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A Reader Complains: You’re Insulting Me By Writing About Jails, Prisons, and Homelessness: I Am Not Like Them

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angrywriter

Dear Mr. Earley,

Why do you always assume mentally ill people either are homeless or in jail?

That’s insulting.  I have a serious mental illness but hold down a job, have a family and am dong fine. If I break the law, then I deserve to go to jail. If I end up homeless it will be because I’m lazy and don’t work or because I don’t take my meds.  Either way, it will be my fault.

People with mental illnesses should be held accountable and treated no differently from anyone else. To do otherwise is to promote stigma and make all of us look like we are criminals or bums.

Sincerely

Alan M.

Dear Alan M.,

I am thrilled that you are doing so well. When my son was sick, I ached for success stories such as your’s. I wanted hope. I wanted to know that persons with severe mental illnesses could and do recover and live regular lives. Please share your personal story with others, especially those who are struggling, because they need to be inspired.

Sadly, I do not agree with much else that you have written.

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FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: Where Are We Housing Individuals With Mental Illnesses? Too Often In Slum Housing!

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slumhouses

FROM MY FILES FRIDAY:  Regular readers might have noticed that I didn’t post an original blog on Monday this week. That is because I have been in the hospital with my mom who is 94 and is undergoing testing for severe pains in her back. I hope to get back on schedule next week. Thanks for your patience.

Meanwhile, here is a blog that first appeared on May 9, 2011, and unfortunately is still germane. The more that I have traveled, the more convinced that I have become that  providing adequate housing in a community to persons with sereve mental illnesses is crucial to their recovery. Sadly, what they often get is substandard treatment in slum dwellings.

FROM SHODDY HOSPITALS TO SHODDY HOUSING

The main reason why I wrote CRAZY was to expose how thousands of persons with severe mental illnesses are being locked-up in jails and prisons because of inadequate community services and laws that require a person to be dangerous before they can be helped.

To me, the incarceration of persons whose only real crime is that they have become ill is a national scandal.

Of course, not everyone with a severe mental disorder in Miami, where I did my research, ended up in jail. When I did my investigation, there were 4,500 persons with severe mental disorders living in 650 boarding homes, called Assisted Living Facilities.  At one time, most of these folks would have confined in state hospitals. Now they are in the community — which is wonderful.

Wonderful, that is,  until you explore the conditions under which many of them are living today.

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Video Shows Dallas Cop Shooting Man With Mental Illness

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http://youtu.be/4U1GOTzvBLQ

I have received dozens of emails from readers who are outraged by this video and news story. Most are asking if the public will feel the officer was justified simply because he shot someone with a mental illness even though this individual did not make any threatening moves toward the police. 

This shooting terrifies those of us who love someone with a mental illness or have a mental illness. I’ve been asked to help this video go viral so that the public will recognize the need for better police training. Please do your part and send it out.

You can also read the AP story that I have added to this blog

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Bazelon Protests 60 Minutes, Attacks Fuller Torrey, While Dr. Sederer Offers His View on Forced Commitments

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 60minutes

The Bazelon Center for Mental Health law  has launched a letter writing campaign  in an attempt to get 60 Minutes to do another segment about mental illness to balance what it claims was the biased viewpoint  presented in a segment called: “Untreated Mental Illness: An Imminent Danger?”   That program aired September 29th, shortly after the Navy Yard shootings, and focused  on schizophrenia and violence. Much of the broadcast was devoted to an interview between Correspondent Steve Kroft and Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. The show ended with Dr. Torrey saying:

We have a grand experiment: what happens when you don’t treat people. But then you’re going to have to accept 10 percent of homicides being killed by untreated, mentally ill people. You’re going to have to accept Tucson and Aurora. You’re going to have to accept Cho at Virginia Tech. These are the consequences, when we allow people who need to be treated to go untreated. And, if you are willing to do that, then that’s fine. But I’m not willing to do that. 

In its letter of complaint,  which was signed by some 36 other groups, Bazelon wrote:

“Imminent Danger” portrays individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia as people with
hopeless futures whose primary life options are hospitalization, homelessness, or incarceration.
The segment provides no indication that individuals with schizophrenia can and do live fulfilling
lives, start their own families, work, live independently, and participate fully in their
communities. Instead, such individuals are painted as consigned to a life of misery and as
ticking time bombs with the potential to become violent at any time. 

 The segment perpetuates false assumptions that there is a significant link between mental
health conditions and violence. Indeed, the point of the segment seems to be that mass shootings
would be preventable if it were easier to hospitalize individuals with psychiatric disabilities.

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Speaking In Three Cities in Four Days: Sadness, Hope and Inspiration

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Treat a disease, you win, you lose. Treat a person…..

Last week found me in East Lansing, Michigan, at the invitation of  NAMI Lansing, whose leadership did a terrific job setting up a public forum. I was especially delighted that a high school teacher had brought about a dozen students to hear me.  They’d read my book in his psychology class.

After I speak, I always spend time talking to audience members and the most common comment that I hear is: “You’ve written my story.” 

I was approached by a woman in East Lansing whose brother was in jail charged with a minor crime linked to his mental illness.

“Please, can you help me?” she pleaded. “He’s never been in trouble before and now he’s sick and we can’t get him help! What can we do!”

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60 Minutes Did Do A Segment About SuperMax, But Didn’t Get Inside It

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Several individuals who work for the federal Bureau of Prisons contacted me privately this week because they were unhappy about the blog that I posted Monday that described allegations about mentally ill prisoners being abused and neglected inside the BOP’s SuperMax prison.

These were employees who either knew me personally or had read my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, which is based on a year that I spent off-and-on inside what then was a BOP maximum security Kansas prison between 1987 to 1989.

 They called to remind me about what sort of inmate gets housed at the SuperMax and to complain because I stated that reporters have not been allowed to see inside our nation’s most secure prison. I was told that some reporters have been taken on a limited tour inside it and I also was told that 60 Minutes had done a story about the SuperMax.

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