Looking Through A Different Colored Lens

 

In the San Francisco Chronicle, reporter Rachel Swan wrote the tragic story of Laudemer Arboleda.  I subscribe to the Chronicle because it provides a different perspective on the same issues as what happen here.  The Laudemer Arboleda story was tragic for many reasons.  His life was ended when a police officer shot him for no well-defined reason.  What I felt was also particularly sad is that Laudemer had demons, he had untreated psychiatric problems.  His mother tried to get him mental health help, but the mental health system turned him away, spit him back out, without helping him. 

People look at this story through various lenses, such as untrained or incompetent or racist police officers.  I’d like you to examine a different lens—mental illness.  I’d like you to see a failed mental health system when you watch the news or many societal ills.  I’m going to tell the stories of three people who suffered from bipolar syndrome.  Each is no longer with us.

When I spoke at my mother’s funeral, many there did not know she had mental illness.  Though mental illness led to her divorce and loss of custody of her children, including me, there were only a few episodes of mental illness in her life.  It was a once every ten years problem.  Medication kept it under control.  There was the time she didn’t recognize me and was sure I was an imposter.  I showed her my driver’s license.  She still wasn’t convinced.  There was the time we called the sheriff who got us a court hearing so that she could get treatment.  We certainly would not have ever gotten her out of bed by ourselves.  My mother was a great piano player, a great example and a great mother.  She died at age 66 of kidney failure.

My aunt (my mom’s sister) also had bipolar syndrome.  I remember my grandmother and me driving to check in at her apartment one day when she was hospitalized, when I was 15.  Aunt Ellie embraced her illness just as she embraced roles when she appeared in plays.  Fellow patients were her friends.  Her psychiatrist was her hero.  When she was in hospice for lung cancer, she visited her doctor friends and fellow long-term patients one last time.  She had a productive role as a mental health advocate and politically active solid citizen of Des Moines.  My mother relied on family.  My aunt relied on her care providers.  Both successfully managed the issue, once it was identified.

Gary relied on his mother to manage his mental health issues.  When his mother died, he went off his medicine and was seriously mentally ill for five to ten years.  He moved out of his low rent house because of ghosts.  He declined free VA housing because they required him to seek mental health treatment.  He would “borrow” my father-in-law’s pickup until it ran out of gas.  One winter he moved into my father-in-law’s decrepit abandoned old farm house, no electricity, no water, mouse droppings everywhere.  He was discovered weeks later because of the $400 electrical bill after he connected a space heater to overhead power lines.  My father-in-law tried year after to year to help him by giving him money or whatever he said he needed.   Gary would tell the mental health hospital that my father-in-law was taking care of him in order to escape treatment.  As long as those demons were in his head, he was a danger to himself and others.  A passing truck hit him as he walked down the center line of a rural highway with a bicycle.  Treated, Gary was an intelligent man and good friend.  Untreated, he was a problem that the whole town knew about, nut mostly chose to ignore.

Mental illness defined my Aunt Ellie.  A person can choose to own who they are.  Mental illness shaped my mother’s life, but did not define her.    Untreated demons killed Gary.  After his mother died, mental illness controlled and defined him.  When I see homeless people on the side of the road, I see Gary and a failed mental health system.

  I challenge you to change your lens when you watch the news or drive by homeless people.  Will you see “poor people” seeking shelter?  Will you see substance abusers?  Will you see unhealthy people controlled by demons?

There are 140,000 homeless persons with serious mental illnesses in the US.

BTW, there is such thing as police officers who murder people.  Here is someone other than Derek Chauvin.  The officer who appears to have murdered Laudemer Arboleda just killed again.  Danville police say officer shot man who pulled out a knife (sfchronicle.com)