Re: The Mental Health of our Troops------------
by
Mary Neal
03/21/2008, 2:00 PM #
Rob, I read your post. Thank you for highlighting the problems facing many of our toops who will return from battlefields with post traumatic stress disorder and brain damaged from war wounds. Unfortunately, America's present system of dealing with mentally ill citizens leads thousands on a road to homelessness, jail, and death. My brother, Larry Neal, was never a soldier, although that is exactly what he most wanted to be. Unfortunately, Larry was mentally ill from his childhood and spent 20 years as an in-patient in a mental institution for his acute mental illness. When dismissed from the mental institutions, Larry and many thousands of other formerly institutionalized patients became subject to the sames laws as ordinary citizens, and subsequently, approximately 30% of America's prison population is now comprised of mentally ill persons. (See
<link> We need to have better waiting for our returning troops, Rob, than homelessness, jail, and death. I know how undervalued our mentally ill citizens' rights are Rob. Mine is the only American family of the 21st Century to have a family member secretly arrested and his corpse returned to his family without any explanation, excuse, apology, arrest records, inquest, or official investigation. We were denied any of these. We are currently engaged in a legal battle to get "dog justice" for Larry, because he was at least as important as Michael Vick's dogs and his death also deserves investigation. Larry's family cannot say whether we are denied due process of law because Larry was indigent, African American, or disabled -- or whether it is because of the nature of his disability (mental illness). Sadly, Larry’s story is not unique; the mentally ill in America suffer many hardships resulting from inadequate or no care. Thousands of chronically mentally ill Americans who cannot orient themselves into society are jailed, homeless, or warehoused in substandard hospitals where many die each year. Larry was a mentally ill heart patient who was secretly arrested in mid-July 2003 and incarcerated until his fatal heart attack on August 1, 2003. For the 18 days of Larry's detainment in Shelby County Jail, Memphis, TN, on some misdemeanor connected with his mental disability, his family and social worker searched for Larry as a missing person. The jail falsely and repeatedly reported that neither Larry nor anyone meeting his physical description was detained in that facility. As an unidentified inmate, Larry presumably did not receive his vital prescription heart and psychiatric drugs. Upon Larry’s death, by Larry’s elderly, grieving mother contracted with The Cochran Firm to bring a wrongful death suit against the jail and negligence suits against the State of Tennessee and Larry’s final care home. However, the managing partner of The Cochran Firm’s Memphis office, Julian Bolton, was actually a 20+year member of the Shelby County Commissioner, the entity that owns and operates the jail where Larry died. In an undisclosed conflict of interest, that law firm apparently kept Larry’s wrongful death case on its shelves inactive for the next 10.5 months while the Tennessee statute of limitations ran. Suit is pending against Cochran in USDC, Northern Dist. of GA, 1:07-cv-1935. Subsequently, for over four years, Larry’s family has been denied access to any official records regarding Larry’s fatal arrest except a partial copy of his autopsy report sent via fax and his death certificate, which is particularly disturbing since the jail was under federal overview at the time of Larry’s death. My family is working to establish a new organization to advocate for the incarcerated mentally ill: Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill ("AIMI"). Presently, only the mentally ill who seek and/or willingly accept psychiatric treatment are serviced or hospitalized, unless or until patients are deemed by authorities to be a danger to themselves or others. People who are too sick to recognize their own psychosis are left largely to their own devices. Here is a secret we learned during years of visiting Larry in mental institutions and having met many sick patients: Many acutely mentally ill people simply do not know/believe/accept that they are sick. Ironically, the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill in America was led for the most part by ex psychiatric patients who had themselves been institutionalized. There was a time when even people suffering epilepsy or nervous breakdown were institutionalized. Rejoining society obviously worked well for those who were capable of the self-discipline and presence of mind to launch this movement, many of whom went on to pursue psychiatric careers after release from asylums. But deinstitutionalization was a tragic development for people like Larry and thousands of other sick people presently incarcerated, having only swapped hospital care for jail cells. That is why this mental health system based on voluntary treatment has failed and our humanitarian decision of the 1970’s to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill has resulted in a growing prison population of mentally ill detainees. How humane is jailing sick people? Other side-effects of our “patients in charge” mental health system are overcrowded jails, an overtaxed criminal justice system, increasing homelessness, and a more dangerous society. Both the Texas woman who drowned her five children and the Virginia Tech student who killed 32 people during a violent rampage were mental patients who needed better treatment and control. We must free our nation’s law enforcement to get back to the business of fighting crime rather than acting as psychiatric caretakers. Rob, your post gives new meaning to the phrase "support our troops." Our organization not only seeks to support our troops who, many of whom will return home with mental dysfunction due to the war, but we also want to support all of our brave American troops by upholding the ideals for which they fight: the idea that all Americans deserve equal protection under the law. Mentally ill people who are arrested without a clear conception of what the criminal charges are against them and who are too sick to understand their Miranda rights should be hospitalized, not jailed. Help AIMI to end the practice of closing America's mental institutions and replacing hospital beds with jail cells. Help AIMI advocate for increased access to mental health care for all Americans.
