TELLING OUR STORIES

Alison Monroe‘s story appears in a 2019 article published by the National Shattering Silence Coalition. Here is an excerpt:

D is … a schizophrenic meth user. For years the system … regarded D’s problem as motivational, and it still wants to see it that way. The hospitals she stayed at tended to define her problem as drug abuse with some adolescent rebellion mixed in. If they could start her on medication for her brain, and impress on her how important it was to stay off drugs, she would be “in recovery” and thus able to live independently and maybe even get a job, and ready to be discharged from any hospital she was in. I followed her for five years, while she was discharged dozens of times — although as I describe below, the system didn’t make it easy for me to do that — and during that time I began to understand how profoundly wrong the system’s perception was. * * *

Once during this five-year odyssey, D was released from an emergency psychiatric hospital—she had been in and out of them (5150’d, as we call it in California) some 15 or 20 times—and we were walking around in the City. We went into Whole Foods (a high-end grocery store) so we could use the clean, spacious bathroom there (bathrooms in the Tenderloin are pretty scarce). Reminded by a display of dollar sodas, she told me an anecdote about voices. / The last time she was in that Whole Foods, she was thirsty and saw a similar pyramid of sodas. She remembered she had no money. But a voice told her, “It’s all right, I’ve got it, it’s paid for.” So, gratefully, she took a can from the pyramid, opened it, and took a sip. Quickly a security guard grabbed her, twisted her arm up behind her back, dragged her into a back room, threatened to call the cops, and told her never to come into the store again. Whoever had told her the soda was paid for was nowhere to be found.

Thus I began to understand that a mentally ill person cannot be blamed for what their voices tell them to do. Telling people them to take responsibility for their actions is no substitute for treating them or for keeping them safe. ….

During two horrible summers [when] she was homeless (between short stays in emergency facilities) and slept in other people’s tents or boats in several counties. She understood she had a government job where they paid her millions of dollars in secret bank accounts as long as she took meth every day. She had a case manager in our county—I was told she had “the highest level of care”—but to do anything for her they would have to find her, and as she had lost or sold her phone that did not happen. / Sometimes she would show up at my house to sleep, terribly thin and sunburned, talking about things I didn’t understand and listening to people I couldn’t see. She would sleep, but often she would bounce up again after a couple hours and say she had to go see or do something, and not come back for weeks. One time she stayed a couple days, and I was able to get her case worker to come over. He listened to her while she was lying in bed crying. D told him something that was hard for me to hear and hard to take in. She said that she had to take meth every day, at least a little bit, or her unborn baby would die. ….