When Madness has Rights

One thing both sides of the gun-ownership versus gun-control argument can agree on is that we don’t want people who are mad as hatters running around Wyatt Earp-ing it up with loaded weapons. If you crack like Humpty Dumpty, you no longer have gun ownership rights. Right? At least that’s the way these things are supposed to work here in Texas.

In theory.

This is a very real and personal issue for me and my sisters because my mother’s husband has threatened to shoot us. SHOOT US! Oh, he's clever about the way he words his threat so the District Attorney cannot call it a threat of bodily harm but when a man clenching his fists and snarling through his teeth says he will make you pay and then lines up his rifles by the door and readies his pistol drawer, he is not asking for cab money.

Let me bring you the last two years in twelve sentences:

Mom was mentally ill to begin with.
Then, Mom developed dementia.
Daughters tried to get Mom help.
Her husband launched a war.
Verbal assaults. Physical assaults.
We all went to court.
War over. Sanity won.
Mom in assisted living.
Kids have guardianship
Hired dragons to protect mother.
Husband still out there.
And, he’s mad.

The recent Casey Kasem stories have brought me to tears. No joke. He is old, infirm, and living with Alzheimer’s disease. Like my mother, he is at the mercy of his care-givers and like my mother, it appears that his kids are doing everything in their power to get Kasem the mental and physical help he needs, only to be thwarted by his spouse who publicly questions their motives and sabotages his care.

So... let’s jump right on this mental illness issue.

Actually, lets talk about guns.

Okay, let’s do both.

That disturbed young man who murdered six people and wounded 13 others in Santa Barbara legally owned three handguns. Three. Only three.

My mother’s disturbed husband owns 65. No, that is not a typo. He legally owns an arsenal including modern semi-automatic guns and black powder antiques, pistols and revolvers, rifles and shotguns. He has it all. Guns are his passion. His life. He also does this cowboy-gun thing where he shoots black-powder weapons on the weekends so the garage is a workroom full of gun powder, pellets, muzzle loading equipment and stuff to make his own bullets.

The angry and confused man that took his revenge on his fellow students had been spoken to by authorities on three occasions in the past year.

The angry and confused man married to my mother who has threatened revenge on her daughters has been spoken to by the police about a dozen times in the past year, most of those events since January and for family violence.

The agitated student in Santa Barbara made rambling manifesto-type videos.

My mother’s agitated husband sends us daughters rambling manifesto-type emails at wee hours of the morning.

The student in Santa Barbara was once charged with assault this past year and that was when he tried to file charges on his roommate but police discovered he was the aggressor.

My mother’s husband has been charged three separate times for assault, had three separate emergency protective orders issued against him and one is in place right now. RIGHT NOW. You see, after we took Mom to the mental hospital, he went to my sister’s house, threatening us daughters and then when my brother-in-law ordered him out of the house, that old guy punched him in the face, grabbed him by the throat, and then the punched him again.

The Santa Barbara shooter had been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability for quite some time.

My mother’s husband has been treated by multiple therapists and managed to conceal his mental instability from the police, Adult Protective Services, and even his own attorney for quite some time. It’s out in the open now. One psychiatrist fired him as a patient and another doctor told him (with my sister in the room) to get his guns out of the house because his nature is just too unpredictable.

So why does my mother's husband, this man with a history of violence and a documented mental illness, who has written rambling unstable letters, who has a history of assault, and threatened me and my sisters have a right to own 65 guns?

Primarily, because nobody has made it a priority to try to take them away from him yet.

According to the Texas Government Code, 411.172, a person cannot keep, own, possess all those guns if he’s mentally ill BUT there needs to be evidence from a licensed physician. Okay, well, plenty of doctors know he’s unstable but what is the process for getting a declaration of mental illness for the purpose of removing the guns from his home and how long does it take and who is going to do it and who is going to protect us from his rage when he learns we got that ball rolling?

If he keeps all those weapons, we are in perpetual danger. If we seek to get the weapons removed from the home, we are basically provoking him and putting ourselves in even more danger.

This is a man who has threatened suicide, who flies into a rage when any minor thing doesn't match his recollection, and who will not hesitate to lunge for your throat or throw his fists to display his superiority.

Can you even imagine what a person with that kind of rage and that many weapons would do if provoked?

Sure, you can. Just turn on the news.

The Madness Equation

Congratulations, it’s a bouncing senior citizen. The judge did not even bang his gavel as he solemnly awarded guardianship of my mother to “Team Sybil”, her squad of four adult kids who had sought champions for two years in this battle against mental illness until we realized we had to don the capes and tights ourselves.

Today, the children of madness became the parents of madness. Now, we can legally work as the super-hero team we had to become to make sure our mother’s physical and psychological and psychiatric needs were met. We’re her guardians, her watchmen, her protectors. She will now see the doctors she needs to see, get the medication she needs to get, live in a safe place, and be supervised by people trained to care for her.

This is HUGE!

In our case, we not only had to find a way to get psychiatric help for our aging mother but we had her abusive spouse to contend with, a man who legally had the ability to make choices on our mother’s behalf but who we believe is dealing with his own mental illness and suffering dementia on top of his underlying personality disorder.

So... we had Mom,  mentally ill with we don’t know what - narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic behavior and maybe some schizophrenia -  and then suffering from dementia on top of her underlying illness, who married a man who is so Jekyll and Hyde that he seems to have a dissociative identity disorder and sociopathic tendencies but is also now dealing with some age-related dementia of his own.

When madness marries madness, it is NOT madness times two. The ripple effects on friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, doctors, law enforcement, government agencies, the court system and every person this pair interacts with is madness squared. SQUARED!

In another post, I’ll talk about the abuse we endured at the hands of both of these people, the altered reality they lived in, the threats, the accusations, the intimidation and how Mom's husband has been so obsessed with her back taxes (which is a non-issue because we've had IRS auto-drafted from her checking account monthly for over years now) that every doctor, police officer, banker, and mailman that crosses this guy's path hears about his tax woes.

But all of that is for another day.

With this court ruling, we’ve changed the madness squared equation. Now, when our mother wanders out the door naked, it will be into a hallway, not onto a sidewalk. She is not in danger of being hit by a car or even hit in the face by the husband who cannot understand why she is an often childlike, confused and unreasonable little-old-woman version of the strong, argumentative woman he married six years ago.

Guardianship awarded. Physical abuse proven. Visitation by the husband denied.

As the attorneys all side-bar’d at the judge’s bench, our mother’s husband shot us a glance of combined bewilderment and rage. How had he, a scientist and the smartest man in every room, lost to three such ignorant women and their idiot brother? Even the court reporter shivered when the attorneys turned toward him and his “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too” face astonishingly morphed into a victimized old man, tragic and court-weary, longing only to visit his beloved wife whom he never once bothered to ask about in the six weeks since she’d been in supervised care. Never a “how’s she doing?” or “is her room nice?” or “are the new medications helping?” or “does she need anything?” Nope. Nothing but a bombardment of the same Jekyll and Hyde emails we had gotten for months, complaining about Mom's back taxes and threatening to sue us for assault one moment (apparently, if you come to the house to give your mother her medicine or drive her to the doctor, that is assault) and Mr. Nice Guy the next (begging us to stop these unnecessary assaults and still complaining about taxes).

But. we’re tuckered out little super-heros with tattered capes and runs in our tights and our heads ache from our crash course in justice from the real-life Justice League of attorneys, judges, and agencies in this state. We now know that  we can, indeed, leap tall buildings, but not in a single bound and never faster than a speeding bullet.

When it comes to mental illness, the solutions are complex and when we fail as a society, we fail big. People get hurt. People suffer. People die. Why, oh why, oh why? Because protecting a person from himself and protecting the public from a potentially dangerous person sounds elementary on paper and even less complicated in comic books and movies but the reality of our obligation to NOT rob a person of his rights, be unjustly invasive, or cross moral and legal and ethical lines with regard to a person’s liberties is an olympian sized conundrum when it comes to our ability to address mental illness at all.

It’s not as simple as identify it, cope with, treat it, and regulate it.

You see, madness is not against the law and people have a right to NOT get treatment.

That’s right. People have a right to be crazy. Period. If they aren’t a PROVEN danger to themselves or others, their odd behavior and subtle threats are “harmless”.  And that burden of proof is great.

For example, if your mother’s 73-year-old husband says he is going to “make you pay” and mentions he has 65 guns and could “resolve this another way”, it doesn’t matter if he is a red-faced volcano squalling in your face and clenching his fists, those words were not, by law, a direct bodily threat because he did not say “I will shoot you” or “I will kill you”.  You have to wait for that volcano to erupt.

- - - Like when he goes to your sister's house uninvited and punches her husband in the face. - - -

Yeah. THEN people believe you.

Talk about madness!

Today, I found great comfort in the Bible verse where Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a person to force somebody with a mental defect to get psychiatric help.

Except for the part about THAT’s NOT WHAT IT SAYS! And, my own cheese must have slid off own my cracker if I’m re-writing the Bible (and plagiarizing Stephen King) to justify the maze of agencies, cries for help, phone calls, doctor visits, and complexities of the legal system that we have maneuvered, hurdled, and trudged through.

And, I was only kidding. We had no capes.

But it’s true. You cannot force somebody to go get help. You cannot make them. You can’t. They have rights. So the conundrum is, if someone is really functioning in a diminished capacity and refusing to get treatment -

they are not capable of making decisions about their own safety and welfare but they have every right to make decisions about their own safety and welfare. 

Our guardianship hearing is only part ONE of the battle our team of super-heroes faces. Because, you see, our mother’s husband is still out there, bombarding us with emails where he has translated things we've said in the real world into the language of his fractured world and then spit those words back out at us in a venomous rant of victimization.

Heaven help us.

Guardianship means nothing to my mother's husband. Her business is his business and he cannot let go. He's making phone calls he is not allowed to make, writing letters he is not allowed to write, and is even showing up places he is not allowed to show up due to protective orders against him. And, even though he has proven himself mentally and emotionally unstable and even though he has proven himself violent to my mother and to her four kids, it's not legally a threat when he says to us if we get in his business, "I WILL STOP YOU".

The madness continues.