Pete Earley

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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Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds has filed a $6 million wrongful death suit against mental health workers, New York’s governor is ordering local governments to take homeless individuals off the streets during frigid weather and mental health philanthropist Ted Stanley has died.

These three stories caught my eye this week. I’ve printed the Washington Post’s account of Deeds’ lawsuit at the end of this blog. Deeds is suing the state, the mental health agency that serves his community, and the mental health evaluator who failed to find a hospital bed for his son, Gus, who was sent home untreated. Gus attacked his father before killing himself. Mental health workers are understandably concerned about the suit.

Should a mental health provider and evaluator be held responsible for not providing treatment?

I am surprised that New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s decision to force homeless people into shelters once the temperature drops to 32 degrees Fahrenheit or below isn’t getting much attention. “It’s about love. It’s about compassion. It’s about helping one another and basic human decency,” Cuomo told reporters.

That common sense compassion caused an uproar when New York Mayor Ed Koch announced in 1985  that he would begin taking homeless, mentally ill individuals off the street at night during freezing temperatures. New York’s American Civil Liberties Union sued for the release of Joyce Brown, a homeless, psychotic women who had been forcibly removed and hospitalized. She had spent more than a year living on a steam grate clad at times only in a cotton blouse and skirt with socks on her feet and a sheet wrapped around her body during frigid nights. Brown would rip up money she panhandled, run into traffic, and expose her bare buttocks and scream racial slurs and profanities. A New York judge ruled in favor of releasing Brown back to her steam grate, stating that Brown was “an experienced street professional” and therefore fully capable of being homeless. The city appealed that ruling and won, but the ACLU lawyers continued the fight and eventually Brown was ordered released. You can read an excellent account of that case in Madness in the Streets, by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat. 

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My father was a strong believer in New Year resolutions. He said it was important to examine your life periodically and ask: “What can I be doing better?” My father died last February at age 94. His death made me think about his words and resolutions that I might make for 2016.

Resolution Number One: Being hopeful.

That sounds simple, but being hopeful often is difficult when dealing with mental illnesses.

When my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, was published, there were 365,000 individuals with mental illnesses in American jails and prisons. Ten years later, some estimate that figure at 500,000. A recent study found that persons with mental illnesses are the fastest growing subpopulation inside California prisons. Every other segment in those institutions has decreased. But the proportion of inmates with serious mental illnesses has increased from 19 percent in 2007 to 26 percent today.

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12-29-15   A double shooting by Chicago police caused the mayor to call for a city-wide review of training and Alexa James, the executive director of the National Alliance On Mental Illness chapter in Chicago, was quick to tell reporters about the importance of Crisis Intervention Team training. Unfortunately, it often takes tragedies such as a fatal police shooting to get our elected officials and the public to pay attention to mental illness.

I have always encouraged NAMI and other advocacy groups to step forward during these teachable moments. The trick, of course, is to not be predatory or exploitive of a preventible tragedy but to offer solutions. James did a fabulous job of pushing CIT in the Associated Press article that I’ve posted below.

I also received a call yesterday about the double Chicago fatalities from Mark Segraves,  a reporter with Washington D.C.’s  Channel 4, who had interviewed my son, Kevin, and me, earlier for a wonderful year-long series called Changing Minds that the NBC affiliate has been broadcasting about mental health issues.

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Jamycheal Mitchell died in a Portsmouth jail in August after waiting several months to be sent to a state mental hospital for evaluation.

States continue to close their mental hospitals in favor of community treatment. The argument is always that hospitals are too costly and services can be better rendered in a less restrictive community setting. But history shows us that the savings from shutting hospitals rarely are passed through to community treatment and there are some who question if everyone with a severe mental illness can live independently in a community setting.

Because of neglect and age, Virginia wants to close two hospitals rather than repair them. Here are my thoughts, which I expressed in an Op Ed published 12-27-15 in The Washington Post.

Virginia’s Mental Health Merry-Go-Round

By Pete Earley   The Washington Post 12-27-15

Four months after a mentally ill man died in jail while waiting for a state hospital bed to become available, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) wants to close one state hospital and is laying the groundwork to mothball a second one.

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