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Frustrated Mother Writes Mental Health Laws Put Parents In “Catch 22” – Waiting Until Crisis To Seek Help

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(6-18-18) Guest Blog: A frustrated mother writes an impassioned letter to her elected officials in Washington State about waiting until someone becomes dangerous before helping them.

The Catch-22 in our medical/legal system that criminalizes mental illness

By Jerri Clark, mother of a young adult son with bipolar/schizoaffective disorder

I’m an active participant in NAMI programs and therefore have met many family members who are struggling to find intelligent help in the medical and legal systems of Washington State.  

Most of the stories I hear come from other mothers.

We are struggling to rescue our children from medical and legal systems that don’t make any sense.

Our systems institute punishment when help is desperately needed. They deny access to services and then blame individuals who are severely impaired for not solving their own crises. They push people to a precarious edge and then kick.

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Mental-Health Officials Are To Blame, Not Our Criminal Justice System

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(4-20-18) A blog  I posted earlier this week by a frustrated father criticizing how the Loudoun County Virginia Sheriff’s office dealt with his son spread across Facebook prompting an angry community outcry.  Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman defended his deputies yesterday on this page.

Today, D. J. Jaffe, author of Insane Consequences and Executive Director of Mental Illness Policy Org,  argues that it is the mental health industry that is failing our loved ones, not the police. His comments were first published in National Review and are not directly related to the events in Loudoun County, but are germane to this continuing conversation. Share your views on my facebook page at Pete Earley Facebook. What needs to be done?)

Criminal-Justice Officials Should Stand Up to Mental-Health Officials

Police have become the real experts on serious mental illness. By D. J. Jaffe  first published in National Review 

The shooting of Saheed Vassell — a man who suffered serious, untreated mental illness — by New York City police has unleashed a firestorm of anti-police protest. But police rarely use force on mental-illness calls. When they do, it is often done because someone the mental-health system refused to treat became dangerous. It’s time for criminal-justice officials to tell the mental-health system how to do a better job so that police and sheriffs don’t have to go on these calls.

The responding officers who shot Vassell thought he had a gun because he was pretending to have a gun (actually a metal pipe) and was aiming it at people. Police had previously brought him to the hospital numerous times only to have the hospital release him without adequate follow-up care. That is the kind of problem police should force the mental-health system to fix. And the protesters should join them.

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Loudoun County Sheriff Responds To Father’s Complaints About How His Son Was Treated During Mental Health Crisis

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(4-19-18) I posted a letter Tuesday (17th) from a father in Loudoun County, Virginia who called the Sheriff’s Office for help when his son’s mental illness became difficult for the family to handle. The father complained about how Crisis Intervention Team trained deputies and the overall department handled the situation. 

This father’s son was released from the detention center yesterday (18th). By that time, he had spent seven days in a hospital receiving care and 30 days in jail, including five days in the Riverside Regional Jail two hours away from his home on suicide watch naked in a single cell.

He has been charged with seven misdemeanors and the father questioned in his letter why his son ended up being charged, arrested and held for a month without bond when his family called seeking help.

I forwarded his complaint to Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman.   I am posting his version of events in its entirety unedited and without comment. I feel it is important for him to have an opportunity to respond and appreciate him doing so.

Given that this young man already has spent 30 days in jail, I hope the charges against him will be dismissed when he appears in court next month and he is able to get meaningful community mental health care. 

Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office

Dear Mr. Earley,

I am in receipt of the article you published entitled, “I Called Loudoun County Deputies for Help. Instead My Son Was Jailed. Hospital: 7 days. Jail:29 days and Counting.” As the facts and circumstances contained in your posting on behalf of the complainant are inaccurate, please allow me to address them factually, step by step. I think this is important as this response will serve to educate the general public regarding the intersection of mental health and criminal justice, mandated processes within the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the paramount importance of safety as it pertains to citizens suffering a mental health crisis, family members surrounding these individuals, and the safety of responding law enforcement officers.

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Her Son Said She Was Homeless, Mentally Ill, Living In A Car. The Response: “Technically, She Has A Roof Over Her Head.”

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 (4-2-18) For some time, Mike Gaeta, has been chronicling his attempts to help his mother, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He informed me his mother died recently, becoming yet another victim of untreated mental illness and our failed system. 

Tribute: My Beautiful Mom Showed Me What Strength and Courage Are

By Mike Gaeta  first published on his blog: Benevolent Neglect.

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” –Michel Foucault

Despite my family’s best efforts to care for her and make sure she received adequate medical and mental health treatment, my beautiful mama passed away prematurely  at the age of 66.

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My mom at around eleven years old

My mom was the daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers and the youngest of eight children. She graduated from high-school and received her Associate’s Degree from Fresno City College, despite having to work in the fields with her family starting from a young age. She would marry her high-school sweetheart, my father, shortly after his return from the Vietnam War.

My mom was a devoted wife, mom, sister and aunt and would defend her family fiercely from all injustices and dangers. One of my earliest memories of her protecting me involves her confronting an older boy who was bullying me when I was in first grade. In talking with him, she convinced the older boy to act as a bodyguard for me against any further bullying from anybody.

When she was not busy working or advocating for us in our schools, my mom enjoyed hosting and feeding extended family and our friends. Whether with her lasagna or albondigas soup, my mom would regularly showcase her excellent cooking skills. Her menudo was particularly good. To this day, my dad adamantly says he has never had menudo as good as my mom’s. In recent weeks, my cousins have reminded me how central my mom’s love, charisma and generosity were to our larger family’s closeness and happiness.

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Forced Commitment Might Have Stopped School Shooting, AP reports. Also, A Father Inside View Of A Backward System

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(3-19-18)  During the weekend, the Associated Press reported that authorities in Parkland, Florida,  sought to involuntarily commit the alleged school shooter there several times more than a year before he opened fire, killing 17 with an assault rifle and wounding 17 more . A commitment under the law would have made it more difficult, if not impossible, for Nikolas Cruz to obtain a gun legally. 

A New York Times OP ED by advocate Normal J. Ornstein, whom I greatly admire, specifically discusses what happened in his family in Florida after Ornstein used the Baker Act to hospitalize his son. 

Meanwhile, The Washington Post published a front page story entitled, “I’m constantly asking: Why? When mass shootings end, the painful wait for answers begins. Earlier in that same week, D. J. Jaffe, author of Insane Consequences, and no stranger to causing controversy, published an Op Ed in the Post under the title: “Don’t deny the link between serious mental illness and violence.”  Jaffe wrote that untreated Americans with serious mental illnesses are, in fact, more dangerous, an unpopular view that others have challenged. He also repeated his call for six changes: 1. more hospital beds, 2. not using dangerousness as the primary criteria for involuntary commitment, 3. adoption and better funding for Assisted Outpatient Treatment, 4. modifying HIPAA so that parents and other caregivers are kept informed by medical providers, 5. using “red flag” orders to remove firearms from persons with mental illnesses, and 6. reining in the federally funded, state administered Protection and Advocacy groups (PAIMI), that often fight to get individuals out of hospitals arguably before they are ready. 

How a Bad Law and a Big Mistake Drove My Mentally Ill Son Away

By NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN, published in the New York Times 

 

Brian Stauffer 

Ever since the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., law enforcement and other officials have been calling for changes in the Baker Act, a Florida law that allows involuntary commitment for 72 hours of people who are an imminent danger to themselves or others. If the Baker Act had been easier to deploy, they think, Nikolas Cruz, the accused shooter, would have been taken and treated before his horrible act.

However this law may be reformed, it will never be able to get people with serious mental illness the treatment they need.

I know something about the Baker Act. About halfway through my son Matthew’s decade-long struggle with serious mental illness, my wife and I invoked the Baker Act against him.

This kind, brilliant, thoughtful young man, who experienced the sudden onset of mental illness at age 24, was living in a small condominium we owned near Sarasota, Fla. One day the manager called us with alarming allegations about his behavior and insisted that Matthew was in immediate danger.

In a panic, we flew to Sarasota, went to the courthouse and filled out the forms to invoke the Baker Act. It was surprisingly easy.

When we got to the condo, Matthew was already gone.

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Why No One Believes Us When We Say Americans With Mental Illnesses Are Not Representative Of Mass Murderers

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Two of the ten deadliest killings were known to involve shooters with mental disorders. It was suspected in a third.

(3-5-18) The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was horrific and also different for me.

After the shootings at Virginia Tech, in Tucson, Aurora, Newtown and the Washington Navy Yard, I penned Op Eds and did radio/ television interviews during which I spoke about how waiting for someone to become dangerous was foolish and the inadequacies of our current mental health care system.

Editors and reporters were eager to print and broadcast my comments.

This time I tried a different tactic. Armed with a 2016 study, Mass Shootings and Mental Illness by James L. Knoll IV, M.D. George D. Annas, M.D., I explained that Americans with serious mental illnesses were not responsible for a majority of mass murders and, in fact, were much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

This is what nearly every advocate is expected to say. Perhaps that is why none of the media outlets, with whom I regularly deal, expressed much interest in my argument. (A person is about 15 times more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year than to be killed by a stranger with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or chronic psychosis.)

With the exception of journalist Tim Williams who interviewed me for NewsTalk Florida, I don’t think any of the others believed me.

A Washington Post/ABC poll found – as Slate put it in its headline –  “More Americans Blame Mass Shootings on Mental Health Than on Gun Laws.”  

“77 percent, said better mental health monitoring and treatment would have averted Parkland.”

This is the prevailing attitude even though repeated studies prove otherwise. Why?

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