I had hoped to spend Father’s Day with my son.
That may not sound like much, but hear me out. Drew, 38, is mentally ill. And not just a little, but a lot: diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at 19, he sees things that aren’t there and hears voices that aren’t real. Sometimes he even acts on those perceptions with tragic results.
It literally took his mother and me years of concerted effort backed by thousands of dollars and good connections to get him the help he needed. That ragged path was littered, among other things, with suicide attempts, homelessness, drug addiction, critical injuries inflicted by others, an attack on his father with threats to his mother, and, finally, six months in jail for assaulting a housekeeper seriously enough to put her in the hospital.
It was only then that the authorities finally honored our exasperated declarations that Drew was a danger to himself and others by placing him in a locked California mental health facility where he safely spent the last several years.
Until now.
“He was transferred yesterday,” my son’s court-appointed conservator told me when I called to arrange that Father’s Day visit.
“He what?” I stammered, truly stunned. “Where and why?”
“To a place that’s far less restrictive,” the conservator chirped. “He’ll be able to come and go as he pleases as long as he sleeps there and takes his meds.”
Oh my God, I thought, that’s a formula for disaster.
And sure enough, a call to the new facility days later delivered the bad news. “Oh,” a receptionist sighed, “sorry but Drew’s gone missing” apparently just three days after arriving.
In fact, my son’s wild inclinations may not be so unusual. A recent column in this newspaper cited World Health Organization statistics showing that one in seven people worldwide suffers from mental health disorders, most commonly anxiety and/or depression. As of 2021, that amounted to 1.1 billion people, and that’s just the small portion who get formally diagnosed.
The percentage in the Philippines is nearly as high: 11.3% to 11.6% as of 2019, amounting to roughly 12.5 million Filipinos. “...the major challenges,” Carl E. Balita wrote in that column, “include limited spending on mental health; the shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health workers; and that access to services remains concentrated in urban centers.”
I have written extensively about the bias in much of the world favoring civil liberties over public safety. “The problem with mental illness in America is that nobody takes it seriously,” I declared last year after Nick Reiner — also suffering from schizophrenia — allegedly murdered his parents, renowned film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. “Or rather,” I concluded, “civil libertarians have determined that one’s right to be sick outweighs the public’s right to be protected.”
In other words, mentally ill people often “fall through the cracks,” as-it-were. The problem is that those cracks are wider than the floor.
Drew’s mom and I saw further evidence of that a week after our son’s disappearance when a mental health team randomly found him “wandering disoriented” on the streets of Los Angeles. “We didn’t know he had a conservator,” a nurse at the hospital to which he’d been taken told me after I’d informed her of that fact.
So I sent a text message to Drew’s legal guardian.
“EMERGENCY,” it began. “Drew is at [a hospital] in Montebello on a three-day hold...Releasing him back onto the streets would be disastrous for him and, potentially, anyone with whom he has contact...He has never taken his meds outside a controlled, locked environment. [Please] act immediately...before it’s too late and irreversible damage has been done.”
Three days later, the conservator called. Miraculously he’d just been updated on the situation and, in the nick of time, was recommending that Drew’s hold be extended pending possible recommitment.
Bottom line: our Father’s Day reunion will happen next year.
I fervently pray.
kkk
David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards.