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CNN’s Dramatic Story About The Bruce Family: Recovering from Mental Illness, Heartbreak and Murder

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“It Shouldn’t Take Killing Your Mom To Get Proper Treatment” — Joe Bruce

9-4-2014

“You have to meet Joe Bruce,” a friend told me. “You need to hear his story.”

I met Joe about a year after his adult son, Will, murdered his mother, Amy, in 2006.  That was the same year that I published my book about how my son was arrested for breaking into an unoccupied house after we were turned away from a hospital because he was not considered a danger to himself or others.

The Bruce’s story was clearly much, much worse than our’s.

When I met Joe at a National Alliance on Mental Illness national convention, I was immediately struck by his quiet determination to change our broken mental health care system and by the incredible love that he felt for Amy and his son. Since that meeting, the Bruce family’s story has been told by the Wall Street Journal and other publications, and Joe has testified before Congress.

However, little has been written about Will Bruce and what happened after he was found not guilty because he was legally insane at the time of his mother’s murder. CNN recently broadcast a followup about Will and Joe, that I want to share it with you.

“If Only They Had Treated Him Before”
By Wayne Drash CNN
Photos by John Nowak CNN

Augusta, Maine (CNN)

Will Bruce strolls across the pale yellow and green linoleum tile of the psychiatric hospital that has been his home for more than seven years.

“So long,” he tells staff members who’ve gathered to see him off. “I hope I don’t come back.”

The last time he was discharged, Will was a different man. He’d refused treatment for 2 1/2 months and gone back into the world the way he’d arrived: confused, incoherent, psychotic.

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USA TODAY OP ED: Notorious American Spy Dies, Turned Spying Into Family Business

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By Pete Earley, Published in USA TODAY  5:44 p.m. EDT September 2, 2014

Ringleader’s death in prison does not undo damage he did to U.S. during Cold War.

The most damaging U.S. traitor during the Cold War — a spy whose treachery enabled the Kremlin to decipher millions of our military’s top secrets — died last week at age 77 in a federal prison insisting that our nation owed him an apology.

“What has happened to me is unfair,” John Anthony Walker Jr., whined to me in 1985 after the FBI nabbed him delivering 129 top secrets to a Russian KGB contact. Walker insisted his spying didn’t matter because the U.S. and Soviet Union were not at war.

Years later in a self-serving autobiography, he went a step further by claiming he’d actually helped end the Cold War. The secrets that he’d sold convinced the Kremlin that it could never match our military superiority so its leaders had simply given up.

No one believed his cockamamie claims, but that didn’t faze him. Walker showed me his grandiosity during one of our first jail house interviews when he bragged: “A new encyclopedia was just published. I’m in it. You’re not!”

A Navy warrant officer when he volunteered to spy for the Russians, Walker successfully recruited his older brother, Arthur , son Michael , and best friend Jerry Whitworth — all sailors. During an 18-year span, the ring sold the Soviets so many secrets a KGB defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, later called it “the greatest case in KGB history” and declared, “If there had been a war, we would have won it.”

The contempt Walker showed for his country equaled the contempt he showed toward his own family. He verbally abused his four children, especially his three daughters, who he described with crude expletives during our talks. He urged one to abort his unborn grandson so she could enlist and spy for him. She didn’t do either. Wife, Barbara, a self-admitted alcoholic, claimed he physically beat her. She slept with Arthur, while John cheated with women half his age. He admitted grooming his own son to “take over the family business,” telling me that he was doing Michael a favor turning him into a KGB spy because he was too inept to succeed at anything without Walker’s fatherly help.

Before Walker, the most infamous spy scandal happened in 1951 when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing U.S. atomic weapons secrets to the Soviet Union and were executed. Americans were thought to have “attitudinal loyalty.” We didn’t betray our nation like the English or French. Loyalty was born in our blood. When I asked the sailors who’d worked alongside Walker why they weren’t suspicious of his newfound cash–he moved his family into a swanky apartment complex, bought a sports car, a sail boat, and took his college-age mistress on Caribbean vacation–they said they thought Walker was moonlighting as a pimp. The idea that he might be a traitor never entered their minds.

Shortly after Walker’s arrest, seven others were caught spying, causing 1985 to be dubbed “The Year of the Spy.”

Walker’s treason not only harmed our nation, it forever ended our belief that Americans don’t sell out their country for 30 pieces of silver. That sad fact should be noted when his death is reported in a new encyclopedia.

Pete Earley is author of The New York Times bestselling book Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring.

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Michael Brown Shooting Got National Attention. What About Deaths of Mentally Ill Prisoners?

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Christopher Lopez, 35, sits restrained with a spit hood over his head in the final hours of his life. (Provided by the Colorado Department of Corrections via a lawsuit by the estate of Christopher Lopez)

Christopher Lopez, 35, sits restrained with a spit hood over his head in the final hours of his life. (Provided by the Colorado Department of Corrections via a lawsuit by the estate of Christopher Lopez)

9-1-2014

While I was reading and watching news coverage of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri,  I found myself thinking about the deaths of three prisoners who had severe mentally illnesses.

*Jerome Murdough, a 56 year-old former Marine with schizophrenia, died in his Rikers Island jail cell in New York  after he was arrested for sleeping in a stairwell to avoid inclement weather. Temperatures in his cell exceeded more than a 100 degrees and, as one city official later put it, Murdough “literally baked to death.” The officers watching him were supposed to be periodically checking on him, but didn’t.

*Darren Rainey, age 50, was locked in a shower stall with steam and scalding water for more than an hour as punishment by correctional officers in Florida after he defecated in his cell and refused to clean it up.  His screams for help were ignored and when his lifeless body was removed from the stall, his skin showed signs of “slippage,” which happens when badly burned flesh literally begins falling off. Rainey had a mental illness and was serving time for cocaine possession.

*Christopher Lopez, age 35, died from severe hyponatremia, a condition that develops when a person’s sodium levels fall fatally low. It’s been suggested that Lopez had been given too much psychotropic medication, which caused his body to begin shutting down. According to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by his family, several guards, nurses, and a mental health clinician stood outside Lopez’s cell, where he was lying  manacled on the floor, talking casually and laughing while he suffered a series of seizures. He had schizophrenia.

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Ten Years Later: I Still Miss My Best Friend

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8-25-14  While my schedule keeps me from responding to all of the emails that I receive, I do read all of them. I especially enjoy reading personal stories. Here is one from a reader in Australia that I wish to share. While it is a sad note, it also describes the beauty of friendship. Having friends is important, especially when someone has a serious mental illness and often feels isolated and alone.  

Dear Pete,

I had a friend who took lithium for 25 years. It kept her sane and she was able to work fulltime, but it eventually destroyed her kidneys.
She was on dialysis for four years before she died in a private hospital.

When her kidneys began to fail, she had to be taken off lithium, and all sorts of other medication was tried to keep her thinking straight. Before she was on lithium, she was suicidal and jumped off the Auckland Harbor Bridge. She landed near a boat where men were fishing, and they dragged her aboard. The police picked her up and took her to hospital.

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Opponents Form PAC, Murphy Stumps For Votes, Fight About Mental Health Continues

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Representative Tim Murphy’s Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act didn’t make it to the House floor for a vote this year, but the Pennsylvania Republican’s promise to reintroduce the bill in the coming legislative session continues to keep both its supporters and opponents busy.

Opponents have created a Stop The Murphy Bill Political Action Committee (PAC) to kill the proposed legislation. The PAC’s spokesperson, Jeanne Peschier, explained in a statement that the group will focus on mid-term elections and “will advocate for legislation that reduces forced psychiatric treatment and increases funding for alternatives to it. We will educate Congress and the public about the harms of forced psychiatric treatment.”  You can read more about the PAC and Jeanne Peschier at the Mental Health Civil Rights Protest blog.

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Florida College Renames “Maniac” Mascot Because Of Your Emails!

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mascot1 (1)

8-25-2014

Your voices have been heard!

Risdon Slate, a fellow mental health advocate, told me in April about an offensive mascot called The Maniac that a Christian college in Lakeland Florida had created.  I wrote a blog about how that mascot appeared to marginalize and stigmatize individuals with mental illnesses. Several of you agreed and voiced your concerns in emails to the college’s president.

This weekend, Risdon sent me this follow-up.

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