The Mental Health Stigma

As I sit in jail my anxiety and depression runs deep. My PTSD was triggered and brought on by writing my memoir. I don't trust law enforcement like I used too since my arrest. I used to think I could never get inflicted with a mental health issue. My mother suffers from bipolar disorder as does my son. But mental health issues do run in my family, my uncle was as strong as many men I knew, but after Vietnam he suffered with survivors guilt as well as PTSD.

Under the Reagan Administration after the assassination attempt on the president, mental health funding was cut. It has never been restored to full funding.

How did I get PTSD? Several Items factor into that. Growing up I was used by my mother's boy friends for their sexual pleasure. I was physically and mentally abused by both parents. My father was more mentally abusive than anything over my sexuality. He was also physically abusive. I also took adult lovers as a child as well. As if that weren't enough to cause my PTSD, depression and anxiety, add on nearly being killed by a terrorist bomb in Munich. Let's look at being assaulted by my room mates while in the military and being raped by the same room mates. The final straw came in December 2020, when I was arrested. Hence I no longer trust the police, now that I am on probation for fifteen years.

When I was working as a ramp agent for Continental Airlines in Denver. My first day on the ramp I was assigned the ill fated flight 1713. Of course, I was being shown how to properly do all of the steps. As the flight took off for Boise, it crashed. I was told to go out and get the bags from an aircraft that had slid off the runway. My partner and I came back and said the plane had crashed, was on fire and had dead bodies. I said that wasn't worth $5.75/hr.

In 1993 a soccer player I had coached for six years was shot and killed at his place of employment, Chuck E Cheese in Aurora, CO. He was only seventeen. I loved him like a son and cried over his loss like any parent grieves their child. In 1968, my favorite uncles plane had been shot down on final approach to Vietnam. He suffered burns over eighty-percent of his body. Seeing him for the first time severely burnt and bandaged severely traumatized me because I was just seven when it happened.

Having to deal with your trauma and demons is a painstaking task. It affects your employment because you have to make doctors appointments, so your employment record is checkered at best. The psychotropic drugs they put you on to treat your conditions, has adverse side effects. My best friend also suffers from PTSD. He received severe injuries when Khadafi blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon. We are both veterans he was Marines and I was Army. Yes we give each other a hard time, but no one else is allowed too. My friend also suffers from PTSD as he keeps having night mares of the event and the seventy-five comrades we lost that night.

Having been incarcerated I see people who have even more mental health issues than others. We had one man running around the pod doing (or pretending) to do karate. He also thought he was spider man. We had another man who did nothing but talk all the time, especially when he found a bible; he thought he was John the Baptist.

We now have a guy who talks to himself all day and night. Thinks he is an MME great and claims to have been on every album with every top selling rapper.

What is the solution to mental health issues? Obviously more funding. In our prisons and jails we have a lot of inmates who are mentally insane. They failed every part of their insanity claim except they answer who is their lawyer correctly and they are deemed mentally fit to stand trial. It happened to one of the inmates in the pod I was in. I would also call for reduced sentencing for non-violent offenders.

I was arrested and charged with the same crime as Josh Duggar and he faces twenty years in prison for each count. Had I gone to trial, I would have received three hundred and fifty years in prison. I only received fifteen years of probation at sixty-one. Why not make those types of crimes non violent and put the offender on probation for ten years?

What will you do as a parent if your child gets caught with it on their computer or phone at school? How far will you go to protect him or her?