Pete Earley

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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“This holiday season; please invite someone with mental illness from the streets into your home. Bring them from the last pew in your congregation into the conversation. Reach out to your neighbor who has a mentally ill child and show them your empathy. Yes, I am serious.” Virgil Stucker

Christmas is Patti’s favorite holiday and she spends hours decorating our house, both inside and out. This year, I was delighted when our homeowner association chose her decorations as the best in the neighborhood. (My photo is embarrassingly bad.) I am grateful for her boundless holiday spirit and that we are fortunate enough to have such a lovely home. Both of us want to extend our best wishes to you during this holiday season. We hope you will enjoy great mental health this coming year and remember others who have a mental illness, especially those who are in our jails, prisons, in hospitals and homeless on our streets.

Virgil Stucker, who contributes to my blog occasionally, recently wrote a Christmas   letter to his friend, Dr. Allen J. Frances, at the Huffington Post about the season and “society’s castaways.” I want to share it with you. Virgil writes:

“I have lived most of the last 40 years in nonprofit healing communities with people who are diagnosed with mental illness. My family and I often walk with, dine with, socialize with, work with, and play with people who too often are treated as society’s castaways. 

Over these years, my wife Lis and I have had several thousand such people join us at our daily table. We, along with my parents, our four children, their spouses and partners, and our seven grandchildren are fortunate to have formed lifelong friendships and had life-altering experiences living in healing communities.   

We know first-hand that people with mental illness are much more human than otherwise; trusting and loving human beings, if only given the chance and offered the social context. 

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(12-21-2015) My wife, Patti, suggested we watch a newly released  documentary on Netflix last weekend called Making A Murderer and we were so disturbed by its shocking portrayal of justice in America’s heartland that we saw all ten episodes back-to-back.

I had a special interest because in the early 90s, a young Alabama attorney named Bryan Stevenson told me that he was representing an African American man on death row who was innocent.

As Patti and I watched the documentary, I kept having flashbacks about that murder case. What I heard being mouthed by Wisconsin prosecutors and detectives was shockingly similar to the sort of rationalization I heard in Alabama.

At first glance, it seemed unlikely that Bryan’s client, Johnny D. McMillian, was innocent.

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