Bestselling Author and Mental Health Advocate
9-9-2014
Finding a good psychiatrist can be difficult.
Three of my son’s doctors have been compassionate, talented and skilled psychiatrists who have helped my son and our family. For them I will always be grateful.
Three other psychiatrists who dealt with him didn’t bothered to learn anything about him except for his diagnosis so they could write a prescription, send him out the door to social workers, collect their pay and move on to their next patient.
And two were really awful.
Personal reasons kept me from attending this year’s National Alliance on Mental Illness convention in Washington D.C. except for a reception on Saturday night, one of the final events.
I was told by several attendees that Demi Lovato’s appearance during the opening night session was one of the convention highlights. The singer, television star, and writer not only talked frankly and openly about her bipolar disorder and addictions but also spent the next day on Capitol Hill speaking to key congressional representatives.
I want to show the world that there is life — surprising, wonderful, unexpected life — after diagnosis.
Bravo Ms. Lovato!
This is the second half of CNN’s story about Joe Bruce and his son, Will, and their lives after Will murdered his mother in 2006 during a psychotic break.
I’VE JUST BEEN TOLD THAT SOME READERS ARE HAVING TROUBLE READING THIS BLOG BECAUSE OF PROBLEMS WITH THE MARGINS. WHILE I TRY TO FIX THIS ISSUE, I’D SUGGEST THAT YOU GO TO THE CNN SITE BY CLICKING HERE TO READ THE STORY. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE
9-5-2014
The only way to honor Amy, Joe decided, was to follow the guidance from her undelivered letter — to not give up on Will. Joe wanted to make sure his son was forced into treatment this time. But to do so, he would have to become Will’s guardian.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.