Thanksgiving for My Parent’s 67th Anniversary

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My parents, Elmer and Jean, are 90 and 91 years-old respectively and this coming Saturday, they will celebrate their 67th wedding anniversary. Until she became blind, my mother faithfully took photographs with her much-loved Brownie camera and kept them in scrapbooks for our family. She and my father also had their picture taken on each of their wedding anniversaries  — often with that same old camera. 

I will be taking their photograph this week and adding it to their ongoing wedding album. To me, these 66 photographs show more than the aging of a couple. They mark events in their lives and in mine.

My parents left their wedding in a car that my dad had bought for $150. They couldn’t drive at night because the headlights didn’t work. They were headed West from their family homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in 1943 with no jobs and no real idea of where they might settle. Click to continue…

A Spy Story: Ames, Blood Money and Me

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If you’ve read my book, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames,you already know that I was able to interview the CIA traitor, Aldrich Ames, for eleven  days without government censors listening to our conversations.    This is because federal  prosecutors had notified everyone – Ames’ defense attorneys, the FBI, the CIA, and Justice Department – that Ames was not to be interviewed by the media, except for the officials who mattered the most — the deputies in charge of the jail.

When the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case discovered that I had slipped into the jail, he was not happy.

Ames asked me to go to Moscow and gave me a handwritten letter to show his KGB (now called SVR) handlers. He also told me his “parole,” which in spy lingo, is the secret word that only his SVR contact would know. Using that word would verify that he’d sent me.

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Using Music to Combat Stigma

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Without a journey there’s no return

It’s the inevitable way of growing up

        Lyrics from “Listen” by Tiago Bettencourt and Cool Hipnoise

Encontrar+SE, a grassroots mental health advocacy group started by Filipa Pahla in Portugal, recently found an imaginative way to fight stigma. A few years ago, Filipa persuaded twenty of her nation’s most popular singers and song writers to participate in a ten-month long, anti-stigma campaign. 

A different artist performed an original song each month about mental illness. The song writers were asked to compose lyrics that first described a problem and then offered a solution. The songs were broadcast on the radio and in music videos on television.

The first three songs introduced listeners to mental illnesses. The themes were : Discriminating/Integrating, Denying/Accepting, and Separating/Uniting. 

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On the Edge in Utah

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Whenever I go out-of-town to give a speech, I try to encourage local reporters to investigate mental health services in their communities. When I visited Utah last year to speak at the state’s NAMI convention, I was interviewed by Nancy R. Green, a television producer at KUED, which is affliated with the University of Utah.  

The great thing about Nancy is that she is an investigative reporter, so she wasn’t satisfied listening to me talk about what happened to Mike and my investigation in the Miami Dade Pre-Trial Detention Center for my book CRAZY: A Father’s Service Through America’s Mental Health Madness.  After she spent time talking to me on camera, she launched her own investigation to discover what is happening today in Utah. Her report, On the Edge, is top-notch and provides a real public service to the state.

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Apology from NPR’s CEO to NAMI

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Last Friday afternoon, Michael J. Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, received a telephone call from Vivian Schiller, the CEO of National Public Radio, during which she apologized for a comment that she made during the firing of Juan Williams.  

Schiller made a flippant remark during the recent Williams’ controversy, saying that my former Washington Post colleague and friend, needed to consult “his psychiatrist.”

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Will Portugal Copy Our Mistakes?

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 The advocacy group Encontrar+SE invited me to Porto, Portugal recently to speak about the closing of our state mental hospitals here in the U.S. This was my third overseas trip, having gone to Iceland and Brazil last year.  

Founded in 2006, Encontrar+SE   is the creation of Filipa Palha, a psychologist, university professor, and determined mental health activist who is trying to make Portuguese health officials accountable.

The government there has announced plans to close all of the nation’s mental hospitals, but it has not allocated any money nor taken any steps to create community-based mental health services.

Sound familiar?

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