Gary & Thomas

Gary and Thomas moved out of our building – involuntarily. Neither man was in college. Their assignment to 4A was mere happenstance. They both are under eighteen months and were “ready” for the first phases of re-entry. Building 3 is all re-entry, with 4B twelve to eighteen months and introduction to the “pre-cog” community. Overflow from B side is housed in A’s fifteen non-college beds. So Gary and Thomas were moved to 4A. Neither man could read; both men suffer from mental illness and are loaded up with handfuls of skittle colored pills to “regulate” their behavior. And even with the pills, both men went nuts and were “checked in” to the padded suicide cell in 7 building.

            The pill life. In here close to 50% of the men are on something. Don’t get me wrong; medications have their place in modern society. We live in an age where pharmaceuticals cure or limit the effects of diseases and conditions that one hundred years ago would have meant death at an early age. But we have become addicted to drugs without adequately evaluating the consequences of our over-dependence. And that addiction comes with a heavy price.

            Nowhere is the evidence clearer of our over-reliance on prescription meds than inside prison. Pills – meds – are a means of control. It’s far easier for the state to dole out prescription meds than address the underlying causes of many of these men’s problems. And prison – while an isolated lifestyle – is not an island unto itself. The reason the Department of Corrections allows medications to be the primary method of inmate health care is because the same is true in the “real” world. Pills are the answer.

            I have a friend in here, fifty-one, retired Navy. He made a horrible mistake one night and driving drunk crossed into a controlled intersection and killed two people. That was in 2006. To this day, he can’t even mention the accident without tearing up. While he sat in jail, pondering his responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives he heard from his wife that she was divorcing him. “I’m not going to put my life on hold for ten years while you go to prison,” she wrote. He fell into a deep depression. Unable to cope with the guilt over his reckless deed and now reeling from the loss of his wife, my friend actively contemplated suicide. The jail “routed” him to the facility psychiatrist. After a visit lasting less than ten minutes the doctor called in an 80 mg prescription (twice daily) of Prozac. Three weeks ago he came to the realization that the meds (now one 30 mg dose a day) weren’t doing what he needed.

            What he needed was to come to grips with what he did. What he needed was to own up, admit his responsibility and move forward. The meds kept him from that. About a year ago, this decent man, a wayward Catholic by his own admission, returned to the church. Monthly he would go to confession when the priest would come. The confessions, the readings, the self-examination allowed my friend to begin to heal. It was this healing that led to him stopping the Prozac and sleeping for fourteen hours every day. Now, he exercises, and prays, and takes college classes, and lives.

            A personal confession. I find myself in jail. The first night they put me on suicide watch – standard procedure anytime someone from “my side of the tracks” gets locked up. The next morning, a counselor asked me, “you’re aren’t going to hurt yourself, are you? When I said “no,” I was moved to a low custody pod and forty other men. I walked in the pod dayroom and felt like I stepped into the psych ward of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I was witness to a range and array of characters and behaviors I didn’t know existed. I was a mess – on the inside – yet no one knew. I carried myself with head high, joking, out-going; all the while I planned to end my embarrassment, pain, and self-loathing. I didn’t. Why I didn’t is between God and me, but my “Damascus” moment didn’t make me brave or responsible or giving. I was still a mess, just a mess who decided to see life through.

            A week after my arrival, I met the jail psychiatrist, an out-going, funny Filipino man who took an instant liking to me. “Are you depressed?” Of course I was – who wouldn’t be? My whole life was destroyed – marriage, wealth, prestige – all was gone. He then read the articles about me from the paper and in less than fifteen minutes came up with a “proposed” diagnosis. “You’re brilliant, personable, successful. You must suffer from mania. We’ll call it a slight disorder and see where that leads.” Mania – that explains my reckless behavior I thought. I’m not responsible; I’m ill. He then prescribed me 10 mg of trazadone (an anti-depressant) nightly to “help” me sleep.

            I clutched onto his diagnosis and treatment. I exaggerated in letters my conversations with the good doctor – anything to get sympathy. And, after only two days of pills, I started flushing the trazadone. I didn’t need it. What I needed to get sleep was to admit to myself and my God what a wreck I’d made of my life. And, I needed to “man up” and do the right thing regardless of the outcome. It was during those very dark, very difficult days that I agreed to plead guilty to all charges without a plea agreement on my sentence and to ensure my family was provided for, I soon discovered self-respect helps you sleep better than a bottle or a pill ever will. Like Tom Cruise’s character in “The Last Samurai,” honor and self-respect may be the best medicine for a broken soul.

            Pills; everywhere pills. The other night there were 38 men getting meds from our side, out of 66. Many of the men getting Zoloft, and Xanax, and Prozac, are in here on drug charges. Their treatment plans require alcohol and drug programs; their mental health plan requires high doses of meds. Even the “real” mentally ill – the schizophrenics – they are over-medicated to the point of being non-functioning. Gary and Thomas would sleep upwards of twenty hours per day. Personal hygiene – cleanliness – is forgotten; all there is is a vacant stare.

            It isn’t healthy and it isn’t right. There is no actual psychiatric treatment, just monthly videoconference “how are yous.” Side effects from most of the anti-depression and anti-psychotics require blood work quarterly to verify the pills aren’t destroying the user’s liver. Men go home with new addictions, new crutches.

            What’s the answer? Let’s face it, as USA Today pointed out in a cover story this week; mental health is the expendable item in most state budgets. It’s the dirty little secret no one wants to discuss until there’s a Newtown, or a Columbine, or PTSD Marine who goes off and kills women and children in an Afghan village. We ignore the problem and then “lock ‘em up.” Worse, we think a pill can solve the problem.

            Pills aren’t the answer. Somebody needs to do better for Gary and Thomas. By the way, what’s in your medicine cabinet?