Are People with Mental Illness America’s Throwaways?

For each successful suicide in jails, there are many others that are unsuccessful. According to a chief psychiatrist in the Los Angeles County Jail, the ratio of failed suicide attempts to deaths by people with untreated brain disorders is about 20 to 1.

For people with serious brain disorders, the effects of being in jail or prison are occasionally positive, but more often negative. Interestingly, many of those who claim that it was positive, do so because they found being incarcerated was the only way they could get psychiatric treatment.

Such cases are the exceptions; however jails and prisons usually exacerbate psychiatric symptoms, both because individuals with serious brain disorders are frequently placed in solitary confinement and because they often are not given the necessary medication to control their symptoms.

I have a more personal story relating to the throw away of our society’s mentally ill. I had a daughter who suffered from schizophrenia since the age of 16. She was in and out of mental institutions; she would receive medications to stabilize her illness. Unfortunately, once she felt she was stabilized she would quit taking her medication, only to require to be hospitalized again.

On December 24, 1994 she suffered a severe episode that required her to be hospitalized in the state mental institute where she stayed for one month. My husband and I had heard of prolixin decanoate, a monthly infection. She was treated at Lackland Air Force Base here in San Antonio. Little did we know that she was being treated by a one year intern in psychiatry. According to military regulations, his treatments were to be supervised by a staff psychiatrist, which never occurred. Our daughter suffered from a severe reaction of akathisia as a result of the prolixin decanoate regiment. Akathisia is a frequent and common adverse effect of treatment with antipsychotic (neuroleptic) drugs. This syndrome consists of subjective (feeling of inner restlessness and the urge to move) as well as objective components (rocking while standing or sitting, lifting feet as if marching on the spot and crossing and uncrossing the legs while sitting).It causes an internal restlessness. Akathisia is known to be a cause of suicide. The simple medical recommendation to cure akathisia is to discontinue the use of the prolixin decanoate and find another medical substitute. However, after we reviewed the medical records it was discovered the intern, in fact, doubled her dosage of prolixin decanoate.

On May 16, 1995 our daughter had another doctor’s appointment with the intern who injected another double dosage of prolixin decanoate at 12:00 p.m. to our daughter. After work, my husband and I discovered her body in our master bedroom. She had shot herself in her right temple.

We brought a wrongful death civil case against the Air Force for our daughter’s medicine overdose which resulted in her toxic completed suicide. Even though it was the significant health providers negligence, willful act, and wrongful act that caused our daughter’s completed suicide, the Air Force officials were successful in delaying our law suit for over six, and prevented the truth in our daughter’s medical records to become part of our civil law case. The attorney that was supposedly supporting our side of the claim was a retired JAG Officer, in other words a military attorney. As we later found out he was in cohorts with the Department of the Air Force.