by Ron Powers
Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.
Storytelling is my choice of action. As noted, writing this book has not been an easy choice, and it is one that I have deferred for nearly a decade. Writing the book has tested the emotional resilience of my wonderful wife, Honoree, and of my brave surviving son as well. And of myself.
Yet I have concluded that in the end, it is among those books that cannot not be written. (Other writers and discerning readers will understand this.)
Nor can it be written in half measures, as I had briefly contemplated after deciding that I was duty-bound to tackle the subject.
I had planned for a while to write from a distance, confining my book to a survey of mental illness’s historic contours and of the efforts and impediments in the last century and a half to understand, master, and eradicate it. Yet a hard and humbling truth arose in my path and would not budge. The truth was that such a book would have been hollow, redundant at best with the many good expositional books on the subject already in (and out of) print. Useless, at worst. It would have meant the squandering of a chance, my last and only chance, to make common cause with the untold numbers of people maimed by psychotic attack upon either themselves or a beloved friend or relative.
By opening up my family’s intensely private loss and suffering, I hope to achieve two goals.
One goal is to persuade my fellow citizens in the Schizophrenic Nation that their ordeals, while awful, are neither unique to them nor the occasion for shame and withdrawal. The other is to demonstrate to those who fear and loathe “crazy people” that these victims are not typically dangerous, weak, or immoral, or in any other way undeserving of full personhood. On the contrary, like my adored sons, Dean Paul Powers and Kevin Powers, they tend to be people who have known love, laughter, inventiveness, hope, and the capacity to dream the same dreams of a future that other people dream. That they have been maimed by a scourge of inexplicable, malign destructiveness is not their fault.
Well, there is a third goal: to preserve that which is possible to preserve in words that describe the lives and soaring souls of Dean and Kevin. Another term for this goal is “consecration.”
Finally: No One Cares About Crazy People is a call to arms on behalf of these people for any society that dares describe itself as decent.
America must turn its immense resources and energy and conciliatory goodwill to a final assault on mental illness. My sons, and your afflicted children and brothers and sisters and parents and friends, deserve nothing less. The passionate, afflicted people who testified in that hearing room in the Vermont capitol in January 2014 deserve nothing less.
I hope you do not “enjoy” this book. I hope you are wounded by it; wounded as I have been in writing it. Wounded to act, to intervene. Only if this happens, and keeps happening until it needs happen no more, can we dare to hope that Dean and Kevin and all their brothers and sisters in psychotic suffering are redeemed; that they have not suffered entirely in vain.
1
Membrane
In the dreams and night-thoughts that roiled in me for years after schizophrenia attacked my sons and killed one of them—dreams and thoughts that revisit me still—I have sometimes imagined my own sanity as resting on the surface of a membrane, a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pierced over the ages. Sometimes, when my thoughts are especially fevered, I can visualize the agent of this piercing. It is a watchful presence at the edge of things, silent and dripping, a stranger in a raincoat. He is interested mostly in the young, but he can strike at any time through the tissue that surrounds our sanity. When we fall into such psychosis, there are no other membranes below to catch and protect us. And the horror and helplessness of the fall are intensified by an uncaring world.
These are lurid images, I admit. Yet humankind has always called upon such imagery, symbol, myth, and metaphor to make an accounting of madness, or of states of mind we might attribute to madness, because madness in itself is visible only in its effects. Thus we have horned demons, thought to invade and dwell inside the head. Skulls of ten-thousand-year vintage, unearthed from gravesites of different societies around the world, reveal the same small holes—bored or cut, it is thought, to release such spirits from their tortured hosts.
Thus we witness the recurring depiction through the ages of psychotic madness as demonic possession and transformation, the shape-shifting from ordinary human to savage beast: the fanged werewolf, emerging from human form under the full moon to prowl the landscape in Satan’s service, murdering and bestowing the lycanthropic curse of its bite. Similarly the vampire, the witch, the warlock, the monstrous Mr. Hyde.
The madness metaphors are shot through with fear and loathing. And they have impelled human society to centuries of actual, nonmetaphorical persecution of the mentally ill.
Those among us who were believed to be mad have been imprisoned in basements and in fortresslike asylums. In the Dark Ages and before—and after—they were beaten and burned at the stake. They have been locked in chains in “bedlams,” sometimes for decades, taunted by the guards, starved, left to go naked or in rags, forced to sleep on mattresses soaked with their urine, and put on display on Sundays for the paid amusement of visitors. The Enlightenment added more sophisticated remedies when the mad were belted into chairs and spun rapidly around, leeched until they were bled nearly dry, forced to swallow mercury and chloride, and drenched with scalding or frigid water. And then came the twentieth century, when things got bad.
The 1900s brought totalitarianism to bear upon the insane. It delivered lobotomization and attempts at wholesale eradication via eugenics, which promised to rid mankind of its “defectives” by neutering or eliminating those who showed signs of madness, weakness, or deformity, thus “purifying” the race. Nazi scientists can claim full credit for using the living bodies of mentally ill prisoners for human experimentation, but the United States is not morally exempt from those crimes against humanity; in fact, it was rock-solid Yankee business boosters who first popularized eugenic theories that turned human beings into mad-science experiments.
In the years after World War II came the problematic panacea of the so-called wonder drugs. These antipsychotic and psychotropic medications were and are intended to control the symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolarity (yet not the diseases themselves; no cure is yet available). They work by regulating flaws in certain chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin and dopamine, which affect behavior. Sometimes they work wonderfully and restore patients to functioning (if not completely normal) lives. Yet psychotropics remain far from perfect and have caused much inadvertent harm, via misdosage and debilitating side effects.
Wonder drugs and their salesmen also disastrously coaxed our leaders in government, health, and business to talk themselves into a historic and massive blunder of mental health care social policy: the shuttering of in-residence mental institutions and the exile of mental patients, presumably medicated, back into their community—into the streets. This historic blunder has a name that grotesquely fits the elegance of its design and effects. The name is deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization uprooted what meager stability insane people clung to—the dismal care of state mental asylums—and drove tens of thousands into the streets, where they pioneered an entirely new urban subpopulation, the accursed demographic of the mad that we call the homeless.
The sudden mass visibility and eccentric behavior of the homeless have made them subject to demonization on a scale and intensity not seen since the Dark Ages. Now the police round them up—from the adolescents just emerging, bewildered, into insanity, to the veterans of madness, who are helpless not just before mental illness but before the injustices that compound it: minority racial status, class disability, crabbed opportunity, inadequate medical care, and family instability. The police round them up for their crimes of survival: f
or robberies of food; for possession of the illicit drugs used for self-destructive self-medication; for loitering, vagrancy, and street harassment; for bothering noninsane people with their monologues and declarations; for not having homes. Bereft of committed support from any quarter, they live marginal, miserable lives and die early deaths.
As for those few schizophrenics who commit acts of horrific violence in psychotic states, they, too, are rounded up. They are found guilty in a criminal court and ordered not to a mental hospital against their (irrational) will, for that would be a violation of their civil liberties. They are ordered instead, in most cases, to prison, or to one of our great sprawling metropolitan jails, where their civil liberties entitle them to beatings and rape by their fellow inmates, beatings and taunting by the guards, solitary confinement that drives them madder still, deprivation of prescription drugs for those few who had prescriptions, roasting or freezing in their cells by manipulated temperature, murder, or despair-induced suicide.
Or, if “rounding up” is too much of a challenge to law enforcement, they can then simply be shot dead on the street. Or in their homes. (I saw him reach for something.)
Whether locked in asylums or wandering the streets, for centuries those who have been struck by madness have always had their own cruel nomenclature to bear, names intended to separate them out, divide us from them: lunatics, imbeciles, loonies, dips, weirdos, wackos, schizos, psychos, freaks, morons, nutcases, nutjobs, wingnuts, cranks.
The mad one, then, is something between a clown and a demon.
Unless that mad one is a gift of God made flesh. Madness defined as demonic possession has its countermetaphor. The Bible is saturated with episodes, visions, and characters that might have emerged from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Disembodied voices of prophecy, flashes of blinding light, a burning bush, a sea that parts, righteous murder, ladders to heaven, transubstantiation, reincarnation, a bodily ascent into the sky, the book of Revelation entire: all are paramount among the sacred textual evidence of the Christian God.
Moses is called into the mountains of Midian by a divine Voice, returns with the Ten Commandments, the sixth of which stipulates thou shalt not kill, and at once orders the execution of three thousand “idolators.” Abraham journeys into the land of Moriah, with his son Isaac in tow, for the purpose of slaying the unsuspecting boy as a test of his faith in God, only to spare the child at the last minute thanks to a heavenly voice; the Angel of the Lord has been convinced of Abraham’s faith. And the Bible’s concluding book is a vision of judgment so intricate, elaborate, and grandiose that, if it were told by a patient in the psych ward of a modern hospital, it would likely prompt a prescription.
If “evil” madness and “godly” madness were the two forms most recognized through history, a third interpretive force arose in the mid-twentieth century to dismiss each of these opposing dogmas: simply denying that madness exists at all. While the belief that mental illness is a myth has lacked the backing of accepted science, it quickly aroused a large and passionate following that encouraged the deinstitutionalization movement, blunted the momentum of accelerating breakthroughs in the identification and humane treatment of the mentally ill, maimed the cultural prestige of psychiatry, and justified legal obstacles to the emergency care and treatment of people in psychosis.
My family and I have witnessed this denialism in action. It arises from a seductive appeal to individual rights and constitutional freedoms. But as psychiatrist John Edwards has told me, denialism also is rooted in what he believes is “primal fear.” Edwards continued: “I think primal fear is the origin, regarding mental illness, of all the misinformation, the projections, the denial, the blaming of the victim or the patient, the lack of empathy toward the sufferers, treating adolescents as criminals, cutting budgets for treatment centers—all of it. Human beings are terrified of this disease, and they try to deny it out of existence.”
Most of us accept the basic, grievous medical truth of schizophrenia and do not deny the disease exists. And it is likely we will not ascribe to a mentally ill person the voice of God or of angels—nor will most of us believe that he or she is possessed by evil spirits. Yet, while holiness and denial remain powerful and influential means of interpreting (or dismissing) madness, we still do demonize the mentally ill. Demonization remains the mode of history and of our time. It may never have enjoyed the cachet and the freedom from accountability that it does now. In our era, in our country, mentally ill people suffer and die because of our fear.
On the unseasonably warm Sunday of January 5, 2014, a businessman and parent named Mark Wilsey picked up the telephone in his family home and dialed 911. This was the first step in a chain of events that within half an hour would thrust the Wilsey family through the porous membrane separating the “ordinary” from the monstrous.
Mark Wilsey, a stocky man in his mid-forties with a trimmed white mustache and goatee, was the owner of a homebuilding company in Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina. Boiling Spring Lakes is an isolated town of approximately fifty-three hundred people in Brunswick County, about twenty-two miles southwest of Wilmington. It is surrounded by more than fifty small lakes. In summer, bass fishermen in their sunglasses and ball caps glide along the lakes’ placid surfaces in their high-performance aluminum boats, tossing their hard-plastic poppers and buzzbaits down into what lies beneath: limestone caverns and shifting sinkholes and the currents of five underground springs that inevitably burst, boiling to the surface.
For Mark and Mary Wilsey, dialing the emergency response number was not an unusual event. They had called for police and paramedic help several times over the last couple of years, starting about the time their teenage son Keith began showing signs of mental illness. Now, on this Sunday, Keith seemed unable to recognize his mother; he called her “John.” He said that he’d “seen a sign” advising him to ask for money. He asked Mary if she wanted to fight. In his hand, he gripped a small electronics screwdriver.1 Mary pleaded with her husband to make the call.
Keith had retained his natural father’s last name, Vidal. He had turned nineteen less than a month earlier. He measured five feet, five inches tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds. A mop of dark hair spilled onto his soft face. His left eye tended to squint a little when he smiled, as if he were about to offer a conspiratorial wink. He liked to play video games and to pound the drums, and his parents had given him a new drum set for Christmas.
Normally a gentle and affectionate boy—photographs show him and his mother hugging closely—Keith had occasionally exhibited jumbled thoughts and spoken of bizarre visions. Twice he had been involuntarily committed for psychiatric care. His mother and stepfather tried several times to secure prescription medications that would help him. But the right meds required the right diagnosis, and a right diagnosis was not yet forthcoming. Finally, Mary thought she had succeeded. A doctor diagnosed Keith as suffering from schizo-affective disorder, the worst possible combination of hallucinations and manic depression. This time, the prescription seemed to match the disease, and Keith’s behavior improved.
And then in late 2013 the symptoms worsened again. Within about four minutes of Mark’s call, John Thomas, an officer with the Boiling Spring Lakes police department two miles away, pulled to a stop in front of the Wilsey house on President Drive and strode into the house. Officer Thomas was wearing a body microphone issued by his department. The only active recording device on the scene, the microphone captured thirty-five minutes of voices and incidental noise that afternoon in the Wilsey home.*
Family members later recalled that after appraising the situation, Officer Thomas stepped to the distressed boy and tried to “talk him down” into a calm state. The two locked arms and struggled. As Officer Thomas tried to reduce Keith’s agitation, a second officer hurried into the Wilsey household: Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office deputy Samantha Lewis-Chavis. Lewis-Chavis joined with Thomas in the effort to subdue the boy, and the two soon h
ad him lying facedown on the Wilseys’ hardwood floor. Keith still held the screwdriver in his right hand.
His parents believe that officers Thomas and Lewis-Chavis were on the verge of gaining Keith’s cooperation. But then the door flew open again and a third officer burst into the living room, thrusting his way into the small cluster of people around the boy. This was Bryon Vassey, a broad-shouldered and barrel-chested detective sergeant with eleven years’ experience in the Southport department, eight miles to the south. In the court trial that followed, Mary Wilsey testified that Vassey bellowed, “I haven’t got time for this shit! Tase him! Take him down now!” (Vassey denied having said this, and local newspapers reported that an officer’s body microphone did not pick up such words.)
Vassey’s aggressive entrance into the house, it seemed to some on the scene, caused Keith to panic—about the worst possible result of an encounter with someone in psychosis. The boy struggled free of the first two officers, bolted into the bathroom, and then charged back into the hallway, where Thomas and Lewis-Chavis again forced him to the floor. But Keith was still grasping the small screwdriver. Deputy Lewis-Chavis obeyed Vassey’s order to tase Keith—though, because he was from a separate department, he lacked the authority to issue such an order to her.
Seventy seconds later, Deputy Lewis-Chavis’s ear was ringing from the concussion of a service revolver discharged at close range, and Keith Vidal, with two Taser prongs in his face, lay bleeding to death on his parents’ hallway floor from a bullet wound in his right armpit.
On February 3, 2014, a Brunswick County grand jury indicted Bryon Vassey on one count of voluntary manslaughter. He was suspended from his department and released on bail.
It was at the bond hearing for Vassey that the “screwdriver” that young Vidal had been holding metamorphosed into something deadlier, at least in testimony. “Let’s not pussyfoot around anymore,” District Attorney Jon Payne demanded—perhaps a little ominously, in retrospect—to the hearing judge, whose name was Jack Hooks. “It wasn’t a screwdriver, Judge, it was a pick.”2 Whatever the object, it was not produced in evidence.
