Funny or Offensive?: Potter Fan Commits Suicide

Andy Borowitz on the Huffington Post:

HUDSON, OHIO (The Borowitz Report) — A rabid Harry Potter fan took his life yesterday after inadvertently learning a plot spoiler from the soon-to-be-released J.K. Rowling movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” 



Jude Ralston, 32, of Hudson, Ohio left a suicide note indicating that since overhearing the plot spoiler at a shopping mall earlier in the day, “I no longer have a reason to live.” 



Family and friends who gathered for a candlelight memorial outside Mr. Ralston’s house remembered a man who seemed to live only for Harry Potter – and wondered if they could have done anything to prevent his tragic fate. 



“When Jude got that vanity license plate that said ‘Hogwarts,’ that seemed harmless enough,” said Polly Clovis, who attended Model U.N. with Mr. Ralston while the two were in high school. “But when he started wearing that wizard hat around town, we really should have seen that as a cry for help.” 



Man Commits Suicide After Learning Harry Potter Spoiler

liz | 12:14 PM | Funny or Offensive?

This Didn’t Have to Happen

A woman gets picked up for shoplifting in Edison, NJ, and taken to jail. She’s 30. Things are not looking good. She’s from Somerset, NJ–not exactly a den of iniquity. Who knows what’s going on in her life? The end of this story should not be that she dies, in a jail, of suicide. This is the second inmate suicide at the Middlesex County Jail in recent memory. Their website says:

Middlesex County has a long history of national leadership in jail operations. In 1917, when the jail opened in New Brunswick, Middlesex pioneered a number of architectural innovations.

In 1978, the Board of Freeholders combined the jail and the workhouse into a unified Department of Corrections. A modern facility was constructed in North Brunswick and the old buildings were closed. Since opening in 1984, the Adult Correction Center has been recognized as a leader in Direct Supervision Jail Management. Through the years, jail leaders from all around the country (and even overseas) have visited Middlesex County.

In 2005, the Middlesex County Department of Corrections processed over 12,000 inmate commitments. The average daily population of the facility totaled 1,182.

The Department of Corrections is composed of 292 employees, administrators, correction officers, supervisors and support staff.

Well, isn’t that nice. I’d ask Warden Edmond C. Cicchi, the Director of the Department of Corrections, what happened here. According to the website, “He is responsible to ensure the highest degree of protection for the citizens of Middlesex County and to ensure the safety of the staff through the secure confinement of inmates committed to the Middlesex County Department of Corrections.”

That doesn’t mention anything about the safety of inmates nor the safety of citizens from other counties. Was that why she wasn’t monitored appropriately?

Franklin Township woman commits suicide in Middlesex County jail, authorities say

liz | 8:41 AM | criminal justice system

Lost to Illness?

This film came out in 2007, but I haven’t heard much about how the subject of the film is faring. The filmmaker can still be found, but where is Sam?

liz | 12:03 PM | bipolar disorder, media

R.I.P. Mumford Morgan/Further Explanation of Mental Health Court

The Philadelphia Daily News had a good editorial on Friday about “sequential interception,” which is the approach taken both by the new mental health court and by the Crisis Intervention Teams that work within the police department. From that editorial:

Unfortunately for Mumford Morgan, this unit was not called when police shot and killed him last Friday in Dilworth Plaza. Morgan, 59, who was homeless and apparently mentally ill, made 40 calls in just over two hours from an emergency call box in the concourse under the Municipal Services Building. When two police officers arrived, he raised a utility knife and was shot to death.

Mental-health advocates are rightly asking why the CIT was not called to the scene and why police did not use Tasers instead of guns to subdue Mumford. We urge the Police Department to review the case and renew its commitment to CIT.

The editorial goes on to endorse the new court by explaining its roots and purpose. Please, naysayers, read this carefully:

The court and the CIT are responses to a complex problem that began decades ago when the closing of state hospitals released mentally ill people into the community without adequate support or services.

Decades later, the high numbers of mentally ill people occupying prisons – some reports put the number at 30 percent of the inmate population – suggests that in too many cases, prisons have replaced state hospitals.

This has huge impacts on both management and budgets. Consider: The Philadelphia prison system is the largest provider of mental-health services in the state of Pennsylvania, according to a report from former city prisons chief Leon King.

The mental health court is a small step, but the right one. The new court will begin with 15 carefully screened inmates who are about to be released, who will get supervision and treatment. Funded by a state grant, the court will handle only non-violent offenders. If that works, presumably more ex-inmates will be added to the court’s supervision.

There’s no shortage of prisoners who could benefit. It’s a component of many arrests for public disturbances, theft, drugs, aggressive panhandling and – in less common instances – violent crimes. Add in addiction, homelessness, and an insufficient health-care system and it’s no surprise that more mentally ill people are receiving more treatment in jail than in hospitals.

But hospital stays are short compared to prison sentences, and mentally ill prisoners tend to be incarcerated longer than average due in part to their conditions: In jail, they might be taken off medications abruptly, which can lead to acute episodes, behavioral infractions, and more time tacked on. A similar cycle traps recently-released prisoners as they return to the community, leading to high rates of recidivism.

Full article here.

liz | 9:18 AM | criminal justice system, philadelphia

Mental Health Court, Round Three

Okay, below I issued a response to a general assertion about probation and parole. But to get Philly-specific, this idea is far from scary for offenders. In fact, it’s already in use, in a sense. From the Inky article:

One reason the Mental Health Court concept was supported by such diverse parties as prosecutor Abraham and Chief Public Defender Ellen T. Greenlee is that pieces of it have been used for at least two years.

Since 2007, criminal defendants with mental illnesses have had their cases assigned to a single Municipal Court judge who works with prosecution and defense lawyers and court-appointed mental-health experts to ensure those awaiting trial get treatment.

The Mental Health Court extends the concept post-prison.

Abraham said 500 nonviolent defendants had gone through the predecessor program since 2007 and “no one has been a recidivist. That’s a very enviable record.”

It certainly is. Also:

A $60,000 state grant will underwrite start-up costs, but personnel will be drawn from existing probation and mental-health-services agencies.

Woods-Skipper said the current staff could handle about 70 people before personnel would have to be added.

Also, we have to keep in mind that the emphasis of this pilot program is re-entry, i.e., reintegration with the community. This is something Philly hasn’t been great at, but is trying all the time to improve upon .

liz | 11:05 AM | criminal justice system

Mental Health Court, Round Two

Yesterday I linked to a story in the Philly Inquirer about the establishment of a Mental Health Court here in Philly. A reader left this comment:

Well that settles it, not moving back to Philly. MH Courts are just another form of forced drugging. Why not use parole and probation which are set up to do the same thing but do it better?

I have to vehemently disagree. As someone who worked for an agency that advocated for incarcerated people and people with criminal background issues–including many people who have mental illnesses–I can assure you parole or probation do not do it better.

Probation officers are often like any other civil employees: overworked, under-resourced, frustrated by the limitations of the system. They can be burdened by high caseloads and unable–through no fault of their own–to pay sufficient attention to individual needs. They are tasked with ensuring that people who have been deemed problematically unable to abide by society’s rules now comply–with the understanding that further punishment is just around the corner. Anyone who’s been in jail or prison knows that being on probation is a horrendous state of purgatory; and due to lack of appropriate staffing and systemic inadequacies, mistakes get made. People get cycled back into jail by accident, paperwork gets lost, individual concerns go unaddressed. The priority? Keeping society safe from the perpetrator.

At no point in this fabulous process–despite the best efforts of the many wonderful people who work in probation and parole for all the right reasons–is the issue of the best mental health care truly assessed. “You taking your meds?” Check. “You pee into the cup?” Check. “You change your address?” Nope. Hello and goodbye. How many times did I, as an advocate, try to get people to have more fruitful relationships with their parole officers based on expanding the understanding of mental illnesses and how they could or did not promote certain behaviors? How do you educate the world?

The reality is that specialization is key. If someone has a mental illness, and this illness is implicated in their inability to abide by certain rules, it is far better to have their case adjudicated by a body that comprehends such issues and motivations, not by people who lump them in with everyone else. There’s an interesting 2001 article from Law & Psychiatry that talks about the growing use of “therapeutic jurisprudence”:

Both mental health and drug courts have their genesis in the concept of specialty courts and the idea of therapeutic jurisprudence (2). The latter concept reflects a focus on “the extent to which legal rule or practice promotes the psychological and physical well-being of a person subject to legal proceedings” (3) as well as an “exploration of ways mental health and related disciplines can help shape the law” (4) and concern with “the roles of lawyers and judges [in] produc[ing] therapeutic and antitherapeutic consequences for individuals involved in the legal process” (5). Both drug courts and mental health courts embrace a therapeutic approach.

Now, granted, the article is old now. And it talks about the limitations of such courts at the time, which still hold: They’re idiosyncratic. Philly’s court will likely be extremely idiosyncratic, given its judge. But if we trace the possible course of a person through the “normal” system vs. a Mental Health Court, you’d see the positive difference, despite whatever frustrations you might have. The biggest difference? Potentially avoiding jail time. This is crucial. You could only believe that mental hospitals are worse than prison if you’ve never been to prison.

This is all I’m going to write now. Later I hope to write more about the problem of being imprisoned in a punitive facility rather than a treatment facility (and the question of “forced drugging”) when you’re severely mentally ill. But this should get you thinking and talking (civilly?) for now.

liz | 10:18 AM | criminal justice system

Philly Gets a Mental Health Court; Sweeney Calls Me Out

Damn — I can’t believe I got scooped by Philebrity on a mental health issue. Snap! But the truth is, this is a good thing. Yes, we will find a way to fuck it up, but it’s a start. Tomorrow we’ll talk more about it. But it’s unquestionably a positive development.

Philadelphia opens Mental Health Court

liz | 4:19 PM | criminal justice system

I Loves Me a Debate, But…

The comments for the post below are getting really interesting and heated. Every time I avoid a subject because it seems overcovered, and then I finally do write about it, I’m very glad I do. As for the issue of banning certain people (which is referred to briefly), I realize that happens on other blogs and sites, but I’m uncomfortable doing that unless a person is overtly racist, homophobic, bigoted, etc. In fact, on my YouTube site, I just got a comment from someone saying, “I’d like to watch your father molest you.” Suffice to say, not a fan. But I didn’t remove it.

I feel strongly about two things: 1) I’m lucky to have a platform, which most people do not; 2) If I put it out there, I should be able to take it. That being said, I do sometimes feel tempted to ban a person. But I feel that the person who gets banned usually hangs himself by his comments, and it’s not even necessary for me to censor him. Obviously, he’s out of control. People who read here will get that.

That’s a larger discussion, but we’re all adults here. We can be civil and agree that the most important thing is to foster conversation that may illuminate these issues. Don’t forget, commenters, that many people who read this blog may be coming here for the first time and want to learn more about mental health. The more we can educate, the better. That means personal attacks and cruel words about other websites are utterly useless to the larger world. The “crazier” we look, the more it damages our credibillity.

liz | 11:13 AM | Uncategorized

Schizophrenia in Children: January Schofield

There’s a great post over at Furious Seasons by Philip about Shari Roan’s LA Times story about a 6-year-old girl, January (pictured), who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. As Philip points out, many of us are skeptical of such an early onset and skeptical of childhood diagnoses in general. The article has caused many reactions–good and bad–which Philip generously breaks down, and questions the strange lapse (from a journalistic standpoint) of omitting facts.

What disturbs me about the whole thing is that if you read her father’s blog (the content of which isn’t mentioned in the piece), which Philip links to, you get an uncomfortable sense that Jani/Janni’s father Michael is really stubborn about his daughter’s “lifetime illness,” as he calls it. Here’s an excerpt that shows some of this recalcitrance; I’m also uncomfortable with the bolded part.

We saw Janni today and she was at her most psychotic in several weeks. I have a nice welt on my arm where she hit me when I refused to call her toy rat “99.” Of course, I was goading her, but I wanted to see if she could deal with it. Of course, she couldn’t. She’d been talking about the rats for awhile (she is back to insisting they are real-these are the rats in her head) but now the violence is back. 400 the cat has reappeared after a long absence, and 400 cat is a bad cat that tells her to hit and scream (which she is also back to doing). She is on 300 mg a day of Seroquel is doing nothing. They need to up her Thorazine from 100 mg a day as that is the only thing that works. However, we are frustrated because the staff and doctors seem to thinking that it is just her “imagination” again, and considering autism and Asperger’s (even though this has already been ruled out time and time again). Yes, she “self-stems” as they call it, rubbing her hands together real fast….but that and the “autistic” behaviors went away at 300 mg of Thorazine. I don’t know why in the hell they are so resistant to labeling her “schizophrenic” but yet so eager to label her “Asperger’s.” Is schizophrenia really so much worse? But she fucking talks to animals and people who aren’t there! And she is violent! That isn’t autism! That’s psychosis! I feel like we are just going around and around in fucking circles here.

Autism and Asperger’s aren’t so cut and dry, but as Michael writes:

It is scary to think you know more than the doctors, but the fact is we do.

Do they? I’m reading and reading his blog and the article and I’m just not sure. I understand that feeling myself, of course. I often think that. And just as often, I’m surprised to discover that I still have so much to learn. Michael Schofield’s voice on his blog makes him come across as a very angry person with serious anger management issues–a person who’s self-aggrandizing and resistant to learning new things (and who can’t seem to spell his daughter’s name the same way consistently, which is just weird).

He comes across as a person who likes the sound of his own voice and a good, punchy, writerly ending to a post more than being open-minded about what’s going on. I understand this, actually, because once we find the Answer (not Allen Iverson, but the initial diagnosis), we cling to that diagnosis, as it’s the first time anyone has taken us seriously. But after clinging to a diagnosis that may or may not be correct, it’s time to let go so that treatment is dictated not by egos and desires (whether doctors or patients or parents) but by eliminating symptoms in a safe, healthy way.

Go to Philip’s page and read the whole argument, including the comments. It’s an important discussion.

Father Of Girl With Schizophrenia Admits Hitting, Starving Girl [Furious Seasons]

[Image by Lawrence K. Ho copyright LA Times. Please don't kill me, LA Times.]

liz | 2:02 PM | SCHIZOPHRENIA, autism, children

Email Is Down

Breaking … Liz Spikol’s email is down … please use teletype to communicate, or perhaps Morse code … or perhaps for this site Morose code (more appropriate) … this cat gets the idea …

liz | 10:58 AM | random