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Lessons
from grateful dead children of a lesser god
 I'm
a loser. How do I know? Because somebody's dead, the latest in a long
line of casualties I've been working 25 years to prevent.I never met her, but
I knew Leslie Carter. I never met any of the others, either. But I've
done my best to patch up our tattered safety net to catch them when
they fall.I got started working
for the rights of the mentally disabled quite by accident in 1972. I
heard that state mental health staffers had been coerced to work for
a certain pet assemblyman's re-election. Since the feds were paying
the salaries in question, a violation of federal law was involved.It took me more than
two years to break the story. By then, an advocacy group had formed.
Citizens for Humanity in Mental Health was headed by Lolly
Giudici. They persuaded Robert Plotkin of the Ralph Nader-affilated
Mental Health Law Project to look into Nevada patient care. In
just three days, he identified a laundry list of potential legal actions.
The showdown came at a public meeting at the Nevada Mental Health
Institute in Sparks. The citizens' group decided to accept the state's
promise to do better. Court supervision after winning a lawsuit would
have worked a lot better than what we have seen in the intervening two
decades. Court orders have teeth. Legislative and regulatory mandates
have never worked.A 1978 legislative report
stated that patients often received no treatment besides drugs. Today,
the Sparks institute remains basically a dispensary of mismanaged medication
and big-money subcontracts.While maltreatment of
the mentally ill is nothing new, turning them into the hardcore homeless
can be traced to one guy with good intentions. Back before he became
TV's number one news punk, Geraldo Rivera was an ace investigative
reporter for a New York City TV station. One day in 1971, he walked
in, unannounced, to Willowbrook Hospital, a true snake pit of
flesh warehousing.People all over the big
apple got sick while eating their dinner that night. Instead of happy
talk, they saw twisted children lying in their own filth with flies
all over them.In originating the video
ambush, Geraldo Rivera accidentally pioneered the era of patients' rights.
The operative philosophy became treat them, or release them. Flesh warehousing
was out. Community based care was in.But "community facilities
were not set up to provide continuing treatment for patients being released,"
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey wrote in the Wall Street Journal
in 1987. "Adequate low cost housing for released patients was never
developed," he added. "The attempts by all three levels of government
to transfer the fiscal burden to one another and minimize their own
responsibility would be ludicrous if human beings were not involved,"
he asserted.If that sounds a bit
like Ronald Reagan's "New Federalism," you've got a good memory.
Reagan popularized cutting every budget but war and pork. Combined with
crumbling Vietnam vets, the mentally disabled began to get very visible.
The homeless problem was born.Referring to a closed
New York hospital, Dr. Torrey said "some of the same men who once used
the building as part of the psychiatric hospital now use it as a shelter—
only now there are no nurses, no doctors, no activities and no treatment."
Sound familiar?In 1971, newly-elected
Gov. Mike O'Callaghan pushed for and won substantially increased
funding for the state division of mental hygiene and retardation. The
money was sorely needed and the booming state had it to spare, with
plenty of extra help from the feds. Alas, the new bureaucrats in charge
soon learned how to milk the fresh cash cow.Public relations predominated
over patient care. Getting federal funds at any cost became the priority.
The infamous "schizomobile" was put on Reno-Sparks streets, cruising
for anyone whose diagnosis might be stretched to include schizophrenia
because of heavy federal money available to treat it. Sparks and Reno
had a veritable schizophrenic epidemic, at least on paper. When I exposed
the practice, institute administrators announced the program had been
so successful that it was being eliminated.Every time we broke a
new scandal, the perpetrators usually got promoted. The names of the
dead have never left me. Ada Marie Young was given heavyweight
drugs without a blood test to see what else she might have taken. Drug
interactions killed her. Jesse Ege, a severely retarded little
boy, was allowed to wander away into a frozen Nevada night. They found
his body along the Truckee days later. I got a top gun trial lawyer
to represent his grandparents, but the old folks were too infirm to
see it through.John Parra. Gloria
Clower. So many haunt my memory. Gloria was a beautiful but very
insane young woman. At her family attorney's office, I viewed grisly
police crime scene photos of her death. She supposedly drowned accidentally
in a bath tub. "I suspect they killed her because she was so much trouble,"
the lawyer told me. He showed me substantial evidence backing up his
charge.Despite deaths and budget
increases, nothing seemed to change. In 1982, I heard that the paper
tiger of the hospital industry was due at the institute. The Chicago-based
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals was coming to
Sparks.My brother, who holds
a master's degree in social work, told me "don't get your hopes up.
JCAH is not an instrument of social change. They basically make sure
all the paperwork's in order."My bro knew of whence
he spoke. I had to threaten legal action to even get an appointment
with JCAH auditor Frank Mims. I told him that the same conditions
which had killed so many patients still existed. I implored him to check
actual conditions, not just file folders. Experts from the citizens
group had advised me to threaten lawsuits if Mims refused to look into
my allegations.I especially warned him
of potential bathtub drownings. Alas, talking to Mims was like talking
to the Sphinx. He flew off to write his report accrediting the Sparks
institute for another three years, keeping that federal money coming
in.Exactly three days later,
Doris Peltier drowned in a bath tub, just as I had warned. Mims
and Co. immediately announced an unprecedented reopening of their review.
For a few days, I felt like I had done something good. But the golden
glow fades fast when you advocate for the disfavored.And that's who they are.
They are losers. They often can't speak coherently. They are usually
not pretty. They are often unruly, children of the lesser gods.When I started tilting
at the Nevada mental health windmill, Leslie Carter was a black
and beautiful three year-old. Fast forward a quarter century, and that
lovely child, now in an adult body, gets bludgeoned to death in the
restroom at Wingfield Park — just a few miles upriver from the
institute that kicked her onto the streets. Two little kids found her
body.I never met you, but
I knew you as I knew all the others. I'm a loser, too, along with the
rest of the living. You and your brothers and sisters died for our sins.
Every so often, another one of you gets sent to us as a sacrifice to
teach us the error of our ways.When will we ever learn
to go and lose no more?TWILIGHT SZONY:
Proving that God has a sense of humor, Reno Hilton boss Ferenç
Szony has been downsized. This Friday is his last day, the very
moment Hilton goes before local tax authorities asking for a $263,000
property tax reduction. Why? Because $20,000,000 wasn't enough profit
last year for our largest hotel-casino. The security guards Szony fired
for refusing to take a 35% pay cut plan to picket the hearing, then
march downtown. Join the fun at 10:30 a.m. Friday at the county commission
chambers at Ninth and Wells. I think Szony should be invited to walk
with the picketers — as long as he joins the security guards union
first.Be well. Raise hell.
Nevada Instant Type in Sparks and both Office Depot Reno locations. |
8-21-2014 UPDATED LINKS
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