More on Lashuan Harris

Posted on October 21, 2005 in California Watch Compassion Stigma

In the newspapers, the story of Lashuan Harris continues to unfold in the strictly legal sense of whether or not she did the deed. Each step in the grisly trail to justice for the mother who killed her beloved three sons gets reported with especial emphasis on the fact that she is mentally ill. The strait jackets are out and the public eyes people like me and many of my readers as dangerous.

As the story unfolds, more reasons for the setting of the grim stage appear. Yet the media continues to play on two themes: “She wasn’t taking her meds” and “She was mentally ill.”

For starters, let us realize just how great the threat mentally ill people are under from normal people as opposed to the reverse. That’s right, mentally ill people suffer more violence than they dish out. Science Daily quoted a Northwestern University study last month:

Researchers at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine say more than one-fourth of individuals with severe mental illness were victims of violent crime during 2004 — a rate nearly 12 times that of the general population.

Depending on the type of violent crime, prevalence was six to 23 times greater among people with severe mental illness than among the general population, said lead author Linda Teplin, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Feinberg.

In addition, Teplin said the annual incidence of violent crime in people with severe mental illness who live in the community is more than four times higher than that in the general population.

When we ask who is more dangerous, Mr. and Mrs. Average American, it is you who are the danger to people like me. Lashuan Harris is an aberration being played up as a false norm for the mentally ill. Keep us away from drugs and alcohol. It increases the incidence of violent behavior in us as well as you.

One has to wonder what was going through the heads of Harris’s family:

Family members said Harris, who had been was hospitalized twice this year and had received outpatient psychiatric treatment, had made threats before. An aunt told the San Francisco Chronicle the threats had prompted the woman’s mother to contact authorities, but others said they didn’t think Harris would actually kill her children.

A little education goes a long ways. Harris might be safely inside a hospital and her children alive if they had not attempted to apply folk wisdom to the very serious condition of a confused schizophrenic. Maybe it wasn’t them:

Lashuan Harris’ aunt, Joyce Harris, told the Chronicle for Friday’s editions that Lashuan’s mother had contacted social services officials about three months ago to seek partial custody of the children. She made the request because Harris had stopped taking medication for schizophrenia and had made threats regarding the boys, the paper reported.

“They said she was sane, that they couldn’t do anything,” Joyce Harris told the newspaper.

One wonders exactly what they reported to social workers or what diagnosis Harris left the hospital with. What did officials mean by “sane”? Had she applied for disability? Did she know she could? What kind of discharge instructions did she receive? Were they given to her orally or was she just handed a sheet? Was she functionally illiterate? We know that she was on Haldol until her symptoms stabilized and then she stopped taking the drugs.

Psychiatrists call this the “aspirin syndrome”. It works like this. All your life you have had headaches. When they hit, you take an aspirin. The headache goes away. This works for infections, too. You take your antibiotics until they go away. You are conditioned to take the pills until the symptoms disappear and then you stop. The trouble is with schizophrenia and mood disorders, the disease continues to afflict you. If you follow the model you use for aspirin, you will find yourself spiraling into a new episode. Mental illness bears more similarity to my heart condition or diabetes. The drugs don’t cure the illness: they curb the symptoms. Inside the folds of the brain, neurons interact with dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrin to create our moods and consciousness. The meds help rebalance the chemistry. If you stop, the brain will suddenly find itself awash in the same conditions that precipitated previous attacks. You will go crazy. And no one can tell where that will lead you.

Undoubtably, Harris believed she had whipped schizophrenia once and for all. Or maybe she just didn’t have the money to buy the medication. Did her family know that she wasn’t taking her meds? It seems so. They declined to intervene, it seems, on the basis of a county social worker’s three month old assessment. Did the social worker look deep enough into Harris’s case before declaring her “sane”? Is Alameda County’s Social Services Agency too overwhelmed to give cases such as Harris’s the scrutiny they deserve?

The points of failure in Harris’s case are many: Harris herself; family members who chose to ignore her illness; the social services system; law enforcement; the disease that is schizophrenia; perhaps racism; and certainly an attitude among politicians and conservative voters that meaningful and humane safeguards against this kind of thing are less worthy of investment than the routine corporate pork barrel that runs the country these days.

People around her didn’t speak clearly about what was happening:

“Lashuan is very protective of the children and I think one of the reasons Lashuan stopped taking her medication was for fear of losing her three children,” an uncle, Avery Garrett, told NBC’s Today show Friday.

Confusion such as this stems from pouring vague information into a disturbed mind. Ultimately where the family and social workers failed was in their inability to talk to Lashuan. She just didn’t hear what she needed to hear for her own safety and the safety of her children.

When she recovers her senses, this poor woman will be in Hell.

* * * * *

An article in the San Francisco Chroncle sets the record straight on schizophrenia:

Among the more common symptoms of schizophrenia are auditory hallucinations, such as the voices Harris reportedly heard, commanding her to drown her children.

Schizophrenics may also develop what doctors call a “flattening of affect,” a seeming lack of emotion or connection to those around them. Harris was described by a witness as acting “blank” after police arrived and attempted to rescue her children.

Schizophrenics may also freeze up in a catatonic state, where they may put their hands in a certain position and be unable to move them.

Although schizophrenics are not by nature violent, and most pose no threat to others, the combination of detachment from reality and fearful delusions can be dangerous if left untreated.

“Violence is not part of the diagnosis,” Binder said. “But if you see someone acting very agitated, you don’t go over and do anything that might seem provocative.”

What distinguishes schizophrenia from other psychotic conditions is that the patient suffers from several different symptoms of psychotic behavior, over a period lasting more than a month. Its cause remains a mystery, although a constellation of genetic, biochemical and behavior factors may come into play.

Many psychotic disorders are transient, such as the hallucinations of someone on drugs, or of an alcoholic in detox. They can be triggered by an illness that causes hormonal imbalances, such as thyroid disease.

Schizophrenia is a long-term disorder, causing immense suffering for a patient and those who live around him or her. But psychiatrists say it is treatable with older anti-psychotic drugs such as Haldol (haloperidol), or newer “atypical anti-psychotic” medications such as Clozaril (clozapine), Zyprexa (olanzapine) or Risperdal (risperidone).

There was no controlling Lashaun Harris. But plenty of people missed the chance to work with her and avoid this Medeaesque family catastrophe.

Bipolar disorder, which I have, is sometimes treated with these newer “atypical” antipsychotics as well. I am not on any of them.