Pete Earley

Patti and I were in the Virgin Islands taking a rare and long anticipated five day vacation when we heard that a blizzard would be hitting the Washington D.C. area, starting at 4 p.m. on Friday (1-22-16). Patti suggested we catch an earlier flight home on Thursday.

“No way!” I said stubbornly. “I’m not giving up two days of vacation. Besides, weather forecasters are always exaggerating. It makes for better ratings.”

A call to American Airlines set off alarm bells on Friday morning. If we didn’t leave the island immediately, we would be stuck in St. Thomas until late Tuesday night. Stuck?

Ordinarily, the threat of being forced to stay in a tropical paradise while the entire upper East Coast was under three feet of snow would be a no-brainer. Bring me another Pina Colada while I watch a perfect Caribbean sunset, please.

But I was scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (1-26-15) about the importance of Crisis Intervention Team training and jail diversion. I didn’t want to miss that hearing.

Patti and I scrambled to the airport and took off for Miami, the first link of our trip home.

And that is as far as we got on American Airlines, which promptly cancelled the next leg of our flight. We were stranded in Miami on Friday during a downpour of rain. A kind but frazzled flight agent told us that we had been re-booked on a flight that would leave late Tuesday night for Dulles Airport.

“But I have to get back to testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday morning,” I said, hoping that statement would make it sound as if the safety of the entire free world depended on me giving testimony.  (I would later learn that Vice President Joe Biden’s flight had been redirected to Miami and that he couldn’t get home to Washington either.)

My plea didn’t work. Worse, American Airlines refused to give us our bags.

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RESILIENCE: Two Sisters And A Story Of Mental Illness, the intimate memoir that I helped Jessie Close write is now available in paperback with a dramatic new cover!

It’s the brutally frank story about Jessie’s struggles with bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and her inspiring recovery. Her talented sister, Glenn Close, widely acclaimed as one of the finest and most versatile actresses in Hollywood, was instrumental in helping Jessie and her son, Calen, after he also was diagnosed. As most of you know, Glenn is a co-founder of the anti-stigma non-profit BringChange2Mind. As part of its campaign, it has produced two powerful Public Service Announcements for television. Glenn also generously wrote three personal vignettes for RESILIENCE which are included in both the hardback and just released paperback. She has graciously allowed me to reprint one of them.  You can order the paperback edition of Jessie’s book  here.

From RESILIENCE: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness

By Jessie Close with Pete Earley and Glenn Close

Vignette Copyright by Glenn Close @2015  Used by permission

It’s strange how memory can distill something down to a single image and yet somehow that single image retains its power to invoke all the other senses. I realize now that my memory of my little sister, Jessie, when she was a child is a collection of images around which other sensations move in and out of my consciousness. Maybe that’s because, compared to most other families, our family has a shocking lack of pictures, especially throughout Jessie’s childhood and beyond. For the most part, at a certain point the pictures just stop. Hers is the only baby-picture book that remains painfully incomplete. Of course, Jessie was the fourth child, and our mother’s days were full of tending to three other kids, a herd of various pets, and a husband who came home from interning at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City only on weekends, if then. I treasure any pictures of us that were taken as we were growing up because they shine a light onto memories full of shadows. Without their validity and light—solid evidence surrounded by a solid frame—all is vague and mutable. So I will attempt to reconstruct a few memories of Jessie from images in my mind’s eye that I have carried with me all these years.

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(1-18-16) State officials have quietly removed two years worth of Inspector General reports from a government website that showed they were aware of a dangerous hospital bed shortage at least two years before state Senator Creigh Deeds and his son were told no hospital beds were available and turned away with tragic results.

When Deeds drove his mentally ill son, Austin “Gus” Deeds, to a mental health center on November 18, 2013, he was informed no local hospital beds were available and sent home. Later that day, Gus stabbed his father repeatedly before ending his own life. Sen. Deeds has filed a $6 million dollar wrongful death lawsuit against state mental health officials, claiming negligence.

The IG reports, which could help Deeds’ legal case, were removed from the Office of State Inspector General website sometime after May 2014 at roughly the same time speculation about the state’s liability began making the rounds at the state capitol in Richmond.

A spokesman for State Inspector General June Jennings told me in an email on Friday (1-15)  that the missing IG reports were removed by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS), which oversees 16 state facilities and assists 40 local Community Service Boards in delivering mental health services. The DBHDS is a defendant in Deeds’ wrongful death lawsuit. An official at the DBHDS, however, told me Friday that it was Jennings’ office that decided to remove the reports from its website.

Jennings’s spokesperson said the IG reports have not been destroyed. They are stored in the IG Office’s electronic archives. While still available, removing them from the IG website makes them much more difficult for the public and for Deeds’ attorneys to identify, locate and read.

The content of those reports go to the heart of Deeds’ wrongful death lawsuit.

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On Monday (1-11-15) I posted a blog about pathology and gun violence. Long-time mental health advocate and former member of the national Board of Directors of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Graham L. Champion today offers his point-of-view about gun violence and mental illness. He can be reached at  psllc06@gmail.com

Deliver Us from Evil

by

Graham L. Champion

During our lives, most everyone of us has at some time or another uttered the words “deliver us from evil.” It may have been as part of the Lord’s Prayer or after a particularly heinous act that we have witnessed or been informed about by the press or it might simply be the result of some action in our life that was particularly disturbing. Evil comes in many different forms from violence to harassment to intimidation to mention but just a few.

In recent times, we have seen senseless mass killings in a variety of different locations. Virtually every time one of these mass shootings happens the media is quick to speculate that if the event was not terror related —  it must have been committed by someone who is mentally deranged. Mental illness has become the “go to” explanation for why someone goes out and shoots up the landscape.

Just as predictably the discussion goes to the issue that we, as a society, need to find a way to better identify those with mental health issues and prevent them from having access to firearms. It is without question that those individuals living with a serious and chronic mental illness, during times of crisis, should not be allowed to purchase a firearm. With that premise in mind, we, as a society, must begin to destigmatize mental health issues and provide treatment for those living with a diagnosed mental health issue.

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Two women meet, fall in love and become one of the first gay couples to legally marry only to have their lives shattered when they are sexually attacked in their home and one of them is viciously murdered. Incredibly, the survivor in this true life crime story forgives the rapist/murderer. And yes, that man has a mental illness.

The book’s publisher sent me a pre-publication copy of this story because he hoped I would write a “blurb” — one of those gushing quotes printed on book covers to lure buyers. Although the writer did an excellent job explaining how deinstitutionalization and a lack of community mental health services have led to our jails and prisons becoming defacto mental asylums, I declined.

Book blurbs are one or two sentences and I couldn’t write an endorsement in twenty words that explained the perpetrator in this book was not typical. Most persons with mental illnesses are not dangerous. They are not rapists and murderers. They are more likely to be victims rather than committers of crimes.

Yet, here was an example of a mentally disturbed man who was very dangerous and very violent. How do we explain his actions?

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Deeds in happier times with his son, Gus.

Before anyone feels sorry for state mental health officials who are being sued by Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds, they should do what my favorite columnist at The Washington Post has done. Take time to read several blogs that I wrote about an Inspector General report that was issued twenty-two months before Deeds was told there were no local mental health beds available and was sent home with his son, Gus, who desperately needed psychiatric treatment.

A fair-minded but tough state Inspector General named G. Douglas Bevelacqua wrote a damning report in 2012 that exposed how Virginia hospitals were  “streeting” psychotic patients. That was the term emergency room doctors used when they turned patients away because there were no crisis care beds available. Bevelacqua, who cared passionately about mental health reform, warned the state’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services that Virginia had a bed shortage problem that needed to be fixed. Immediately.

No one listened.

After the Deeds’ tragedy,  state mental health officials issued a self-serving report that made it sound as if they had paid attention to Bevelacqua’s findings, but simply hadn’t been able to implement his recommendations in time to prevent the Deeds’ tragedy. Bull.

Rather than fessing up, those officials began circling the wagons, so much so, that Bevelacqua resigned in protest, claiming that his boss was pressuring him to water down an investigation of how state mental health officials had bungled the entire “streeting” crisis. His boss,  Michael F.A. Morehart  subsequently released the report that Bevelacqua had refused to sign and did exactly what Bevelacqua had predicted. His report didn’t take anyone to task for their failure to address “streeting” in time to save Gus Deeds.

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