Pete Earley

(8-8-22) In this third installment about recent books, emerging author Luther Kissam V finds power and healing writing poetry. Thrilled to reprint his story and a poem.

Have I Told You About My Superpowers

by Luther Kissam V (copyrighted material used with author’s permission.)

It was about 10 p.m. at my rural, Pennsylvanian boarding school when my mother found me running nearly naked through the snow and freezing weather. She was visiting, and I had just jumped out of her moving car, paranoid that she was trying to stop me from fulfilling my purpose.

I told her I had superpowers that the moon had given me, and that I was on fire. Neither of those things were true, but my delusions of grandeur were overwhelming. I was manic with psychotic features. Serendipitously, a teacher stumbled upon us, and was able to coax me into his car before taking me to the school infirmary so I could be hospitalized.

I left the hospital with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and a prescription for Lamictal. In some ways being diagnosed with bipolar disorder was a blessing; at least I finally knew the cause of my worsening emotional instability. For years I rapidly cycled through episodes of depression and mania, impacting my relationships and potential future.

I was getting by but barely.

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(8-6-22) A fatal shooting in Fairfax County, where I live, ended the life of a young man in the midst of a mental health crisis. Watch the body cam which was released this week and ask yourself why this had to escalate.

Story courtesy of NBC.

Aaron Lynch, 26, was fatally shot by a Fairfax County officer after his family called for help. A mental health clinician was part of the response to their first 911 call but not the second, after which he was killed

Aaron Lynch died after an officer shot him on Arbor Lane the night of July 7. He was 26.

Lynch’s parents said the shooting was unjustified. The county police chief said the officer opened fire as Lynch advanced on officers while swinging a bottle.

Three officers, all trained in crisis intervention and deescalation, entered the home in the 6900 block of Arbor Lane after 8 p.m. They immediately encountered Lynch

“Hey, Aaron. Hey, bud. Whoa,” an officer can be heard saying on video.

Lynch says nothing before the encounter escalates quickly.

“Put it down, put it down, put it down,” an officer says.

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(8-5-22) This is the second in a three part series about books that have crossed my desk this summer written about serious mental illnesses. Author Gail McPeake, RN., uses her personal journey with her adult son, Tom, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, to warn others about the risk of suicide after someone is discharged from a hospital.

Excerpt from Home Safe: The High Risk of Suicide after Hospitalization for Mental Illness by Gail McPeake, RN. (reprinted by permission.)

I lived an hour away and I had planned on picking Tom up when he was discharged, but they put him in a cab and sent him home.  The next day on the phone Tom was talking erratically again, and in the evening, I saw via his home Ring security camera that he was outside his house, walking on the driveway swinging his sword.

He had a collector’s sword that he kept in his bedroom “for protection” to feel safe, but he never took it outside. Tom went back in the house, and I called him, telling him to put his sword in the safety case and lock it, which he did.

The hospital had assessed that Tom was well enough to be sent home, but within two days we realized that he needed to go back to the hospital, so my husband, Steve, and I drove to see Tom.

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(8-3-22) Summer is prime reading time and although books about mental illnesses are not usually on a beach read list, I have asked the authors of books that have crossed my desk recently to tell us why they wrote their book and give us a sample chapter. 

 Against All Odds: A Practical Guide to Successfully Navigate Psychosis and Behavioral Health Systems 

By Gary Tsai, M.D.  (Book website: click here.)

For nearly three decades, my family struggled to get help for my mom. She was a loving mother and brilliant scientist, and happened to have schizophrenia and anosognosia, a condition whereby the area of the brain responsible for self-reflection is damaged, causing someone to lack awareness of their condition.

Unsurprisingly, it was extraordinarily difficult to get her to agree to accept treatment for a condition she fundamentally did not believe she had.

More surprisingly, since this is a rather common phenomenon that affects 40 – 50% of people with serious mental illness, the system responsible for providing care for her was not designed to do so and seemed nearly impossible to access. While in most areas of healthcare, the quicker and easier it is to access services the more severe the condition is, we quickly found out that the opposite was true in mental health systems.Click to continue…

(07-19-2022) “Your son is in our jail.”

It’s been a year since Sandra Jones received that alarming phone call last July, and the Chesapeake, Virginia mother is still seeking answers about why her son, Judaea, then 18-years-old, ended up being arrested and jailed.

“This whole thing still bothers me,” Jones told me during a telephone interview.

What happened to Judaea is an example of how easily someone who is mentally impaired can become entangled in our mental health and criminal justice systems, and the trauma it causes families.

Sandra and her husband, Eugene, adopted Judaea shortly after they both retired from civil service jobs. The child was her husband’s great nephew and Judaea arrived with an assortment of diagnoses including Autism, Intellectual Disability-Moderate, ADHD, Anxiety Disorder, Conduct Disorder (impulse control), Shaken Baby Syndrome and Tardive Dyskinesia.

His new parents loved him and nurtured him, but by the time Judaea turned 18, he was becoming more than the couple could handle. “We wanted him to live independently, to have friends, and have a life outside our home,” Sandra Jones said. “We weren’t getting any younger and needed help.”

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(7-14-22) The National Council for Mental Wellbeing (formerly the National Council for Behavioral Health) said criticism of its Mental Health First Aid training program is “flawed.”

MHFA was recently lambasted in a report issued by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative New York think tank that frequently criticizes government spending. The National Council represents the nation’s mental health care industry and promotes/sells MHFA training programs.

MHFA courses are extremely popular and have been taken by more than two million Americans. Congress recently included $120 million for MHFA training in the Safer Communities Act, along with another $64 million in next year’s budget.

In a formal statement, the Council said Carolyn D. Gorman, the author of Mental Health First Aid: Assessing the Evidence for a Public Health Approach to Mental Illness, did not understand the purpose of MHFA training. Gorman wrote that there was scant evidence that MHFA benefited Americans with serious mental illnesses.

The National Council’s response:

We agree that more needs to be done to ensure that people with mental health challenges, especially those with serious mental illness, have access to treatment. With that in mind, we wish the author had come to us while developing this report. We would have welcomed the opportunity to reconcile the inaccuracy of the report’s fundamental premise – what Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) is and what it seeks to accomplish.

Unfortunately, the flaw in the basic premise impacts the validity of the report’s overall conclusions. The report faults MHFA for not solving the crisis of untreated mental illness in the United States. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about MHFA – what it is and what it seeks to accomplish.

MHFA was never designed to reduce the prevalence of mental illness or improve access to high-quality treatment and services. So it is wrong to measure the effectiveness of the program against those objectives, as the report does.

MHFA has one clear and simple goal: to give individuals the skills they need to recognize and respond to signs and symptoms that indicate someone might be experiencing a mental health or substance use challenge and guide them to appropriate care. That is the only valid objective to measure the program’s effectiveness, and the results of peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated the program is effective by that measure.

The mental health system in this country has significant challenges, and we all must work together to address them. The National Council for Mental Wellbeing works tirelessly toward this goal. While important strides have been made in the last decade, much work remains to ensure that everyone who needs treatment for mental illness can access the care they need.

(Carolyn Gorman responds: The Council suggests the point of the MHFA program is to give people the skills to recognize mental illness. I directly acknowledge and address this objective in my report in multiple places. While some studies do in fact find a *statistically* significant increase in recognizing some specific symptoms of specific illnesses, those findings are much less *practically* significant—baseline rates of recognition for mental illness are incredibly high even before MHFA training.  To make a comparison, this is like going from getting a B+ grade on a school final exam to an A- or an A. We’d still consider a B+ student competent and proficient, and wouldn’t make the student re-take the whole class. I am grateful for the National Council’s openness to dialogue in the future as they do important work, and I’m sure there is much we could agree on elsewhere and dually champion.”