The Stories You Don’t Hear About

So many people with mental illnesses get caught up in the tangle of the criminal justice system. This is something I witnessed firsthand in my work with a prison reform organization that provided services to incarcerated people and their families. These people aren’t on the radar most of the time. No one cares. No one knows, mostly.

One such story — and there are many others — is that of Felice Debra Eliscu in Wisconsin. From MindFreedom:

Felice tells MindFreedom that a lot of her current troubles started in 2001 when she got into a dispute with a correction’s officer, and she was charged with assault. She was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” and spent several years locked up in the Winnebago psychiatric institution where she was forcibly drugged.

She was let out about three years ago under a program called “conditional release” where she had to agree to take powerful psychiatric drugs, perhaps for the rest of her life, in exchange for her freedom.

Felice says, “When I was let out of the institution I was prescribed six or seven psychiatric medications. My face started to twitch on Abilify, so I stopped taking it.”

Even though she says her psychiatrist supported her decision to quit Abilify, she said other parts of her psychiatric team wanted her to continue taking such powerful neuroleptic or “antipsychotic” psychiatric drugs.

She said her outpatient forced drugging was monitored by Lutheran Social Services, which even has religious content in their printed material for the program. Felice said at one point three college students were hired, and one by one they would drop by each and every day at Felice’s home to watch her take her psychiatric drugs at 8 am, noon and 4 pm.

“All the forced drugging finally freaked me out,” says Felice. “Last week I took a bunch of pills. I didn’t mean to kill myself. I meant it as a radical statement.”
…

On 6 August 2008, after taking the bunch of pills, Felice was admitted based what was seen as a suicide attempt, which is a violation of her conditional release.

“I’m worried I’ll lose everything. The mental health system runs everything, my housing, my possessions. They even own the parking lot where my vehicle is parked. I want the forced drugging to stop. I want help, but I don’t want forced psychiatric drugging.”

In my social work career (brief though it was) I saw enough variations on Felice’s theme to know how messed up things can get if you find yourself enmeshed in the prison system/mental health system.

For more on Felice, click here.

[Art by Felice.]

liz | 9:59 AM | Uncategorized