‘FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: Here’s an edited version of a blog that I published after the mass shootings in Newtown. I believe it makes several points that are worth repeating. I hope you will agree.

LEARNING FROM LGBT’s HOW TO CHANGE MINDS

The shootings at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson and Virginia Tech, have finally turned a spotlight on our broken mental health system.

Two years ago, I spoke at a convention of journalists  from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community.  I said that mental health advocates need to learn from the LGBT community.  Yesterday’s Washington Post published an editorial by immigration activist Frank Sharry that ecohed the same thought. Sharry wrote that gay activists have given underdogs a blueprint for how to successfully change public opinion.

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Where are Faith Communities on Mental Health?

A guest blog by the Rev. Alan Johnson

It was a both a very sad and a very uplifting Memorial Service last month in the church where I am a member.  Also as a clergy (member of the church not on the staff) I was given the burden and the blessing of officiating at that Memorial Service for a 36 year old who had ended his life.  How did the service come to be at this church?  There are several factors, not least being because of Pete Earley speaking in our church, another one being because the church has been involved in mental illness issues for several years.  I was asked to officiate also because my brother had ended his life 8 years ago.

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Pete Earley with George Taylor Sr.

Nineteen year-old George Taylor Sr. returned home in April 1970 from fighting in Vietnam a changed man.  For more than a year, he had cleared jungle and walked point as part of a unit nicknamed “the herd” that engaged in heavy, repeated combat.  He and his comrades were part of the U.S. Army’s 1 battalion 503^rd, a company of the 173^rd Airborne Brigade.

Taylor had joined the Army two years earlier directly from high school. Serving in the military was a family tradition. When Geoge returned home to Florida, his family didn’t recognize him.

George looked like a much older man who had witnessed too much carnage and lived for too long under the threat of death. He was argumentative and began getting into bar fights, drinking heavily, and had trouble finding and keeping jobs. “It got to the point where I couldn’t deal with people, so I went into the woods,” George recalled later.

For six months, George simply disappeared into the rural Florida landscape, living far away from civilization, much as he had when on patrol in the jungles. When he finally emerged from the woods, he hit the road, roaming the country, often drunk, battling the mental nightmares of his past.

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     A California inmate refuses orders that require him to take anti-psychotic medication for his mental disorder. After he smears his own excrement inside his cell, the attending psychiatrist and correctional officers decide to remove him forcibly from his cell and give him an injection. The officers order him to extend his hands through the cell’s food slot so that he can be handcuffed and when he ignores them, officers spray his cell with OC spray, commonly called pepper spray. He still refuses so they shoot additional bursts directly into his face and on his body until he finally submits.

He is finally forced from his cell and knocked to the floor. He is taken to another cell where he is strapped onto a gurney with all of his limbs bound.

This thirty minute record of the incident may be difficult to watch if you have a mental illness or love someone who does. But the procedures that it documents are actually carried out in a much more humane and professional manner than what I observed in the Miami Dade County jail when I did my research for my book.

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In the hotly contested race for Virginia governor, The Washington Post quizzed the candidates about their positions on mental health. This is one of the first times that I have seen a major news organization ask candidates about mental health during a general election and not in the aftermath of a mass shooting. I am happy the media is finally including mental health in its list of  important campaign issues.

Now the bad news.

Backers of the Democratic candidate in the race are broadcasting an especially ugly, stigmatizing television ad.

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