My news story and column on a local mentally ill person's horrors in the criminal justice and mental health systems.
News story: The nightmare: Mental illness George's ultimate jailer; county staff, funds 'jailed' too
For many years, Aaron George has all too often been trapped by prisons of his own mind.
Unfortunately, when George is mentally incarcerated due to the effects of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, plus post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorder - and, for the last year, a brain cyst - he often winds up also being physically confined in a jail cell.
His current residence, since Thanksgiving Day, is the Grimes County Jail.
Sheriff Donald Sowell has the unpleasant, and often frustrating, duty of being his jailer.
He, too, is incarcerated, in a sense. He is "locked up" by a small county's small jail budget, which includes not only a relative lack of manpower but no special facilities and no special training to give full care to people like George, who is the worst but not the only casualty of the state's, and nation's, mental health system to end up in his custody.
Read here for the rest of the news story:
And the column: The state of Texas' mental health care: It's criminal
Aaron George sits in the Grimes County Jail, deteriorating every day, becoming less and less functional, less and less himself, less and less "human" as a human being, all while leaving the sheriff and jail staff frustrated and helpless.
Sheriff Donald Sowell, through no fault of his own, is in an unenviable position. District Attorney Tuck McLain is left to potentially prosecute a case he'd rather not, even as the wheels of the judicial system grind so slowly George's case has not even gone before the grand jury yet for possible indictment.
It's criminal.
Whether Aaron George is a criminal now, or was in 1992, it's criminal that a bipolar schizophrenic sits in a county jail cell rather than a state mental hospital.
It's criminal that he sits there without proper medication, literally beating himself against the walls because voices and compulsions tell him to do so.
It's criminal that Donald Sowell, a small-county sheriff has to deal with cases like George's because jails like his become dumping grounds for mentally ill people who may commit crimes because of inadequate treatment.
It's criminal that the state mental health system leaves them stuck there, sometimes for a year or more.
It's criminal that mental illness, besides any actual crimes committed by a mentally ill person, still has a quasi-criminal taint to it, whether in Grimes County or anywhere else in the state.
It's criminal that many people may still think mental illness issues can just be swept under the rug.
It's criminal that state officials believe this enough that the prison system faces another serious lawsuit, this one from advocates for mentally ill inmates.
It's criminal that the Mental Health Mental Retardation budget gets slashed year after year.
It's criminal that MHMR doesn't have more state hospitals and beds, along with halfway houses or group homes.
It's criminal that more and more of the functions of Child Protective Services get privatized to untrained people by Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Legislature.
Read here for the rest of the column.
For an excellent blog with more on Texas criminal justice issues, including mental health and due process, read Read Grits For Breakfast.
For information and links on the new lawsuit against the state of Texas, alleging that criminally confined mental health patients are being deprived of Constitutional due process due to their cases taking WAY too long to process, read Read this post of his.
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