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NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE

The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America




BUT I REPEAT MYSELF . . . 


. . . on the topic of guns and madness and guns and madness and . . . 

The Louisville bank shooter bought a gun despite struggles with mental health –
Washington Post


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on October 30, 2023December 4,
2023Categories justice system, mental healthcareLeave a comment on But I repeat
myself . . . 


DO YOU SEE WHY WE URGENTLY NEED SWEEPING MENTAL HEALTHCARE REFORM?


I’ve all but given up on any hope of gun-law reform. My wife Honoree was shot
and killed three weeks ago by a stranger almost surely in psychosis.


Maine Gunman Disclosed He Had Mental Health Issues, Gun Shop Owner Says – The
New York Times (nytimes.com)


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on October 30, 2023December 4,
2023Categories justice system, mental healthcare, Mental Illness Advocacy,
politicsLeave a comment on Do you see why we urgently need sweeping mental
healthcare reform?


TRIBUTE TO HONOREE FLEMING: SCIENTIST, EDUCATOR, SECULAR SAINT

Dr. Honoree Fleming

Via The Boston Globe


‘SHE NEVER LET LIFE DEFEAT HER’: RETIRED ACADEMIC DEAN SLAIN ON VT. TRAIL
REMEMBERED BY FAMILY

Honoree Fleming, a 77-year-old retired scientist and academic, was shot to death
while walking on a rail trail in sleepy Castleton, Vt.

On the afternoon of Oct. 5, her 37th wedding anniversary, 77-year-old Fleming
was on a popular walking rail trail above a sprawling meadow in this tiny
college town of Castleton, Vermont where she had retired as an academic dean.
She was just a couple of miles from her home when someone ambushed her and shot
her in the head.

Read more:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/10/19/metro/honoree-fleming-vermont/?event=event25


A MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR OUR DEAR HONOREE

Honoree’s service took place at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 22 at the Fine Arts
Center on the Castleton campus.

> A staunch citizen of Castleton, Mark Brown, owner of Brown’s Auto Salvage, has
> created a GoFundMe account for information leading to the arrest of Honoree’s
> killer: Fundraiser by Mark Brown : Honoree Fleming reward fund (gofundme.com)”
> 
> Thank you all again.
> 
> Ron, and Dean


HONOREE IS FONDLY REMEMBERED FOR HER INTELLIGENCE AND HER BOUNDLESS EMPATHY,
TRAITS THAT DEFINED HER LIFE AND WORK.

Honoree Fleming and Ron Powers

In her recent article, she made an interesting discovery in the world of cell
biology, identifying a new cellular structure called “mitonucleons.” These
mitonucleons are made up of mitochondria (the energy producers in cells) and
chromatin (the genetic material). They appear to be essential in the development
of unique structures known as “spheroids.”

Dr. Honoree Fleming’s research, conducted on human endometrial cells, has shown
that mitonucleons are formed during a process where cells become specialized for
specific tasks. These mitonucleons can merge together to create spheroids, which
have a role in the development of gland-like structures in the uterus.

These spheroids can even float freely and reattach to other cells, and they seem
to be able to travel between cells, acting a bit like “cellular Trojan horses.”
This is particularly interesting in the context of cancer research, as cells
that form these spheroids appear to be more aggressive in tumors.

It’s important to note that while this research is intriguing, there’s still
some debate and further investigation needed to fully understand its
implications. Nevertheless, it opens up new avenues of study that could have
important applications in understanding cell biology and diseases, especially
cancer.

Fleming faced challenges during her teaching career, including being denied
tenure at Middlebury College despite her significant contributions as an
educator and researcher.

Dr. Fleming encountered sexism throughout her career as a woman in the field of
science. She was a pioneering “lady scientist” in a world that still struggles
to fully recognize the achievements of women in science. The media frequently
identified her as “the wife of Pulitzer prizewinner Ron Powers” in headlines and
captions since her passing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/honoree-fleming-s-son-speaks-out/vi-AA1ij7EZ?ocid=socialshare


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on October 19, 2023December 4,
2023Categories UncategorizedTags no one cares about crazy peopleLeave a comment
on Tribute to Honoree Fleming: Scientist, Educator, Secular Saint


JAMES MARK RIPPEE (APRIL 17, 1963-NOVEMBER 29, 2022)

Catherine J. Rippee-Hanson recently completed this breathtaking digital pen
drawing of her brother, the late James Mark Rippee, taken from a photograph.


Digital artwork by Catherine Rippee-Hanson

You know Mark Rippee’s story if you have followed this blog or read any of the
media stories about him. For years, this mentally ill, blind, and homeless man
clung to a brutal existence on the streets of Vacaville, California. County and
state services, not bound by any hard and fast rules, left him to die there, and
he did.

Catherine Rippee-Hanson’s brilliant, damning creation deserves to be enshrined
as the prevailing image of American society’s degree of concern for its “crazy
people.”

If you retain only one image of those dispossessed by our systems of care for
our most helpless citizens, let it be this one.


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on July 10, 2023July 10,
2023Categories mental healthcare, Mental Illness AdvocacyTags homelessness,
human rights, mark rippee, mental health, mental healthcare, mental illness,
schizophrenia, traumatic brain injuryLeave a comment on JAMES MARK RIPPEE (APRIL
17, 1963-NOVEMBER 29, 2022)


BEDLAM* HAS NEVER GONE AWAY

A schizophrenic victim! Arrested on a MISDEMEANOR charge! Dumped not into some
backwoods hoosegow but into FULTON COUNTY JAIL IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA! Left alone
as he was EATEN ALIVE BY BEDBUGS!



He had a name, LaShawn Thompson, and an age, 35.

LaShawn Thompson

An Atlanta attorney for Thompson’s family was quoted as calling this atrocity
“the most deplorable death in custody case in the history of America.”

Mental healthcare reform? Give me a break.

Story:

https://newschannel9.com/news/local/covered-in-bed-bugs-georgia-man-dies-in-filthy-jail-cell-criminal-probe-called-for-lawshawn-thompson-michael-harper-fulton-county-jail-atlanta-sheriff-pat-labat

*A corruption of “Bethlehem,” then “Bethlem” Hospital, the West’s first and most
brutal “insane asylum,” founded in 1050.


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on May 23, 2023May 23,
2023Categories justice systemLeave a comment on BEDLAM* HAS NEVER GONE AWAY


A STATUE FOR JAMES MARK RIPPEE 

Undulating above the 9,386 military graves at the American Cemetery and Memorial
near Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, its head thrust back and its arms
supplicating the heavens, is a bronze figure of terrifying benevolence. It was
cast by the American sculptor Donald Harcourt De Lue and placed in 1951 above
the cliffs at Omaha Beach, the most brutal of the five landing sites invaded by
U.S. forces on June 6, 1944—D Day in World War II. The sculpture is titled “The
Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves”.

The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves. Photo Credit: Nico 88

I believe that a statue of similar significance should be struck and placed
somewhere in America, preferably on a street in Vacaville, California, if the
Solano County officials would tolerate such a thing. Call it “The Spirit of
American Madness Rising from Our Streets and Jails and Graves.” The statue’s
eyeless face would replicate the smashed and scarred features of the late James
Mark Rippee, an appalling symbol of the atrocities that can befall a victim of
brain-damaging mental illness in a nation that prefers to look the other way.
The statue would represent all the oppressed and neglected mad people left to
rot in society’s shadows in our time and throughout time.

I know: the very idea of this will strike many as grandiose. Grandiosity might
be the only thing that “crazy” people and their overwhelmed protectors have
left.



Mark Rippee died at age 59 from many complications in a Vacaville hospital on
Tuesday, November 29. Some unidentified Samaritan had brought him there after
noticing that he was on the ground, struggling to breathe. (Doctors found
evidence of sepsis and pneumonia, among other symptoms.) For years following a
horrific motorcycle accident in 1987, when he was 24, Mark had stumbled around
the small city’s streets like a maimed animal from the Vaca mountains—hit twice
by cars, at the mercy of vicious thugs who beat and robbed him, sleeping under
newspapers in frigid winter nights, frequently arrested (unlawful camping was a
common charge, for irony fans), suicide-prone, truculent and resistant to care
because his derangement made him that way. 

He was kept alive through the Sisyphean efforts of his twin sisters Linda
Privette and Catherine Rippee Hansen, and the dozens of compassionate souls in
the town who tracked him down and kept him supplied with water, food, and the
blankets and canes and small change that were routinely stolen from him. Mark
accepted their gifts and concern. He would not accept their strategies for
guiding him to professional care. His affliction, steeped in paranoia, would not
allow it.

And so, yes, Mark Rippee and his sub-nation of mad people deserve a statue. They
are, have been, mass-casualties of war, just as were the eighty-nine million
victims of World War II 1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties,
the forty million in World War I
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties, and all the casualties of
all the wars fought since the beginning of time. It is a surreal war, this one,
fought mostly by the losers: the “crazy” (chronically insane and brain-damaged)
people themselves; their protectors and advocates; neurosurgeons and
psychiatrists; some—not nearly enough—lawmakers and enlightened sheriffs of
metropolitan jails. No statistics exist to tally the number of mad people who
have lived, suffered, and died through history.

The mad people have always been losing this war. Their enemy, merciless,
intractable, apparently invincible, is: Nothing. Nothingness. Silence.
Indifference. Contempt. 

And mute primal fear. The seriously mentally ill are unique among the world’s
dispossessed in that their mere presence repels and terrifies. They reawaken
ancient superstitions of demonic transformation. Myths of the vampire and the
werewolf, the tale of Jekyll and Hyde—these fantasies merge seamlessly with
medieval notions of insane people as monsters, their heads roiling with evil
spirits that can be released only by boring a hole through the skull. And the
most nightmarish notion of them all: What if I am one of them and don’t know it?

Best to keep away. And keep “them” away. 

Particles of hope are coalescing. Print and broadcast journalism now cover
mental-health issues with clarity and urgency hardly seen a decade ago. This
surge could flow from the wave of grass-roots advocacy that sprang up at about
the same time—the networking of infuriated victims’ mothers, internet-linked
coalitions, advocacy groups in cities and towns, enlightened free-lance
activists. 

Two important examples come to mind. Both were published in medium-sized
California newspapers (an endangered yet essential species in today’s
communications world). The first was written by Joceyln Weiner of Cal Matters, a
Salinas paper, and appeared in February 2020. Weiner has covered the Mark Rippee
story for years and understands the web of vexed policy issues such as of forced
treatment, which would enable the involuntary hospitalization of victims who
need supervision but don’t want it and are entitled to reject it—people such as
Mark Rippee.

Weiner also laid out the excruciating barriers to conservatorship, a court order
that eluded the frequent desperate pleadings and petitions of Mark’s sisters.
Conservatorship can let a court officer appoint someone to oversee the safety
and interests of a person whose mental capacities are deformed. Cathy and Linda
Rippee appealed with obsessive ardor, over years, to the Solano County Board of
Supervisors for conservatorship of Mark. Every appeal has been denied on arcane
policy grounds—hence their constant searches for their brother on Vacaville’s
streets and alleys and strip malls. A fundamental reason for the rejections was
that Mark Rippee was not (wait for it) “gravely disabled” and thus not eligible.
He could do some things for himself, you see. Like crawl under a newspaper on a
frigid night.

Another Alice-in-Wonderland rationale of the Board, as Weiner pointed out, was
that Mark could not be conserved because each time he was placed on an
involuntary hold, he stabilized to the point that he legally had to be released.
Stable, and not disabled. Got it.

The second exemplary essay was published the day after Mark died, under the
byline of the acclaimed Melinda Henneberger, writing in the Sacramento Bee.
After a ten-year career at the New York Times, Henneberger won a Pulitzer Prize
at the Kansas City Star in 2022, then moved to The Bee as a columnist. Her piece
is at once empathetic toward Mark and lacerating toward those who did nothing as
he wandered, weakened, and perished: 

> “I say ‘we’ let him die, let’s call the roll: Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed state
> Sen. Henry Stern’s ‘Housing that Heals’ bill, which would have guaranteed the
> right to treatment for severely mentally ill and unhoused Californians like
> Mark . . . Mark thought the voices he heard were being broadcast by
> extraterrestrials from a military submarine using ‘mind warfare’ to turn
> ‘almost every single person in my life against me’ . . . Anyone who doubts
> that Mark was not capable of freely choosing or rejecting treatment can clear
> up his confusion by spending five minutes with one of the many untreated
> severely mentally ill homeless people screaming nonsense at no one on the
> streets of Sacramento and every other city.”

And as for the Rippees’ failed crusade to obtain conservatorship over Mark,
Henneberger writes:

> “Another bill that might have kept Mark alive was state Sen. Susan Eggman’s
> legislation, which would expand California’s definition of ‘gravely disabled’
> to make it easier for people like Mark to get help. Though his initial
> diagnosis was a traumatic brain injury, he supposedly still didn’t qualify for
> a conservatorship on a medical basis. And in Solano County, he didn’t qualify
> for a conservatorship based on his mental illness, either. Every county
> interprets ‘gravely disabled’ differently.”



I personally have written many times about James Mark Rippee on my blog
noonecaresaboutcrazypeople.com. The blog’s name is taken from my 2017 book, No
One Cares About Crazy People, which I wrote following the suicide of my younger
son Kevin, who had battled schizoaffective disorder for years. My friend and
colleague Gail Freedman is directing a video expansion of the book.

James Mark Rippee is receiving, in death, a parcel of the attention and analysis
that he was denied for most of his life. His sister Catherine predicted in her
fury and grief that the attention will last for about a minute.

We—the all-inclusive and thus almost meaningless “we” that Melinda Henneberger
sardonically referenced—must see that it lasts longer than that.

To assert this necessity is not to imply my belief that it will come about. The
heartbreaking, blind wreckage of a man who for years shambled the streets of
Vacaville may well vanish into “our” collective memory faster than a mass
shooting. Yet “we,” and we, must try. To paraphrase Beckett, we can’t go on.
We’ll go on. As Linda and Catherine Rippee vowed that they would do, “we”—the
“we” who care about crazy people—will keep pushing for jail, prison, hospital,
and public policy reform in the sub-nation of mental health care. We will keep
pushing to free the crazy people from puerile and outdated restrictions such as
the HIPAA laws. We will keep trying to educate our fellow citizens; to cleanse
their “normal” minds of destructive superstitions. We will. . . well, we will. 

A statue would help shore up our morale. It will not be an imposing statue, with
its eyeless face and its smashed and scarred features. Yet those same qualities
will invest it with beauty, and consecrate the cause.








Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on December 1, 2022December 2,
2022Categories Mental Illness AdvocacyTags healthcare policy, healthcare reform,
homelessness, mark rippee, tbiLeave a comment on A STATUE FOR JAMES MARK RIPPEE 


MSNBC TAKES A SHALLOW DIVE INTO MENTAL ILLNESS

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Sadly, the road to
mental-illness coverage is fashioned from similar material.


Nicolle Wallace credit: Abovfold, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Nicolle Wallace is an elite and excellent television journalist. She hosts a
Monday-Friday marathon of two-hour news interviews, MSNBC’s Deadline: White
House, in which she and her guests dissect the flood of political stories
pouring out of the nation’s capital. Riding the crest of this flood for the last
several years, of course, has been the Captain Bligh of American conversation,
Donald Trump. Trump’s inevitable dominance of the daily news cycle guarantees
that much of the expert talk will recapitulate what has been reported on
previous days. This is hardly Wallace’s fault, and she brings heroic
preparation, intensity, and palpable human passion to her daily goal of making
it all fresh and compelling yet again. My wife Honoree and I are grateful
viewers of her program.

Aware of her thematic constrictions, Wallace and her producers made an
enterprising decision not long ago: they would embark on an occasional series of
mini-documentaries exploring topics rarely or glancingly noticed on regular
newscasts. Under the rubric Deadline: Special Report, these segments are being
streamed on NBC’s affiliate cable channel, Peacock, and occasionally on
Wallace’s MSNBC show.  

As Wallace explained to Variety, “The idea is to do multiple series and deep
dives into single topics without overlapping too much with what we do on the
broadcast.”

This is a rare and noble impulse, yet it comes with a caveat: when you promise
to do deep dives, you need to dive deep.

The debut Special Report is streaming now on Peacock: the four-part America’s
Mental Health Emergency. Three of the four interview guests offer a tipoff that
the Report’s aims are no more than snorkel-level. 

Lindsey Vonn credit Duncan Rawlinson CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

These three are celebrities. Granted, they are celebrities who have “gone
through a lot,” as the saying has it. Yet their presence as guests only
reinforces the weary television trope that no issue will engage an audience
unless a super-star shows up to validate it. The travails of Olympic skier
Lindsey Vonn and the actors Rosie Perez and Taraji P. Henson, while clearly real
and devastating to them, do not begin to embrace the totality of what “mental
illness” means at the depths of its menace to human reason. 

The fourth-segment guest nudges the Report toward this level, yet it’s a faint
nudge. Wallace interviews the estimable Shilpa Taufique, Ph.D., director of the
Division of Psychology at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. Dr. Taufique is
also the founder of the small Comprehensive Adolescent Rehabilitation Education
center (CARES), which consults with distressed children.

I mean no disrespect for Dr. Taufique’s good work when I point out that her
segment has the whiff of “obligatory,” and serves to extend the great “sin” of
the Report’s first three episodes: the sin of omission. 

Omitted is any mention of the emperor of all mental maladies. [efn_note]With
apologies to Sidddhartha Mukherjee’s towering 2010 book, The Emperor of All
Maladies: a Biography of Cancer.[/efn_note].  It goes by several names: serious
(or chronic) mental illness. Brain disease. The psychotic family of
schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder. No journalistic
project that calls itself a “special” “deep dive” into “America’s mental-health
emergency” has a right to ignore it. Yet they do, routinely.

The ultimate origins of this abhorrent disease are not yet fully understood by
neuroscience. It is known to be partly inherited, a (relatively) rare cocktail
of flawed genes that usually forms in mid-adolescence, when the brain is subject
to a massive “pruning,” a replacement of outworn genes with new ones that will
control the brain until the end of life. The chaotic power of these genes, their
obliteration of reason and self-awareness, can be touched off by severe stress
of various kinds. 

One would not know that by watching the four installments of America’s
Mental-Health Emergency. One would be part of the vast majority of Americans.
It’s possible that Nicolle Wallace and her producers are in the dark—out of
their depth—as well. Serious Mental Illness is an awful calamity that calls up
primal fear. It repels people who still buy into the medieval superstition that
“crazy people,” “whack jobs” and “psychos” can shape-shift into murderous
monsters. (Think upon the myths of Dracula, the Wolf Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mister
Hyde.)

This superstition, this bigotry, this denial have taken an obscene toll on
society. Half measures and misspent funds drain our wealth. (Think of the
homeless crisis and of the mentally damaged people in that population.)
Political leaders remain benighted and callous. County jails, urban and
small-town, are filled with suffering souls who belong in mental care centers,
watched by doctors who can keep the victim stabilized with medication. (The
brutal jail version of special care is solitary confinement, which increases
psychosis.) General hospitals toss uninsured patients into the streets. Mindless
policies such as the HIPAA code, which prohibits family members from learning
the condition of a hospitalized loved one, remain on the books. Lobotomies
remain legal. The manifold horror stories of psychotic victims barely out of
childhood yet brutalized as criminal adults continue apace, as they have since
the Bedlam Asylum was opened in 1329. Mothers’ frantic pleas for help, for
simple understanding, continue to haunt my in-box and my dreams five years after
No One Cares About Crazy People was published. I recall a long evening of
emailing back and forth with a mother in Florida, trapped inside her house as
her deracinated son pounded on the door, threatening to kill her.

And how has MSNBC/Peacock’s “deep dive” enlightened us?

It pains me to write what I am about to write, Nicolle Wallace. I admire you and
know your intentions are good. But I am writing it out of mourning, and in
adrenaline and blood.

Of Lindsay Vonn, who suffers from depression, you tell us that she “was the
world’s greatest skier and could fly down a sheet of ice at 80 miles an hour.”
You tell a panel of Today Show staffers that “Vonn was so beautiful, so
vulnerable, so open” in the interview.

Tyler West credit: Kimmy West

I could get you an introduction to Tyler West, a non-celebrity who is also
beautiful, vulnerable, and open. Or was. Tyler, who suffers from bipolar
disorder and autism, languishes in a federal prison on an unsubstantiated charge
of statutory rape, and for crossing the lawn to a neighbor’s house one night in
a psychotic state, opening the unlocked screen door, and falling asleep on a
sofa. He has been beaten by inmates to the point of brain injury; thrown into
solitary; denied medication. I have called Tyler “a symptom of America’s broken
mental health care system.” I have contacted lawyers, advocates, even a Senator,
asking for intervention. No one cares. Damndest thing.

Taraji P. Henson via Wikimedia Commons

Of Taraji P. Henson, you report that “Taraji’s character in Empire was a
magical, you know, iconic kind of woman. She was tough, she was strong . . . I
talked to her for almost an hour.”  You continue, “They [the celebrities] don’t
say anything about fame. Fame doesn’t protect them from any of this. And what
they all said and what Taraji said most powerfully was I get up every day and
try to get through the day. Rosie Perez made the same point.”

I could introduce you to many people who are incapable of getting up.

Rosie Perez credit: Joella Marano from Manhattan, NYC, CC BY-SA 2.0 via
Wikimedia Commons

You drew Rosie Perez out on her traumatic childhood. Yet the closest you or she
come to a clinical diagnosis was to report that she suffered from “PTSD.” PTSD
might or might not have led her into serious mental illness. We never learn.

I could go on—oh, could I go on—but I really do not want to berate you, Ms.
Wallace, or to belabor the point. I think I have made the point clear. Serious
mental illness, like a certain former president whom you mention daily, seems to
be above the law. Or beside it. Or ignored by it. And ignored by most state and
national leaders and journalists who might hold the malefactors and policy
laggards and brutal jail wardens accountable; increase local mental healthcare
centers instead of building new jails; develop guidelines for public/family
education along several fronts—and ultimately mobilize opinion for the creation
of a cabinet-level Department of Mental Health, which would oversee these and
other dire, overdue needs.

Now, there would be a deep dive.  



https://noonecaresfilm.com/


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on October 24, 2022October 25,
2022Categories Mental Illness AdvocacyLeave a comment on MSNBC TAKES A SHALLOW
DIVE INTO MENTAL ILLNESS


THE FILM WEBSITE FOR “NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE”

As many of you might know, my 2017 book No One Cares About Crazy People is in
development as an independent documentary film.

Gail Freedman

The director, Gail Freedman, is expanding the book’s theme to include not only
the story of my schizophrenia-afflicted family, but stories of similar families
across the United States, with interviews by Gail and footage by her crews in
various cities and towns.

This work-in-progress has great potential in expanding the story of serious
mental illness, and in educating both political leaders and citizens about SMI:
its unsuspected prevalence in the population and its untold costs in public
safety, human misery and to our national wealth. Combating SMI is a feasible
task, yet it remains crippled by the appalling lack of societal information
about its causes, dangers, and treatment. The damage is compounded by the
unconscionable negligence among policymakers, law enforcement, prison systems,
educators, and even some psychiatrists.

Gail is forging ahead on this project—traveling the country to gather portraits
of ravaged families and struggling victims—even as she continues to seek funding
for the film’s completion.

You can help. Gail has created a powerful website, filled with information and
links to glimpses of the families and experts she has interviewed. You can
access it at  https://noonecaresfilm.com.

Please review this shocking yet hopeful documentary, and help Gail complete it
and present it to the world.



Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on October 20, 2022October 20,
2022Categories Mental Illness AdvocacyLeave a comment on THE FILM WEBSITE FOR
“NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE”


MATT GAETZ, WILL YOU STOP RANTING AND START HELPING?!

Here is an open letter to a divisive Republican Florida Congressman who yet
might be of use.



Mr. Gaetz:

The July 16 edition of Salon reprinted an Alternet article that quoted some of
the vilest, most callous and repugnant remarks I have ever read—and that’s
saying something. The remarks were glazed in an oily hypocrisy as transparent as
it was fraudulent.

Matt Gatez. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of
America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons


The remarks were yours, Mr. Gaetz. (I can’t bring myself to call you
“Congressman” Gaetz, because “Congressman” is an honorific, and I have never
discovered anything in your character that suggests honor. I think I’ll call you
“Matt.”) You voiced them during a podcast on June 8. They were aimed at the
bereaved Congressman Jamie Raskin, whose son Thomas, on New Year’s Eve 2020,
committed suicide. 

The podcast was hosted by your spirit animal, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie
sat mooing with approval at your side as you spoke, occasionally belching out a
supportive comment of her own. 

Do you recall those remarks, Matt? I do. The thrust of them was that Jamie
Raskin was no longer able to discharge his congressional duties. Because his son
had committed suicide.

There are levels of inhumanity, Matt. There are levels of character destruction,
of barbarism and bullying, of abusive self-degrading malice. You know these
levels, Matt, because they are where you and your fellow congressional cretins
live like feral cliff-dwellers. Your horde has pumped these rancid values into
the public discourse over the last decade; you’ve done your best to normatize
them. To an appalling extent you’ve succeeded.

And now you have broken new mud. You’ve hacked out a new bottom level. No slur,
no lie, no amount of hateful falsity in your public past can match your soulless
verbal mugging of Congressman Raskin, a man of rare high character and rarer
courage who just now is performing the definitive public service of his life:
holding to account the moral miscreants like you who thought, on January 6,
2021, that it would be a good idea to follow Donald Trump’s goading and
vandalize the United States Capitol building in Washington.

Now you want Jamie Raskin out of Congress—you know, for his own good.
Coincidence? Maybe.

You put on your Sigmund Freud pants, Matt, to explain to us laypeople why Jamie
Raskin must retreat from the public scene: 

> “I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in
> the Congress to such an interwoven way that he’s unable to do the
> congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma .
> . . I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and
> severe ways.”

Is that what you like think, Matt? Your . . . analytical gifts are stunning. You
kept your own hide safely distant from the violence that day, yet you somehow
divined without evidence that it was a bunch of far-left (“anti-fa”) zealots who
triggered all the trouble. Still, you were quoted as saying, “We’re proud of the
work we did on January 6th to make legitimate arguments about election
integrity.” Doesn’t this make you—oh, a proud far-left anti-fa zealot?

Jamie Raskin,  U.S. representative for Maryland’s 8th congressional district 

Here, though, is the nub of it, Matt: Congressman Raskin will surmount your
venomous hypocrisy. Your real victims are the millions of Americans whose lives
have been scarred by a child’s mental illness and/or suicide. Often these people
are shunned into the bargain by a society that assumes they are crazy
themselves, or somehow to blame. I speak from experience. Now
they—we—Congressman Raskin—suffer a fresh round of gratuitous stigma, via your
clueless and falsehearted claim that such bereavement robs survivors of the
ability to function. 

Statistics on mental illness vary, as do definitions of mental illness. The
National Association on Mental Illness reports that more than 14 million people
suffered serious mental illness (incurable brain diseases such as schizophrenia)
in 2021. Lesser forms of mental illness affected a fifth of the population.
Suicide rates are easier to pin down. Some 46 thousand Americans killed
themselves in 2021. About half of these were mentally ill. The Raskin family
courageously announced that Tommy, a Harvard Law School student, had suffered
from serious depression for years. Depression is a leading symptom of chronic
bipolar disorder.

The Raskin family made their announcement to combat stigma. 

What was your own point, Matt?

History and common sense make you look like a fool, Matt, perish the thought.
“And death shall have no dominion,” wrote Dylan Thomas, and for most bereaved
people, this is at least partly true. They forge on. Abraham and Mary Todd
Lincoln lost their beloved 11-year-old son Todd to typhoid fever in February
1862, in the midst of the Civil War. Less than a year later, Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation. Meningitis took the life of Susy Clemens, Mark
Twain’s cherished daughter, while Sam and Olivia were away in Europe. “It is one
of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive
a thunder-stroke like that and live” Sam wrote. Yet he did live, and wrote some
of his more important works before his own death in 1910. 

The list goes on to encompass the millions of unknown parents and siblings who
bravely have forged on, electing to consecrate their lives and work to the
memories of their lost loved ones. 

Your intrusion into the Raskins’ grief was out of line, Matt Gaetz. Only those
who have actually lost a child, to suicide or otherwise, are qualified to
discuss the despair that descends, against their will, until “comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God,” per Aeschylus.

The Alternet quotes you as saying, piously, “[Y]ou know, no one would ever want
to lose a child, particularly to suicide,” and, “As human beings, our hearts go
out to him.” How true and how touching. You could prove your sincerity and
commitment to these remarks in many ways. 

The American mental healthcare system is in shambles. This year, committees in
both houses of Congress at last began to focus on solutions. The Senate Finance
Committee has released a discussion draft regarding mental health care for young
people in Medicaid. In May, President Biden released his draft for a
comprehensive strategy. And less than a month ago, your body, the House of
Representatives, passed the Mental Health and Well Being Act, and two other acts
aimed at reclaiming those afflicted with madness and addiction.

These are essential yet tiny steps. Massive work remains to be done: reforming
our medieval criminal-justice system as it relates to mentally ill prisoners;
rewriting outdated and harmful policy mandates; training many more care workers;
speeding up access to diagnosis and treatment; vastly increasing public
education; perhaps even creating a cabinet-level office to unify these and all
other operations. Oh yes: and reducing stigma. 

Have you thought of taking a leadership role in some or all of these
initiatives, Congressman Matthew Gates? Being a part of seminal reform in mental
healthcare would give your legacy a priceless quantum boost. It might even get
your thoughts diverted from political conspiracies—which, after all, as you
might know, can be a sign of paranoia.


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on July 19, 2022July 20,
2022Categories politicsTags gaetz, mental health care, raskin, suicideLeave a
comment on MATT GAETZ, WILL YOU STOP RANTING AND START HELPING?!


“HOPE, HOPE TO THE LAST . . .”

. . And there are a couple of new reasons to hope, in the struggle against
mental illness.



Tomorrow Was Yesterday (subtitled “Explosive First-Person Indictments of the US
Mental Health System— Mothers Across the Nation Tell It Like It Is”) is the
second of two essential books produced by the fiercely eloquent Dede Moon
Ranahan since her son Pat died in July 2014, in a hospital psychiatric ward. It
follows on the heels of Sooner Than Tomorrow: A Mother’s Diary About Mental
Illness, Family, and Everyday Life, which appeared in April 2019, and was
written while Pat was still living, and no one foresaw his imminent death.


Dede Ranahan

Her first book reached out to mothers of afflicted and lost children, making
common cause with their plight and her own. (And why is it, I ask again, that
mothers seem always to be the point-parents in dialogues about m.i.? Where are
the fathers?!) This second work is even more ambitious. It’s a compendium of
stories that Ms. Ranahan has exhaustively retrieved from mothers in similar
straits. It brings to mind the protean books of Studs Terkel more than a
generation ago. Ms. Ranahan writes that she chose this interview-and-transcribe
approach in lieu of “an extended rant,” and she has been forthright about the
psychic weariness this journey has cost her. If you are lucky enough not to have
lived in this horrific “sub-nation,” with its attendant catastrophes of
diagnosis, effective treatment, ruinous healthcare costs, courtroom and criminal
justice, effective political leadership, and awareness in the culture at large,
please read Ms. Ranahan. And then get busy. You could help change the world. And
DeDe Ranahan is now enshrined in the literature of enlightenment.




The second reason for fresh hope is a new call to arms by Thomas Insel, the
former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and a figure known as
“the nation’s psychiatrist.” It is titled Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness
to Mental Health.

Thomas Insel


In the tradition of the late D.J. Jaffe, but with a psychiatrist’s grounding in
nosology and a journalist’s zeal for social and civic truths, Insel explores the
strange disconnect between stunning advances in the understanding of why and how
the human brain can run amok, and the infuriating stagnation of actual
reclamation for the mentally ill. He writes with laser-like clarity and the
assurance of a master in his field.

I can’t recommend this book with any more persuasion than that of the great
advocate Pete Earley, who writes on the back cover:

> “’Healing’ is truly one of the best books ever written about mental illness,
> and I think I’ve read them all. Dr. Insel speaks as a parent, scientist,
> doctor . . . defining what’s wrong and offering clear-headed solutions—all the
> while guiding us forward with compassion, goodness, and hope in this
> juggernaut wake-up call.”


“ . . . and hope.” Yes.


Author noonecaresaboutcrazypeople_1y4oqpPosted on March 4, 2022March 4,
2022Categories UncategorizedTags mental health, mental illnessLeave a comment on
“Hope, hope to the last . . .”


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