slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
We were on something like the 15th round of rummy, and my father was winning decisively. He cracked a wide, toothy grin as he laid his cards on the table. “That’s 321 for BaBa, and 227 for String Bean,” he said, tallying the ledger we were keeping on a piece of scrap paper.
Before he finished writing the numbers, he began a rapid succession of anecdotes about his first car. And his second. And his third. He reached for a magazine to show me the vintage Mustang he said he was planning to buy my mother for their 45th wedding anniversary, which, he reminded me, was just six months away. Then he began speaking Sicilian, instructing me to repeat after him: “Napeladan mangia pane!” (“People from Naples eat bread.”) “Calabrese testa dura!” (“People from Calabria have thick heads.”) My father has the most amazing blue eyes, and right then they were wide and eager, like an overexcited child’s. He was rambling, and the inflections of his voice betrayed sheer manic joy. It was a mood completely incongruous with our setting.
We were playing our card game at the Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services, or PESS, a small locked-down unit in the community hospital near my parents’ apartment in Somerville, N.J. Harsh fluorescent lighting fell on cracked and faded yellow walls. A disheveled, rail-thin woman paced and wept in the room across the way. Down the hall, a police officer guarded locked double doors.
(...)
Here’s what I thought should have happened: My father should have been hospitalized against his protestations until his mania subsided. Once it did, he should have been released under supervision and under the condition that he abstain from drinking, which can exacerbate the symptoms of bipolar syndrome, and adhere to a treatment plan involving some combination of talk therapy and medication. I imagined something like probation, but run by a mental health office instead of a criminal court.
As it turned out, New Jersey’s mental health community was debating that very idea. Gregory’s Law, an involuntary outpatient commitment statute named after an 11-year-old boy who was killed by a man with untreated schizophrenia, had been passed by the state legislature in 2009. But in 2011, as my father was shuffling between jail and the emergency room, it had yet to be implemented.
cont at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/m...er-actually-lost-his-mind.html?pagewanted=all
Before he finished writing the numbers, he began a rapid succession of anecdotes about his first car. And his second. And his third. He reached for a magazine to show me the vintage Mustang he said he was planning to buy my mother for their 45th wedding anniversary, which, he reminded me, was just six months away. Then he began speaking Sicilian, instructing me to repeat after him: “Napeladan mangia pane!” (“People from Naples eat bread.”) “Calabrese testa dura!” (“People from Calabria have thick heads.”) My father has the most amazing blue eyes, and right then they were wide and eager, like an overexcited child’s. He was rambling, and the inflections of his voice betrayed sheer manic joy. It was a mood completely incongruous with our setting.
We were playing our card game at the Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services, or PESS, a small locked-down unit in the community hospital near my parents’ apartment in Somerville, N.J. Harsh fluorescent lighting fell on cracked and faded yellow walls. A disheveled, rail-thin woman paced and wept in the room across the way. Down the hall, a police officer guarded locked double doors.
(...)
Here’s what I thought should have happened: My father should have been hospitalized against his protestations until his mania subsided. Once it did, he should have been released under supervision and under the condition that he abstain from drinking, which can exacerbate the symptoms of bipolar syndrome, and adhere to a treatment plan involving some combination of talk therapy and medication. I imagined something like probation, but run by a mental health office instead of a criminal court.
As it turned out, New Jersey’s mental health community was debating that very idea. Gregory’s Law, an involuntary outpatient commitment statute named after an 11-year-old boy who was killed by a man with untreated schizophrenia, had been passed by the state legislature in 2009. But in 2011, as my father was shuffling between jail and the emergency room, it had yet to be implemented.
cont at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/m...er-actually-lost-his-mind.html?pagewanted=all
