental illnesses and substance abuse problems.  We just aren’t doing it. Linda is president and CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health and a former colleague of mine on the Corporation for Supportive Housing board. She also is also one of our nation’s leading experts on the financing and delivery of mental health care in America. In her testimony and during questioning, she eloquently gave no-nonsense practical advice.

I also was delighted that the committee heard from someone with lived experience. Former NFL Receiver Brandon Marshall described how borderline personality disorder made his life and career “a living hell” until he got help. Here’s an except of his impassioned testimony.

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(5-2-16) The Justice Department, many mental health advocates and federally funded protection and advocacy groups are opposed to group homes and housing that resembles an institutional setting. The goal is for everyone to live independently in their own apartment.

But is it realistic to believe that everyone can live on their own if they have a severe mental illness and other debilitating challenges?

My good friend Trudy Harsh, the driving force behind the non-profit Brain Foundation, believes that some individuals need services that are best delivered in a group setting or multi-person facility. That’s currently  a politically unpopular point of view, but Trudy is speaking from her experiences not only as a housing  activist but also as a mother.

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Students at University of Miami walk through Tunnel of Oppression

(4-29-16) How do you get someone to understand what it might be like to experience a mental disorder?

Student members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness campus group at Indiana State University in Terre Haute decided to educate their peers by adding a mental health room to the school’s annual “Tunnel of Oppression” event. Many colleges host “tunnel events,” often sponsored by the NAACP or a school’s residential life organization to call attention to how students often stigmatize and marginalize others. This was the first year that the ISU campus chapter of NAMI added a Tunnel of Oppression room that focused exclusively on mental disorders.

“Tunnel of Oppression doesn’t sound too inviting,” ISU student Charlene Johnson explained during lunch when I visited ISU recently to speak. “But we got really positive feedback here and students overwhelmingly reported that the experience felt much more real than they had expected.”

Johnson and her professor, Dr. Jennifer Schriver, described the NAMI tunnel to me. I’ll let Charlene tell you.

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(4-25-16) Leadership. How do you define it?

I was asked to speak last week at the National Stepping Up Summit in our nation’s capital and when I glanced out from the podium, I spotted a table where a delegation from Fairfax County, Virginia, was seated. Among them was Sheriff Stacey A. Kincaid, Deputy County Executive David M. Rohrer, Community Service Board (mental health provider) Director Tisha Deeghan and Gary Ambrose and Laura Yager, who are in heading up our county’s Diversion First initiative.  (1.)

As in so many communities, Fairfax officials made jail diversion a priority after a tragedy — the 2015 death of Natasha McKenna, a 37 year-old African American woman with schizophrenia who died after being repeated stunned with a taser while shackled inside the jail. I was one of the loudest critics about how county officials handled that senseless death.

But let’s compare the McKenna case to what is unfolding now in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area where Jamycheal Mitchell, a 24 year-old African American inmate with mental illness died in jail from a heart attack brought on by him starving himself while waiting to be sent to a state hospital.

After McKenna’s death, Sheriff Kincaid banned the use of tasers inside the jail. She stopped locking mentally ill inmates into solitary confinement unless necessary for their own safety. She began training deputies in crisis intervention team training and created special housing units for mentally ill women and men. She also led a delegation to Bexar County, Texas, to learn about its jail diversion program and when she returned, she became a leader in pushing for Diversion First, which Board of Supervisor Chair Sharon Bulova has made a top priority. Today, individuals such as McKenna are taken to a crisis center for evaluation rather than directly to jail or an emergency room.

What has happened since Jamycheal Mitchell’s death last August in Portsmouth?

Eight days after his feces smeared body was found in a cell, Lt. Col. Eugene Taylor III, assistant superintendent of Hampton Roads Regional Jail, announced that the jail had conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence of any wrongdoing or mishandling by jail employees. Despite repeated requests, jail officials have refused to make their internal investigation public. The local police department chose not to investigate Mitchell’s death.

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