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Helpful hints about what to do in a crisis, and a Post editorial

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Happy Fourth of July!

A new Psychiatric Crisis Resource Kit that can help families if someone they love develops a mental disorder is scheduled to be unveiled this week in Chicago at the national convention of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It’s been developed by the Treatment Advocacy Center.    

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind whenever someone mentions TAC  is its aggressive and relentless campaign to promote Assisted Outpatient Treatment laws. But whether you support AOT laws or oppose them really doesn’t matter. All of us with loved ones who have a mental disorder need to be prepared and from what I have seen so far, TAC has done a real service by putting together a mental health first aid kit.

When my son first became ill, I was completely at a loss about what to do. And based on the emails and letters that I receive weekly, other parents, families and friends find themselves in the same situation.

For instance, the kit recommends that families compile a list of telephone numbers for key people, agencies and organizations that should be contacted if there is an emergency. While that sounds like a no-brainer, how many of us have the telephone number of a mobile crisis team, a psychiatric case manager, or an Assertive Community Treatment (PACT or ACT team) handy? Do you know the emergency numbers for your community mental health provider? How about your local suicide hotline? Do you know if your community has a Crisis Intervention Team and, if so, how to contact it. What’s the number of a public defender who knows mental health laws? Or a private attorney? Is there a mental health court in your jurisdiction and, if  there is, do you know what sort of cases it will hear?

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Advocates, Fired Cop, Unnecessary Death and AOT Controversy

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When the 14 year-old old boy came home from school and found his mother on the floor badly beaten and unconscious, he decided to do something. He took a pistol from a drawer, marched into his mother’s bedroom where his drunken step-father had passed out on the bed, and fired point blank into the man’s skull killing him. Arrested and charged as an adult, the youth was taken to an adult  jail to await trial.

The boy had been there only three days when defense attorney Bryan Stevenson met him. He was so traumatized that he could not answer any of the lawyer’s questions. He’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted — so many times in that three day period in jail that he’d lost count of how many men had abused him. All the boy did for two hours was sob as Stevenson held him.  

This tragic story was one of several that Bryan Stevenson described in an impassioned speech that he gave last week during an Advanced Judiciary Academy conference at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. I’ve written about Bryan before on my blog. He’s an inspirational advocate.

Bryan and I were invited to speak to the Illinois judges about how wealth and poverty influence our criminal justice system. We’d been invited to lecture because of my book, CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE: Death, Life and Justice in a Southern Town.  For those of you who might not have read it, CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE  is a true story about the murder of a popular, white teenager in the Alabama town that inspired the novel, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.  A poor, uneducated,  black man named Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian was convicted of the killing which happened inside a dry cleaners on a busy Saturday morning. McMillian was sentenced to death after two witnesses testified that they’d seen his truck parked outside the cleaners at the time of the murder and another witness claimed he actually see McMillian standing over the dead girl during a robbery.  It seemed as if McMillian had been caught red handed.

But after Stevenson began investigating the case, a different picture emerged. Both witnesses who’d claimed to have seen the truck recanted their stories. Both had received reward money in return for testifying. The eyewitness who swore that McMillian had murdered the girl was proven to be a liar. Even worse, Stevenson discovered that the prosecution had hidden crucial evidence that proved McMillian was innocent. During the murder, he had been at his home miles away helping host a fish fry. Two law enforcement officers had stopped there that day but had failed to come forward to substantiate his alibi. Put simply, McMillian had been framed.

Although Bryan proved McMillian was innocent, Alabama officials refused to free him. It took a 60 Minutes segment about the case to shame local and state officials into releasing an innocent black man from death row.

I spoke first at last week’s conference and described the murder and investigation. Bryan spoke after me about the case but quickly moved to such broader issues as the number of persons with mental illnesses now being incarcerated and his latest campaign to stop pre-teens and teenagers under age fifteen from being charged as adults when they commit crimes. Many of these children are sentenced to life in prison. His work as the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative prompted the judges in the audience to do something that Judge Susan Hutchinson, who helped organize the academy, said she’d never witnessed  before.

They gave him a standing ovation.

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CIT Returns to Fairfax County!

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Great news for those of us who live in Fairfax County, Virginia!
The Fairfax County Police Department just finished conducting a CIT class that was held from September 28th to October 1st and was attended by 49 officers.
In an earlier blog, I criticized the department for not including Crisis Intervention Team classes as part of the police force’s regular training program.    For those of you unfamiliar with CIT, it is a specially designed program that brings mental health professionals and law enforcement together to find ways to improve community mental health services.   
Sadly, police officers today deal with more persons with severe mental disorders than psychiatrists do. It only makes sense that the police undergo training that helps them identify someone who might be having a mental break and teaches them successful methods to deal with those persons, hopefully without force.

Police Shootings Stir Local Activist

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Not long after a still unnamed Fairfax County Police officer fatally shot an unarmed motorist named David Masters last November at a traffic light in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.,  I received a telephone call and letter from Nicholas Beltrante, an 82 year-old, former D.C. police officer, longtime private investigator, World War Two veteran, and frequent appointee to various criminal justice advisory boards in our area.
Beltrante had read a piece that I’d written in the Washington Post about the shooting of Masters, whose family said he had a mental illness, and Beltrante felt the Fairfax Police Department needed someone to begin looking over its shoulder.

Sadly, no CIT Officer of the Year in Fairfax

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I returned from speaking at the International Crisis Intervention Team conference in San Antonio, Texas, with mixed feelings. The conference was great and I was especially pleased to bump into Robert Cluck from my local NAMI chapter in Northern Virginia, as well as Major Tom Ryan from the Fairfax Police Department, who has been one of our county’s strongest CIT advocates. They were among the 1,300 attendees making the conference the largest to date. 
The focus of CIT has expanded from when it was first introduced.  Initially, it was seen as a training program for the police that taught officers how to respond when they encountered someone with a mental illness who was in the midst of a crisis. Now the emphasis is on using CIT to bring different community leaders together to improve mental health services.

A Lecture from a Hero of Mine

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I was delighted when I opened my email and discovered that Major Sam CochrenMajor Sam Cochran, who often is called the “Father of Crisis Intervention Training,” had sent me a note. Sam is one of my heroes and has probably saved more lives of police officers, persons with mental illness, and their loved ones, than anyone else in our nation in recent times. He is also a modest and decent guy who is dedicated to helping persons such as my son even though he does not have a family member with a mental illness.

I tell Sam’s  story in my book and describe the key role that he played in developing CIT in Memphis, then spreading it across the nation and now internationally. Talk about someone who is making an impact!

The reason Sam was writing was to give me a well-deserved lecture — in his gentle, Southern way.

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