(5-15-20) FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: Unfortunately, Hollywood marketers always believe that sex sells so when the movie  Lars and the Real Girl was released in 2007, they packaged it as a comedy about a man who orders a life-size sex doll which he believes is real. This titillation harms what is a charming story written by Nancy Oliver and directed by Craig Gillespie about mental illness and community acceptance. Now that you have watched Tiger King during stay at home orders, watch this movie. Those seeking a cheap sexual buzz will be disappointed but viewers who want to see what happens when someone with a mental illness is embraced by those around them will find it well worth their time.

Lars and the Real Girl (blog first posted in March 2010)

Actor Ryan Gosling plays Lars Lindstrom, a likable but withdrawn young man who has trouble making friends. One night he buys a life-size sex doll on the Internet and falls in love with it. He names her Bianca and explains that she is a Brazilian missionary so she doesn’t believe in pre-marital sex. He treats her as if she were a real person.

Now here’s where this movie turns from — as a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal put it – “a five minute sketch on tv” into an “achievement that borders on the miraculous.”

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Nancy West photo: “Therapy booths” that look like human cages are used for group therapy at the Secure Psychiatric Unit at New Hampshire State Prison for Men. Courtesy of IndeptNH.

(5-12-20) Answer me this:

When does the clock start ticking on a 72 hour involuntary commitment hold? Does the countdown begin after a police officer drives someone to a hospital emergency room or when that private hospital sends the patient to a state psychiatric hospital?

Question two: Should a person with a mental illness currently being held in a maximum security prison be released if they have not been convicted of a crime?

Judges in New Hampshire are being asked to answer both questions in separate lawsuits.  Both are tied to a lack of psychiatric treatment beds in the state.

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(5-6-20) A common theory about the Vietnam conflict was there were no large protests until the killing began ending the lives of young men from the middle class and some from the upper class.

If true, I wonder if the COVID-19 pandemic will wake up Americans previously unaffected by mental problems to our underfunded and overburdened system as large numbers of them seek help coping with anxiety and PTSD.

Will our leaders insist on real parity that demands insurance companies and employers treat those with mental problems the same as they do those with physical ones or will much needed dollars and personnel simply be shifted away from those with the most serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia?

I don’t like to simply repost news articles, but this story in The Washington Post about the coming wave of mental health issues sounds an alarm.

Is anyone listening?

The coronavirus pandemic is pushing America into a mental-health crisis

Anxiety and depression are rising. The U.S. is ill-prepared, with some clinics already on the brink of collapse.

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(5-4-20) Five years ago, the police department and sheriff’s office in Fairfax County, Virginia, came under fire because of two separate deaths: an alleged coverup of a police shooting outside a home and the death of Natasha McKenna, a woman with mental illness, inside the jail.

Because of the public outcry, the county’s governing body (the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors) created an Ad Hoc Police Practices Review Commission to review what had happened and recommend reforms to reduce future police shootings and inmate deaths. I served on that commission and among its myriad of recommendations in its final report were 24 specifically about mental health.

It’s not uncommon for a blue ribbon panel to publish a report, only to have those recommendations sit on a shelf gathering dust. To insure this didn’t happen, the county periodically listed on its website a progress report.

Unfortunately, the last update posted on the website was on June 2018 – nearly two years ago. That’s not a good sign.

One possible explanation for the lapse is that the two elected officials most responsible for pushing reforms – former Board Supervisor Sharon Bulova and Supervisor John Cook – are no longer in office.

Regardless, the public is entitled to know which of the commission’s recommendations still haven’t been implemented and why.

I’m curious too if your community adopted any of these mental health reforms.

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(5-1-20) The death of Dr. Lorna Breen has received widespread attention but I want to memorialize her and remind the public that there are many reasons why someone chooses to end their own life – a lack of moral character is NOT one of them.

I am grateful for all the good that Dr. Breen did and for her father’s bravery in speaking out during his family’s pain to warn others about how COVID-19 is not only threatening Americans’ physical health but mental health as well.

If you feel overwhelmed or know someone who is, please contact the national suicide lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Father of late ER doctor who died by suicide says she ‘just ran out of steam’

The father of top Manhattan ER doctor Lorna Breen — who committed suicide after working on the front lines of the battle against the coronavirus — said in a new interview that “she put her life on the line to take care of other people.”

“She was a doctor, every bit of the word that a doctor should be,” Philip Breen said on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”

“She put her life on the line to take care of other people. She was in the trenches, so to speak, right in the front line as people were dying left and right around her,” the retired surgeon said about his 49-year-old daughter, who had become infected herself and returned to work after recovering.

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(4-28-20) News articles about how difficult it is for many Americans to practice social distancing and self isolation caused me to think of Thomas Peter Mullen, the founder of Passageway in Miami, Florida, and the valuable lessons that he taught me.

With pure white hair that tapered into an equally white beard and a fondness for wearing blue jeans with a tattered Navy blazer, Mullen lived modestly and enjoyed engaging in long discussion about morality, spirituality, and an individual’s mission and purpose in life.

I remember his staff at the halfway house that he ran keeping him occupied in another part of the building when a pharmaceutical rep dropped by with samples of the antipsychotic Abilify.  Passageway operated on a barebones budget and the staff was happy to receive free samples, but they knew Mullen would go into a tirade if he encountered the rep. Mullen believed drug companies should give medicines free to those who needed them, not profit from their sales.

Mullen had grown up in a tough Irish Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx and after his father had been swept overboard and drowned during a nor’easter while fishing in the Atlantic, Mullen’s mother had asked the Marist Brothers, a religious order dedicated to helping the underprivileged, to take her grieving teenage son under its wing. He joined the order and was eventually sent to Miami where he ran a methadone clinic but soon got into trouble for permitting social workers to discuss the pros and cons of abortion with pregnant drug abusers.

He left the church to launch a halfway house in 1979 for seriously mentally ill felons being freed back into the Miami community. By the time we met, Mullen had overcome tremendous obstacles in keeping Passageway open, including having ten thousand residents sign a petition demanding that it be forced to move from the residents’ neighborhood after a newspaper disclosed its location.

Mullen was dogged and resilient – but this blog is about loneliness and forgiveness.

Let’s begin with a murder.

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