Bestselling Author and Mental Health Advocate
From my files Friday: This snippet, which I posted last October, remains one of the best when it comes to explaining our failed mental health system. If you didn’t watch it previously, check it out. It is well worth your time. Meanwhile, please remember the significance of Memorial Day.
The Virginia Attorney General’s office has complained about an opinion piece that I wrote last week in The Washington Post that accused the state of failing to adequately investigate the death of Jamycheal Mitchell. He is the 24 year-old inmate with schizophrenia who died last August from a heart attack caused by starvation after he was arrested for allegedly stealing $5 of snacks from a convenience store and spent 101 days in jail.
In a letter to the newspaper, Cynthia E. Hudson, the chief deputy attorney general, wrote:
Contrary to Pete Earley’s May 15 Local Opinions essay, “Awaiting answers on Jamycheal Mitchell’s death,” the Office of the Attorney General has never and would never advise a client agency to obstruct an investigation.
Ms. Hudson stated:
Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) shares the “concerns and the frustration of many Virginians over the lack of clear answers surrounding Mitchell’s death.”
Really?
Here’s a reminder of the shenanigans that have happened in Virginia revolving around Mitchell’s death.
(5-19-16) While I don’t like to simply post articles, a front page story on today’s Washington Post about mental illnesses and guns is worth reading.)
When it comes to mass shootings, President Obama and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan are in rare accord on a leading culprit.
Both point fingers at mental illness. And in poll after poll, most Americans agree.
But criminologists and forensic psychiatrists say there is a critical flaw in that view: It doesn’t reflect reality.
While acknowledging that some of the country’s worst mass shooters were psychotic — the Colorado theater gunman, James Holmes, with his orange-dyed hair; the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung Hui Cho, whom a judge ordered to get treatment — experts say the vast majority of such killers did not have any classic form of serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis.
Instead, they were more often ruthless sociopaths whose behavior, while unfathomable, can’t typically be treated as mental illness.
The oversimplification, experts say, is perpetuated by the gun industry and a society that assumes that the mentally ill are the only ones capable of deadly rampages. Now, with the White House and Congress prioritizing an overhaul of the mental-health system to try to curtail mass shootings and gun violence, critics say the country is chasing an expensive and potentially counterproductive cure on the basis of the wrong diagnosis.
“It would be ridiculous to hope that doing something about the mental-health system will stop these mass murders,” said Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” which examines the personalities of brutal killers. “It’s really folly.”
When San Diegan James Holmes opened fire in a Colorado movie theater in 2012, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others, the mass murder struck a punch to the collective heart of our nation.
It rocked our sense of security and went down in the history books as the largest number of casualties in a shooting in our nation’s history.
Holmes is now serving 12 consecutive life sentences without parole, plus 3,318 years in prison.
Four years later, his mother, Arlene Holmes is speaking out for the first time exclusively to 10News anchor Kimberly Hunt.
(5-14-16) In an Op Ed piece published Sunday in The Washington Post, I called on the Justice Department to investigate the death of Jamycheal Mitchell, a 24 year-old African American with schizophrenia, who died in a Virginia jail from a heart attack caused by starvation.
I also called on Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) to publicly censure state mental health officials, who delayed a report about Mitchell’s death until after the state assembly had adjourned, and the attorney general’s staff who told court officials not to talk directly to investigators.
I further urged Virginia legislators to strip the inspector general’s office of its responsibility for investigating mental-health care based on its pusillanimous reporting and prior incidents of alleged kowtowing to appease state officials.
My editorial came after a flurry of news stories about the Mitchell case. Earlier this month, an attorney for Mitchell’s family filed a $60 million civil suit alleging that Mitchell was beaten, starved, and treated “like a circus animal” during the 101 days that he was held in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail waiting to be transferred to a state hospital.
Even though the state Office of Inspector General and the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services dropped the ball when it came to actually investigating what happened inside the jail, the Virginia news media has been relentless, most notably the Richmond Times Dispatch. Reporter Sarah Kleiner revealed that jail officials had taped over video recorded outside Mitchell’s cell. Those videos would have shown if he had been given a food tray each day and whether guards and nurses actually checked on him. That revelation led to the Newport Daily News calling for a federal investigation.
The failure of our local and state officials is so complete — and typical of a state where officials are so contemptuous of the public’s right to know what their government does — that we believe an investigation by federal civil rights officials is in order.
Gary A. Harki and Patrick Wilson, two reporters at the Virginian-Pilot, also have been digging into this story, as has Deanna LeBlanc at WAVY.
Holding those responsible for Mitchell’s death is only the first step. Virginia needs to censure those who were responsible for investigating his death but shirked their responsibility. (Angry about this preventable death: urge McAuliffe to take action by sending him a copy of this blog.)
(5-13-16)
The air in C wing stinks. It is a putrefied scent, a blending of urine, expectorant, perspiration, excrement, blood, flatulence, and dried and discarded jailhouse food. When the jail’s antiquated air conditioning breaks down during the summer, which it often does, some officers claim C wing’s pink walls actually sweat. It’s decades of filth and grime bubbling up, rising through coats of paint.
Those few lines are from my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness. They describe the barbaric conditions that I observed when I spent ten months inside the Miami Dade Pre-Trial Detention Center (downtown jail) where inmates with serious mental illnesses were beaten, neglected, abused and treated little better than animals.
I observed the horrific conditions in the jail and troubling events during 2004/2005 and for the first time since then, I returned earlier this week to Miami to see what has transpired since my book was published.
What I observed was nothing short of a miracle. In the twelve years that have passed since I first walked into the jail, Miami has been transformed from being one of the worst examples of how prisoners with mental illnesses were treated into a model system that the rest of the nation should follow.
Pete Earley is the bestselling author of such books as The Hot House and Crazy. When he is not spending time with his family, he tours the globe advocating for mental health reform.
As a former reporter for The Washington Post, Pete uses his journalistic background to take a fair-minded approach to the story all while weaving an interesting tale for the reader.