Bestselling Author and Mental Health Advocate
(8-20-18) Sadly, mental illnesses never take a vacation, but I do. One final week before I return to work. I’ll be back then with posts, but right now I have to drive a buddy of mine who is waiting. She is impatient. Have a great day and thanks for your support and advocacy.
(8-17-18) Taking a much needed break this week, but I wanted to share this blog with you that I first posted in 2014. It remains one of my most popular and haunting posts.)
My Husband Joe
By Kathleen Maloney
My husband Joe and I enjoyed 18 wonderful years together. We had a beautiful daughter and our lives were filled with love, laughter, joy, hard work and exciting plans for the future.
That was before he got sick, before he was diagnosed with a mental illness.
The first sign came in December 2003 two weeks after Joe got laid off from a company where he had worked for 20 years. On Christmas Day, he became so distraught he collapsed on the floor. At the emergency room, a doctor suggested that it was stress that caused him to become depressed. Joe calmed down and we made a follow up appointment with our doctor. Click to continue…
(8-13-18) Taking a much needed break this week, but I wanted to share this blog with you, written more than a decade ago. Enjoy!
Praying For Serenity
When my son, Kevin, came over recently to play chess — or should I write to easily defeat me in several chess matches — he arrived carrying a DVD. The title was: The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
Johnston is a song writer, singer, and an artist who has struggled for years with a severe mental illness.
We watched it together and I was deeply moved. Johnston’s first album recorded on a tape recorder in his parent’s basement contained three haunting songs about his mental disorders.
Not everyone appreciates Johnston’s jarring and, at times, squeaky voice, including my wife, Patti, but Kevin and I found that the rawness of his vocals made the struggles that he described even more poignant. (You can visit Johnston’s webpage here.)
(Andrew Nelles/The Tennessean via AP)
(8-10-18) Pleas by the National Alliance on Mental Illness national office and NAMI’s Tennessee chapter to stop the execution of a seriously mentally ill inmate failed last night. Billy Ray Irick, who was convicted in 1986 of raping and murdering a 7-year old girl during a psychotic break, was administered a lethal dose of toxic chemicals in Nashville. He was 59 and had been on death row 32 years.
NAMI had asked its members to petition Gov. Bill Haslam to commute Irick’s sentence to life in prison without parole. The governor demurred, saying his role was “not to be the 13th juror or the judge or to impose (his) personal views but to carefully review the judicial process to make sure it was full and fair.”
In a statement seeking commutation, NAMI argued that information about Irick’s mental illness was never properly considered during his trial and sentencing.
Ironically, last minute appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Irick’s death hinged, not on his mental condition (witnesses testified he had the mental acuity of a seven to nine year old) but whether the lethal drugs used to execute him were appropriate.
Arguably, his case is an example of the difficulty our justice system has in determining whether a crime was committed because of a person’s impaired thinking or because of their criminality. As I wrote earlier this week, there were repeated warning signs that Irick was both mentally ill and violent. Yet, no one intervened, even hours before the murder when he was seen muttering to himself in a half-drunk rage. Court records show Irick heard voices and was “taking instructions from the devil” before he was left alone to babysit Paula Dyer. This was after family members observed him chasing a young girl in Knoxville with a machete.
(8-6-18) Tennessee is scheduled to execute Billy Ray Irick in three days even though he has a long, well documented history of mental illness – a fact jurors were never told during his 1986 trial. Incorrectly, they were specifically advised that he was not mentally ill.
In addition, Irick has the mental cognitive acuity of someone who is seven to nine years old. He is fifty-nine.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI Tennessee and a state coalition – created specifically to oppose the killing of Tennessee inmates with severe mental illnesses – are urging the public to contact Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam at bill.haslam@tn.gov or by calling his office at (615) 741-2001. They are asking Haslam to commute Irick’s death sentence to life in prison without any possibly of parole. Irick has spent the last 30 years on death row. The governor’s commutation is considered his last chance.
In their letter to the governor, NAMI CEO Mary Giliberti and NAMI Tennessee Executive Director Jeff Fladen stated:
“Powerful delusions or hallucinations characteristic of psychosis may lead a person to act in ways they never would have otherwise…”
They argue two critical points:
- Executing Billy Ray Irick would run contrary to constitutional restrictions on imposing capital punishment on persons with diminished capacity due to mental disabilities.
- Information about Billy Ray Irick’s severe mental illness and its impact was never properly considered at his trial or his sentencing.
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery is pushing back, insisting the state has a right to “execute its moral judgment” and put Irick to death.
Irick’s crime was horrific. All death row convictions are. He raped and murdered Paula Dyer, a seven year old girl, he was babysitting.
(8-3-18) Earlier this week I posted a blog written by a mother who had lost contact with her daughter. Bob Carolla, who many of us know from his work as a peer advocate and former senior writer in media relations at NAMI’s national office, immediately sent me a link to this Washington Post story by one of my favorite writers, Terrence McCoy, who often writes about mental illness. Bob urged me to share it with other parents who have a missing loved one. Thanks Bob. (NAMI offers advice here about what to do if someone you love is missing. If you have found a missing loved one or have advice please offer it on my Facebook page.)
Few homeless people drift into Dolan Springs, Ariz., because there’s not much of a town to drift into. Little more than a gas station, a Family Dollar and a grocery store, it’s a splash of half-civilization in the middle of the desert, where 36 percent of residents live below the poverty line. So when Patience Matthieu, a thin woman of 31 years, saw a new homeless person in March, asking for food, she stopped and watched him. He looked just like her cousin, if that cousin had some teeth knocked out. What was he doing all the way out here?
Matthieu could tell something wasn’t right with him. He said he wanted to tend lawns, but this was a desert town. He said he was living in a tunnel, but where? So she decided to help. She brought him clothing, got him some canned food, and offered to split her earnings made from selling a few odds and ends at a swap meet. As he grew to trust her, she asked him how she could contact him, and, hesitatingly, he gave her his full name. She went home and, curious, punched it into Google: Christopher Aaron Moreland.
The results introduced Matthieu to the pained digital world of families searching for relatives, many of whom are severely mentally ill. In one more facet of life upturned by technological change, families are increasingly adopting the digital tools of 2018 to find vanished loved ones, in addition to the missing posters and federal registries of the past. They’re creating Facebook pages proclaiming their relative is missing, then sharing it. They’re crowdsourcing information. They’re trying to make posts go viral and sometimes succeeding.
The search ultimately led Matthieu to a group called Missing & Homeless, a Facebook community that, in three years, has gone from a few hundred followers to about 43,000, helping to reconnect around 45 families. The results of those reunions have been mixed. Some have been joyous — hugs and tears and an end of homelessness. Others have been wrenching. Families sometimes learn their loved ones want to stay on the streets, and, worse, their homeless relatives may not even recognize them.
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.
