My friend\u2019s life was dominated by her mentally ill son.<\/p>\n
He was schizophrenic and had dangerous delusions.\u00a0 He would be committed to the New Mexico State Hospital in Las Vegas for six months at a time, but could not be kept longer than that due to laws intended to safeguard the freedoms of the mentally ill.<\/p>\n
She worried about him in the hospital because of the living conditions, but she worried about him much more when he was free.\u00a0\u00a0 The cycle of events was predictable.\u00a0 He\u2019d be hospitalized, medicated, stabilized.\u00a0 The law required that he be released because he was demonstrably stable as long as he stayed on his meds.\u00a0 Then he\u2019d get out and come back to the only home town he knew.\u00a0 He would stop taking the meds and would get involved with low lifes who shared bad street drugs with him and took whatever money he had.\u00a0 The delusions would come back and he would do something awful — life-threatening, perhaps — that would eventually land him back in Las Vegas.\u00a0\u00a0 A neighbor of his mother\u2019s was, for no logical reason, the object of some of his delusions.\u00a0 He believed messages from alien spacecraft emanated from the neighbor\u2019s house, she told me.\u00a0 Once he drove a car into the neighbor\u2019s living room.<\/p>\n
She spent more money than she had trying to get him help.\u00a0 Nothing worked.\u00a0 Once she found a miracle cure — a radical change of diet \u00a0— and told me with tears of joy that after all these years she had her son back.\u00a0 He was in his 30s.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t last.<\/p>\n
Does everybody have at least one story about mental illness, about a life ruined, about heartbroken parents who try everything and blame themselves\u00a0 — for their failures, their omissions, their flawed genes?\u00a0 I have more stories.\u00a0 \u00a0New Mexico has many.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, with the legislature in session, I remember Joe Mercer, whom I knew well and admired immensely.\u00a0 Joe barely missed becoming Governor of New Mexico in 1986.\u00a0 He was shot to death by his mentally ill son Stephen in 1994, along with sheriff’s officer Bill Sibrava, when they went to Stephen’s home to take him to the hospital.\u00a0 Stephen Mercer was also killed in the incident — a not uncommon outcome for mentally ill individuals in police encounters.<\/p>\n
Some decades ago, laws were changed to close the inhumane “snake pit” mental hospitals of the past and replace them with community facilities allowing greater freedom for the residents.\u00a0 You will not be surprised that the community facilities have never been adequately funded, perhaps because they are inherently much more expensive to operate.\u00a0\u00a0 This year, it would not be realistic to demand radical increases in funding.<\/p>\n
We’re going to have mentally ill people in jails and emergency rooms.\u00a0 If they cannot be proved to be an imminent danger, they can only be kept in custody for 72 hours.\u00a0 In the short term the most practical solution might be to change laws so it is easier for police to hold them for longer periods.<\/p>\n
We have to continue asking why state agencies such as CYFD hire and pay enormous sums to third party management companies, creating an expensive extra layer of bureaucracy between taxpayer dollars and mental health service providers instead of paying the providers directly.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most painful fact is that we don’t know how to cure mental illness.\u00a0 Maybe new research will find the answers, but meanwhile, some mentally ill individuals will not be “cured.”\u00a0 At best, they will only be managed.\u00a0 With the most humanitarian of intentions, we have yet to find the balance between the rights of those individuals and the hazards they pose for the rest of us.<\/p>\n
Triple Spaced Again, \u00a9 New Mexico News Services 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My friend\u2019s life was dominated by her mentally ill son. He was schizophrenic and had dangerous delusions.\u00a0 He would be committed to the New Mexico State Hospital in Las Vegas for six months at a time, but could not be … Continue reading