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Clubhouses Offer HOPE for Recovery

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I’ve spent much of the last several days in airplanes.

 In El Paso, Texas, I  spoke to criminal defense attorneys and then flew to Cambridge, Mass., to address a wonderful NAMI group in a local library. Next came a fundraiser for the HOPE Clubhouse in Ft. Myers, Florida;  a seminar sponsored by NAMI Four Seasons in Asheville, N.C.; and two speeches in the New Orleans area at the request of the South Central Louisiana Human Services Authority. This week, I will be flying to Boston to address the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

I am always touched when I hear recovery stories, especially those told by young people.  Jourdan Miller, a beautiful girl in her  early twenties,     described how important the HOPE Clubhouse in Ft. Myers was to her recovery. As with so many of our young people, Jourdan had excelled as a teenager and had gone to college with big plans – only to become sick.  She was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and not long after that she became so ill that she had to drop out. At one point, she was suicidal. When she called the local police during a manic episode, rather than getting help, she ended up getting arrested and  jailed — “to be taught a lesson.”  That experience — at the hands of unsympathetic and poorly trained sheriff’s deputies — resulted in her developing PTSD.

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Forty Years Later Jail Still Violating Rights

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Shortly after my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, was published in April 2006, I received a telephone call from an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice who asked me about incidents at the Miami Dade County jail that I’d described in my book. The federal investigator was curious about my claims that correctional officers, who worked on the ninth floor of the jail, physically beat inmates. During the ten months that I’d spent doing research at the jail, I had been told several times by officers that I needed to exit the floor “for my own safety” while jailers  “put their hands” on troublesome inmates. When I returned to the cellblock later, I was  able to confirm that guards had gone into cells and beaten inmates. One officer was especially infamous for abusing prisoners.  He bragged about it. At the time, I was surprised at how openly officers talked to me about the beatings.

Last Friday, the Justice Department released a three -year study of the Miami Dade corrections department and the federal investigators’ findings confirm what I first revealed in my book. Put simply, the Miami Dade Pre-trial Detention Center is a living hell on earth for inmates with mental illnesses.

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Why is “Dangerous” the Criteria?

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      I receive emails and letters from parents and family members who have tried to get their loved ones help by having them involuntary committed into a hospital only to be stopped by our legal system. One of the sadder notes came this week from a father whose daughter was so sick that the psychiatrist who first examined her and the independent examiner appointed by the court to review her case quickly agreed that she needed to be hospitalized.

     But when the young woman appeared before a special justice here in Fairfax County, Virginia,  he ignored the two professionals’ recommendations and released the woman because, in his opinion, she did not pose a danger either to herself or to others.

    “Where did this dangerousness criteria come from?” the frantic father asked me in an email.

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