Physically ill...foggy minded. trudging on
News coverage of my sponser
I've been reading Crazy in America
and learning about the inadequcies of the criminal justice system in Iowa. Oddly enough, an organization not at all equipped or even slightly prepared to deal with psychiatric patients. deinstutionalization reduced the number of beds in the Iowa State Mental Institute from 1800 in 1940 to just 95 fifty years later. Until 1974 lobotomy was endorsed by Iowa's medical society to "stretch hospital labor"
Posterous keeps crashing there's more..try to post later.
Another crash posterous.. how demoralizing to write several paragraphs only to have posterous crash my browser
Crazy is a captivating read about the all but complete lack of a mental heath care system for the seriously mentally disturbed. A common theme in Crazy is law enforcement's lack of training in dealing with any aspect of seriously mentally ill people. Officers on the beat who treat someone experiencing schizotypal symptoms and botch even the approach of one of such persons could incite a mortal incident. As did two beat cops in Florida, who suffocated a mentally ill man while he pleaded with them to be committed. The reprocussions of the incident lasted years, torturing the minds of those officers. One wrapped his car around a palm tree driving with a blood alcohol content over twice the legal limit. The other police officer ended his own life years after the incident in a violent confrontation with his estranged wife, whom he had beaten in the months following the suffocation.
Prison guards are not trained to adaquately tend to the needs of such individuals either. One woman with a well established suicidal ideation and history of self harm, placed in an isolation cell still found a way to hurt herself. Prison staff had a fellow inmate watching her on a 15 minute walk through cycle. Somehow the inmate found the opportunity to harm herself plucking out her eyeball with her fingers. When staff finally saw to her her eyeball was dangling from it's tendons hanging out of its socket. This inmate did previously attempt to harm her eyes. Years later serving time in prison for a separate sentence she plucked out her other eyeball leaving her permanently blind.
Posterous crashed my whole system..maybe due to uploading media. Computer restart.
Picture a stillshot from A Bell From Hell.
Yet another crash and restart. I can't take any more posterous at the moment. More lost paragraphs. Next time I'll be saving every paragraph and I'll use Firefox, maybe the Chrome browser is an issue.
Oh, I did want to include something I would love to throw on my presentation but it's just too long and not eventful enough to take a snippet from. It's a schizophrenia simulator that some police departments are using for training purposes due to the increased volume of mentally ill people they are dealing with.
The black cloud hallucination at 1:29 wold be terrifying. Very informative though, riding the bus in Milwaukee I used to see people displaying schizotypal symptoms, seeing the world through a similar lens is quite interesting.

