MI- Mother fights system that undid years of work on son's mental illness

5-18-2008 Michigan:

As he headed for prison just over a year ago, Chad Childers feared the doctors there would take away the prescription drugs that silenced the voices in his head and kept his depression at bay.

"Chad, I'm not going to let that happen," his mother promised.

But it did, even though Diana Childers:

• Made certain his pre-sentence report included a detailed record of his mental illness, including a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

• Got a 30-day supply of the three drugs that controlled it and delivered them to the Lapeer County jail before he was taken to prison.

• Obtained new prescriptions for refills.

• Wrote a letter to the judge, describing Chad's long battle with mental illness.

Despite all that, on March 28, 2007, when Chad arrived at the Michigan Corrections Department's Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center in Jackson, a prison psychiatrist took away his medication, sending him into a psychotic break of depression and paranoid delusions.

More than a year later, he still has not fully recovered, his mother said.

"I don't want Chad to be given special treatment," she said. "I just want him to be treated as a human being with a chemical imbalance. He is not a monster."

Not an isolated case

Attorneys in a long-running federal lawsuit over conditions in the Jackson prison complex say what happened to Chad Childers has happened to many others.

In a hearing before U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker last month, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Elizabeth Alexander claimed the prison violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Mentally ill prisoners routinely are misdiagnosed, she said, and the prison psychiatrists and psychologists often undiagnose those who were being treated before arriving. Some take away psychotropic medications, warning inmates a diagnosis of mental illness could hurt their chances of getting into certain programs and being paroled, the attorneys claim.

In a letter to his mother, Chad Childers, 26, of Columbiaville in Lapeer County, said a prison psychiatrist told him his medication could make him impotent.

Chad began showing signs of mental illness in his late teens, Diana Childers said. He was admitted to mental hospitals six times, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by court order after arrests for stealing and breaking and entering.

When he was 21, his doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and settled on a combination of three drugs to control it.

"It took us years to get him on those medications where he was symptom-free," his mother said.

'What medications?'

In November 2006, distraught over problems with a girlfriend, Chad stole a neighbor's car, intending to drive to see her. He pleaded guilty, and a Lapeer County judge sentenced him to 1 1/2-7 1/2 years.

The day after he arrived in Jackson, he wrote his mother a letter, saying the psychiatrist had taken away his medications. She worried he might attempt suicide, particularly since he was placed on the cellblock's fourth tier.

A prison official assured her -- incorrectly, it turned out -- her son was still on his meds. Chad's letters told her otherwise. By his third letter, she could tell he was deteriorating mentally.

"It made me feel like I had let my son down through all the efforts I had made," she said.

She began calling corrections officials in Jackson and Lansing, demanding they resume Chad's medication. An administrator in Lansing promised to help, then stopped returning her calls after Chad's grandmother wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen.

A month after he entered prison, Chad was admitted to Duane Waters hospital in the Jackson complex. His mother assumed it was because he had suffered a mental breakdown, but she later learned he was being treated for cellulitis, a potentially fatal skin infection she believes he contracted due to unsanitary conditions in his cell.

She called and asked a nurse if Chad was receiving his psychotropic medications. "She said, 'What medications?'" Diana recalled.

Chad's medical records had not followed him the short distance to the prison hospital.

Last May 17, Diana finally was allowed to visit her son. His legs were swollen and peeling from the infection, but of more concern was his mental condition. He pulled away when she tried to hug him, claiming she was not his real mother. He reverted to childhood, talking about long-past neighbors.

"He looked bad," his mother said, the worst she had seen him in years. "I cried all the way home."

The next day, he was transferred to the Huron Valley Complex in Ypsilanti, where the state sends many of its mentally ill inmates, and locked in a small cell, his home for the next 135 days.

"They called it observation," Diana said. "I call it solitary confinement. He didn't have a pencil, a Bible, a book, a television, a radio, anything to occupy his mind."

He continued deteriorating, became angry, "like a madman," she said. He cried and smeared feces on himself.

A partial solution

This past February, after placing countless phone calls, after writing two letters to Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Diana Childers met with corrections officials and an assistant attorney general in Lansing. As a result of her persistence, they told her, the Corrections Department had changed its policy, issuing an order that any inmate who arrives with a prescription for psychotropic drugs should continue receiving them for at least 10 days.

Didn't that make her feel better? an assistant attorney general asked. It didn't. Why did it take a mother's persistence to change policy, she wondered, and what happens to inmates who don't have an advocate?

Last fall, Chad was transferred to a prison near Ionia. He is receiving drugs for his mental illness, she said, although not the ones he was taking before entering prison. He has recovered some, but still has a way to go, she said.

By this fall, he will be eligible for parole, but his mother vowed to continue her fight.

"I believe the way we're treating these prisoners is inhumane," she said. "I believe we don't treat our prisoners of war this bad. I hope not. If they let him out of there tomorrow, I would not stop advocating for the mentally ill in prison. Somebody has to." ..more.. by Pat Shellenbarger | The Grand Rapids Press