The United States attorney for Arizona, Dennis K. Burke, wrote to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that despite being under suicide watch, Loughner’s unmedicated behavior is endangering him.
It has been determined that Jared suffers from schizophrenia, and is unable to participate in his defense against the 49 charges stemming from the Arizona shootings that left six people dead and thirteen wounded. Now somebody wants to get this desperately sick young man some help. Because if he can't stand trial, then he can't be prosecuted, convicted and executed.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the prosecution, and Jared is now being forcibly medicated.
I intended to return to my NAMI Convention reporting this week. But wow. This story lands on my laptop, the very essence of the Prozac Monologues spirit.
There are so many layers of meaning here. I don't think I am up to the task of analysis. Instead I will tell another story, the original sequel to last week's rerun.
This is how a Christian community responded to the violent act of a mentally ill man. -- as they understand what it means to be Christian. From January 21, 2010 --
The Miracle of Gheel
It was seventh century Ireland. The Queen died. King Damon's grief was so deep that it moved into depression and then psychosis. He thought his daughter Dymphna was his queen. Rather than submit to his advances, Dymphna fled to Belgium, to the town of Gheel. But her father followed. When she again rebuffed him, he killed her, cut off her head. Dymphna was buried in the local church.Six centuries later, her coffin was found during renovations. Signs on the coffin demonstrated her holiness. She began to be venerated. Cures of the sick were attributed to her. She was canonized in 1247 as the patron saint of the mentally ill.
Okay, here the one last bit of unrecovered Catholic in me demands to be heard, to note Rome's fascination with girls who prefer death to rape. Even as a nine year old, that troubled me.
Abandoning The Mentally Ill -- Or Not
Moving on. People came to Gheel for healing. Many brought family members who were mentally ill. Sometimes they left them there. The priest housed these abandoned ones next to the church. When the job of caring for them became too much for him, townspeople started bringing in food. They built a hospital in the 14th century. When it was full, the real miracle of St. Dymphna occurred, or rather, began. Townspeople took some of the patients into their own homes, reserving the hospital only for those most ill.
All across Europe, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed. They were exorcised, tortured and burned at the stake. But not in Gheel.
Imagine it! A psychotic foreigner commits a terrible deed. But the townspeople do not close the borders. No, they open their homes.
And they still do. Through plagues, wars, revolutions, recessions, depressions, during the Napoleonic "Reform," when all the mentally ill people in the country were ordered into one big hospital, during the Nazi occupation, with their "final solution" for mental illness, during the latest reform when the U.S. of A. was/is dumping all our mentally ill people out of the hospitals, onto our streets and into our jails, the people of Gheel developed and continue genuine community-based mental health care.
What Community Care Looks Like
Today, there are 700 foster homes for 1000 people with mental illness. A person will enter the hospital for evaluation and stabilization. S/he meets the psychiatrist, psychologist, nurse, social worker and family practitioner who staff one of the five neighborhood community mental health centers. Each of these staff people spends half a day each week in the hospital, so everybody gets to know everybody. The potential foster family and patient meet at the hospital, then over tea at home, then over a meal, then over a weekend before placement. Outpatient care, medication monitoring and therapy continue at the neighborhood center. If possible, the biological family participates in the treatment plan.
But What About Relapse?
What if the person's symptoms flair? We say s/he is having a bad day. Because the person lives in a family, not on the streets or alone in an apartment, problems are caught and addressed early, not after getting fired or evicted or arrested or in a bloody mess. If needed, s/he can go back to the hospital for a while. In fact, the hospital is not the place of last resort. When the foster family has to go out of town, say, for a funeral, the person can stay at the hospital. There is continuity of care. There is care.
Three years ago I wrote a chapter for Deep Calling called, If This Were Cancer. I detailed all the ways that hospice patients receive the support of others, and that people who have suicidal depression do not. If this were cancer, there would be casseroles... I imagined the total collapse of care for the mentally ill, under the weight of our crazy health care system. In fact, it's happening as I write.
I am ever so grateful to Janet, whose last name I don't remember, who gave me Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Healing and Home on the Streets by Craig Rennebohm, the source of this story.
Lord God, Who has graciously chosen Saint Dymphna to be the patroness of those afflicted with mental and nervous disorders, and has caused her to be an inspiration and a symbol of charity to the thousands who invoke her intercession, grant through the prayers of this pure, youthful martyr, relief and consolation to all who suffer from these disturbances, and especially to those for whom we now pray. (Here mention those for whom you wish to pray.)
We beg You to accept and grant the prayers of Saint Dymphna on our behalf. Grant to those we have particularly recommended patience in their sufferings and resignation to Your Divine Will. Fill them with hope and, if it is according to Your Divine Plan, bestow upon them the cure they so earnestly desire. Grant this through Christ Our Lord. Amen.
... I think maybe Jared could use our prayers, too.
photo of Risperidone by V1ND3M14TR1X and used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
image of Dymphna in the public domain
A Kitchen Interior by Joachim Beuckelaer, 16th c., in the public domain
book cover from amazon.com
I just started The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Yes, I spelled his name correctly. Another friend, a bookophile who knows loony recommends it. It is the first of Fforde's loony alternate reality series, starring Special Operative Thursday Next, a literary detective who is chasing down the evil Acheron Hades who has stolen... It's a Lost in Austen/Inkheart kind of alternate reality, blurring the boundaries between the world of normals and the many worlds of books. But today I am going back to the library to check out the original Jane Eyre. Okay, okay -- I've never gotten around to it, just seen the movie version. What with Fforde bending time and plot, I can tell I will miss stuff if I don't know the original.
Alternate Worlds
Chabon provides another alternate world in a tale of two Jewish adventurerers, Gentlemen of the Road. Set in 10th century Khazaria, two con men/bodyguards/swashbucklers star in a dime store novel with elegant prose, inadvertently fighting for justice and the rightful heir to the Khazarian throne.
Not all alternate worlds are fantastical. Like Gentlemen of the Road, books set in real times and places can sweep you up so that you leave your own world and enter the author's. The day my mother left her third husband, the good stepfather, separating hers and theirs from his, I postponed going crazy by moving to China via Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. Seventy years after it won a Pulitzer Prize, Oprah made it a Book Club pick.
Rounding out our alternate world category, Ellis Peters takes us to a Benedictine monastery in twelfth century England, in the midst of a civil war. Cadfael is a second career monk, a crusader turned herbalist and forensic scientist detective. The series starts with A Morbid Taste for Bones and goes on for nineteen more volumes -- God bless Ellis Peters. This series has also been filmed, with Derek Jacobi as Cadfael.
Nonfiction Anyway
Douglas Adams and Hebrew poetry have both inspired me through the years. If they tell you three, then they add a fourth. I told you I had two categories. So here is a third -- compelling nonfiction. These two are on my own to read list:
The first is friend-recommended The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It is a tragic story of the clash between two cultures, that of the Hmong and that of Western medicine. The parents say Baby Lia Lee's soul is outside her body, captured by an evil spirit. She needs a shaman. The doctors say she has epilepsy. She needs medication. The doctors win. The results are not good. I haven't been reading biographies of people who live with mental illness lately. But I might make an exception for this one.
The second and last is Invictus: Nelson Mandela and The Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin. This edition has pictures from the movie. The original edition is titled Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Combine the typical sports narrative structure: loser team triumphs, with that incredible, grace-filled moment in human history: oppressed people triumph and don't wreck vengeance on the oppressors.
Memoirs, Anyone?
So there are more than enough books to fill out my local library's summer reading club requirements. I'm thinking of an autumn post with a list of mental illness memoirs: Kay Jamison, Elizabeth Wurtzel, etc. Recommendations?
What are you reading this summer? Enjoy.
book jackets by amazon.com
illustration of popcorn by digitalart used by permission