(11-20-24) Risdon N. Slate, an expert about the criminalization of mental illness, has published a memoir, Resilience In The Storm: My Journey With Mental Illness, describing his personal struggles, lessons learned and his recovery. I asked him to share part of his story.
Dear Pete, this chapter captures me in a full-blown manic episode after my psychiatrist decided I was not mentally ill and took me off lithium. Prior to the doctor stopping my medication, I had remained in the closet regarding my mental illness for eight years, telling only significant others that I was bipolar and seeing psychiatrists behind the scenes for meds. I was running from the stigma surrounding mental illness. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed.
After the manic episode, I decided if this could happen to me as a criminology professor with a PhD in criminal justice, work experience as a federal probation officer and as an assistant to the warden at a medium/maximum death row prison it could happen to anyone.
A Wake Up Call
This episode proved to be a wake-up call in my life. Others do not have the connections that I do to help them in times of crisis. I decided to open up regarding my story. Writing a memoir enables me to reach out to a broad audience and provide hope for the possibility of recovery. The process was cathartic as well, helping me make connections between obstacles that I encountered as an illegitimate child with a speech impediment and my mental illness. I use hardships experienced in my youth to bolster me in facing my illness today. In the words of Booker T. Washington. “Success is not measured so much by the position that one has attained in life as by the obstacles one has overcome while trying to succeed.”
RESILENCE IN THE STORM: MY JOURNEY WITH MENTAL ILLNESS
BY RISDON N. SLATE, PhD. Copyrighted. Used by permission from author
PROLOGUE
It was 9:30 on a Sunday morning, Labor Day weekend, when the police came for me.
“That’s my husband,” my wife told the two officers by the pool gate at the condominium complex which we were visiting. “He has a PhD and is a criminology professor.” She felt compelled to tell them this because several minutes earlier I had thrown a lounge chair into the pool, taken off my clothes, and dove in after it.
“He worked in this city as a United States Probation Officer and an assistant warden,” she pled. I was at that moment standing by the side of the pool stark naked. I was relieved to have the police officers intervene and believed justice would ultimately prevail.
My wife was in tears, holding the vial of lithium that I should have been taking. Pointing to the bottle, she told the officers that a doctor had mistakenly taken me off the medication. “Please help him!”
Their help for me was to take me directly to jail.
The officers had me pull on my shirt and shorts and place my hands behind my back as they cuffed me. They placed me in the back of their squad car, where I attempted to tell them about the people conspiring to do me harm.
“Quiet,” one officer insisted as we pulled out.
Always respectful of the police, a few minutes into the ride, when I was given permission to speak, I told them how grateful I was for their intervening and liberating me from the plot against me. They did not respond.
As I entered the housing area of the county jail, the smell was a pungent mixture of bleach and bodily fluids.
I was placed in a holding cell with about fifteen other men. I recognized one of my fellow captives as the actor Wesley Snipes playing the role of a detainee. I slid underneath a bench in the cell and huddled with him. I was starving, and he shared his bologna sandwich with me. I appreciated his generosity so much that I tried to hug and kiss him. He, without speaking, deflected my advances by holding the sandwich in in his palm and redirected me to eat the sandwich by pointing to it.
“Hey, Jeff!” I called out to Jeff Bridges, who was acting as another detainee waiting to appear before a magistrate for a bail hearing.
“That is not my name, fool,” he snapped back at me.
I chalked his testiness up to the part he was playing in the film we were making, and I apologized to him for using his real name. He just ignored me.
Unabashedly, I told my fellow detainees, “I worked in that prison just up the road.”
One retorted, “I think I remember you, you son-of-a-bitch.”
I was non-pulsed and excitedly continued my diatribe, informing them, “There is a conspiracy against me involving a federal judge and my ex-wife’s father, which cost me my job as a federal probation officer. I am in this jail until I can figure out my next move.” They looked at me incredulously, but I believed we were all playing our roles.
Further antagonizing the others was my attire: I had made my way into the holding cell wearing my shirt that the cop had handed me to put on back at the pool after skinny dipping. It was a sheriff’s t-shirt from another state commemorating a 5k run with a badge prominently imprinted on it.
I continued with my conspiracy theory, getting in the face of one of my fellow detainees that another had called Jerimiah as I shouted, “I want my probation officer job back.” Jeremiah, a hulking African American, reacted by saying, “Shut up!” He then put me in a headlock, pounded me with his fist on top of the head, and ripped off my shirt. The remnants of the shirt’s collar remained intact around my neck, and I magically believed I would be shielded from harm by this mere piece of cotton encircling my neck.
Nonetheless, I sought cover by laying prone under a bench, where I was comforted by an empty ½ pint milk carton that I thought was sending me a surreptitious message only I could decipher. There was a picture of a missing child on the carton whom the authorities were looking for. I was heartened. The effort made on behalf of that little boy encouraged me not to give up and assured me that people on the outside were working on righting the wrongs that had befallen me and landed me there.
I ultimately had an initial appearance before a magistrate. Disoriented, with no view of the outside world or clock available, I lost track of time. I didn’t know the day or time of my initial appearance before a judicial authority; I would learn later that it took place about seven hours after having been brought to jail. My bail was set at $500, but I could not make it, as I had thrown my wallet onto the roof of the condominium complex in an attempt to shield my identity from the conspirators before the police arrived. Though my wife was present at the hearing, she was unable to make bail. I had hurled all our resources away. We were 500 miles away from home, and she was without an automatic teller machine card, credit card, or sufficient funds. She had even asked my former professor, who owned the condominium where we had been staying, for financial assistance with my bond. However, he declined to help – telling her that he did not want his name associated with my release back into the community. He recommended that she sell my car to acquire sufficient funds. She chose not to do so. My wife was greatly concerned for my well-being but was perplexed as to how to obtain proper care for me. She was not allowed to address the magistrate, but in the courtroom, she told me that she spoke to my guards about my situation. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I can go back inside. I am protected.”
After not making bail and being returned to the holding cell, I slid up close to another detainee telling him about my previous job at the prison in town, work as a federal probation officer, and my forced resignation from that position. He got in my face and shouted, “Shut the fuck up, or I’m going to knock the shit out of you.” To my surprise, Jeremiah came to my aid, yelling “Leave him alone.” I moved to another corner of the cell.
I had to use the toilet in the cell, and I found myself stymied by the plumbing.
Flushing the toilet was beyond my comprehension. With no toilet paper available, I methodically smeared my excrement on my face like war paint.
The jailers began moving detainees one by one from the cell, leaving me housed with an inmate whom I initially mistook for Abraham Lincoln. He was lanky, stooped over, and had a ruddy complexion. However, since he had no beard, I concluded that he was actually U.S. Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, there to conduct an investigation of the jail.
My unbalanced behavior was manifested through chanting made-up words (“kudabah, wudabah, katori, mingala”) over and over again, coupled with hand over mouth war cries, ritualistic dancing while standing in place with arms outstretched from my sides level with my shoulders, palms up, bringing one knee up as high as possible to my chest. then alternating rhythmically the other knee, and eating the paper containing my charge. This resulted in five guards dragging me out of the cell. They threw me to the concrete floor, kicked and punched me in the ribs, and hog-tied me before moving me to a strip cell. My pain was muted as I drifted outside my body and floated to the ceiling, where I observed the melee below as I was snatched up, restrained, and relocated. They isolated me by moving me to an empty strip cell, with no running water, chair or bed, only a hole in the concrete floor for bodily functions in solitary confinement.
Once in the strip cell, with a magical belief that I would be protected by Native American mysticism that I had been exposed to in a college religion class, I began pounding on the metal walls of the strip cell and peering through the eye slot in my cage when the guards made their periodic checks. As the captors looked in, I proclaimed, “I have a 6th Amendment right to counsel, and I am prohibited from cruel and unusual punishment by the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You will soon be hearing from the President of the United States demanding my release.” They did not respond. They just grimaced, shook their heads, and walked away.
I freshened my war paint by fishing through raw sewage in the hole for bodily excretions in the cell’s floor, and I pulled out a broken identification bracelet that had belonged to another inmate. My sole thought–They killed whoever had worn it, and they were going to kill me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Risdon Slate, Professor of Criminology at Florida Southern College, has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and was appointed by former Governor Jeb Bush to Florida’s Mental Health & Substance Abuse Commission. 
He has been published in numerous scholarly journals and has authored books including Criminalization of Mental Illness: Crisis and Opportunity for the Justice System and The Decision-making Network: An Introduction to Criminal Justice. Slate received his Ph.D. in criminal justice from Claremont Graduate School, M.S. in criminal justice from the University of South Carolina and B.S. in criminal justice from the University of North Carolina.
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