WBEZ | Mental Health

Why we could all use some therapy

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

While riding on the bus or the "L," have you ever seen an ad for a psychological center (are you depressed? anxious? etc.) contemplated calling the number, then quickly averted your eyes, embarrassed that you even considered it?

"Do I really need therapy?" you ask yourself, realizing in that very moment that yes, you really do.

Then you wonder, "Am I the only person who has ever wrestled with these crazy thoughts? Am I crazy?"

The truth is, you're not crazy, and you're not alone—you're actually one of millions.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, major depressive disorder (which you may just write off as a bad case of the blues) affects 14.8 million American adults each year. 5.7 million Americans have bipolar disorder, 2.2 million struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and generalized anxiety disorder affects approximately 7.7 million.

Depression and anxiety are the most common; and unfortunately, the most likely to be swept under the rug. "Man up," "Stop wallowing," "Stay positive," "Just eat," "Go for a run," "Try yoga," urge friends and family members, as if a brain can instantly be re-wired with a positive attitude and some downward dog.

These magic cures may work for some people; but for those with chemical imbalances or deeper issues that a good balanced breakfast and a walk in the park can't fix, therapy (combined with psychiatric medication as needed) could work wonders.

Does the steoreotypical image of lying on a couch and telling your life story to a wizened old analyst not sound like the most appealing option to you? Fortunately, psychoanalysis is much more complex, involved and helpful than film and television often make it out to be. Also, modern therapy methods can be tailored to your specific issue, whether it be depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, alcoholism, co-dependency in relationships or all of the above.

Therapy also comes in a variety of different forms, from individual appointments to support groups to family counseling sessions, many of which are fully or at least partially covered by insurance. Most therapists also have connections to psychiatrists, nutritionists and general physicians to treat any physical symptoms that may arise.

Stigma around mental health care still exists today; but the more informed people are about the diverse symptoms and proper methods of treatment for mental illness, and how billions of people around the world are affected every day, then they are much less likely to judge.

If you are physically sick, then you got to the doctor to get well again. So, why feel shame and guilt about seeing a therapist for your mental health?

If you want to talk to an unbiased professional about whatever you may struggling with—whether it be a recent breakup, a death in the family or a quarter-life crisis you just can't seem to shake—go ahead and make the call. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of strength.

Resources in the Chicago area:

Insight Behavioral Health Centers (specializing in eating disorders, mood disorders and women's reproductive mental health issues such as postpartum and peripartum depression)

Lakeview Center for Psychotherapy (therapy and counseling for adults, adolescents, children, groups, couples and families)

Urban Balance (general therapy for individuals, couples and families)

Working Sobriety (for a 12-step approach to alcholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, etc.)

To find therapists in private practice, visit therapists.psychologytoday.com or contact the counseling center on your college campus.

Has therapy had a transformative effect on your life?

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr.

The story of Dunning, a 'tomb for the living'

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:35:00 -0500

For a long time, Chicagoans were scared of Dunning. The very name “Dunning” gave them chills. People were afraid they would end up in that place.

Today, the Chicago neighborhood, out on the city’s Far Northwest Side, looks like a middle-class suburb. “If peace and quiet are what you seek, look no further than Dunning,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2009. Some of the area’s younger residents have no idea what used to be there: an insane asylum, a home for the city’s poorest people, and cemeteries where the poor were buried.

“I grew up in this area,” says Michael Dotson, who is 29. “I’ve passed by this vicinity a hundred times, and never knew anything about it.” Dotson recently stumbled across a website that mentioned the old Dunning asylum. And then he saw a headline claiming that 38,000 bodies might be lying underneath the old Dunning grounds, their burial places unmarked.

That prompted Dotson to pose this question to Curious City:

What’s the history behind Cook County’s former Dunning Insane Asylum and the people buried near there?

It’s a long history with many dark chapters. Curious City can’t detail the entire history, so we focused on finding out who lived at Dunning — and who is still lying in Dunning’s unmarked graves. In both life and death, the people who ended up at Dunning were some of Chicago’s least fortunate residents.

Here’s how historian Perry Duis describes Dunning’s reputation in his 1998 book “Challenging Chicago”:

For many generations of Chicago children, bad behavior came to a halt with a stern warning: “Be careful, or you’re going to Dunning.” The prospect sent shivers down the spines of youngsters, who regarded it as the most dreaded place imaginable.

Chicago resident Steven Hill, who is 60, recalls: “It was a term used in the ’50s and ’60s — ‘If you and your brothers and sisters don’t behave, we’ll send you to Dunning.’ And that used to scare kids, because they knew that it was a mental institution.”

Mundelein resident Ross Goodrich, who is 81, heard a similar expression growing up on the West Side in the 1930s and ’40s. “Whenever anyone would act a little nutsy, any of the kids, we’d say, ‘Oh, gotta send them to Dunning.’ It was a pretty common expression,” he says.

Hill and Goodrich are interested in the history of Dunning because both of them had great-grandparents who died in the institution in the early 1900s.

The complex occupied 320 acres of land between Irving Park Road and Montrose Avenue, stretching west from Naragansett Avenue to Oak Park Avenue.

It was never actually named Dunning. But the property just south of it was owned by the Dunning family — so when the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway extended a line to the area in 1882, the stop was named Dunning Station. And then people started calling the institution “Dunning.” (In its early years, people sometimes called it “Jefferson,” since it’s part of Jefferson Township.)

When it opened in 1854, it wasn’t an insane asylum. The Cook County Infirmary was a “poor farm” and almshouse. County officials opened its doors to people who had fallen on hard times and found themselves unable to earn a living.

“They didn’t provide very many services,” says Joseph J. Mehr, a Springfield clinical psychologist who wrote about Dunning in his 2002 book, “An Illustrated History of Illinois Public Mental Health Services.”

“What they really provided were a place to sleep and food,” he says. “And that was pretty much the extent of it.”

But from the very beginning, many of the poor people who were sent to live at the almshouse had mental illnesses. “In some ways, it’s almost similar to what we have today,” Mehr says, “in that we have a lot of people who are homeless and living on the streets, and a significant portion of them are people who are mentally ill.”

So the county added an “Insane Department” at the almshouse. And then, in 1870, it built a separate Cook County Insane Asylum on the grounds.

“The feeling was it’s better to isolate the population of the mentally handicapped, the indigent, and keep them far away from the city proper,” Chicago historian Richard C. Lindberg says.

But Mehr sees another motivation behind the asylum’s location, far from downtown Chicago. “The idea was to get people who were disturbed out of stress-inducing situations,” he says. “Asylums were built out in the country, and they were really pastoral, bucolic places where people could relax.”

That was the idea, anyway. In reality, Dunning was chronically overcrowded, and patients were neglected and abused.

“You could think of this place as the prototypical evil dark asylum of literature,” Mehr says. “There wasn’t much treatment. People … weren’t fed well. The food was terrible — weevil-filled. … People didn’t get the kind of medical care that they ought to get. … For many, many years, it was really a terrible place.”

Abuse and corruption

In 1874, a Tribune reporter described Dunning’s poorhouse as “a shambling, helter-skelter series of wooden buildings” where dejected-looking people with matted hair and tattered clothing were “crowded and herded together like sheep in the shambles, or hogs in the slaughtering-pens.”

“The rooms swarm with vermin,” an attendant told the reporter. “The cots and bed-clothing are literally alive with them. We cannot keep the men clean, and we cannot drive the parasites away unless they are clean.”

The reporter couldn’t take the smell in the room, exclaiming: “For Heaven’s sake let us get out; this stench is unbearable.”

Political corruption was part of the problem at Dunning. County officials treated it as a patronage haven, hiring pals and cronies who had no expertise in handling mental patients. Employees got drunk on duty, partying and dancing late at night in the asylum. Some of the asylum’s top authorities used taxpayer money to decorate their offices and hold lavish parties while patients were suffering in squalor.

“Everybody was a political hiree,” says Al Opitz, a neighborhood historian. “So consequently, they had nobody to report to other than the political boss.”

In an 1889 court case, Cook County Judge Richard Prendergast described Dunning as “a tomb for the living.” He criticized the asylum for squeezing 1,000 patients into a space better suited for 500. “The presence of so many lunatics in a room irritates all,” Prendergast said. “Fighting among the patients at night is frequent.”

That same year, two attendants at the Dunning asylum were charged with murdering patient Robert Burns. They’d kicked him in the stomach and given him a gash on the head. A defense attorney claimed these “blows and kicks … were beneficial to the insane man, as they were a sort of stimulus or tonic,” according to the Tribune. Jurors acquitted the attendants, blaming Dunning’s overcrowding rather than the actions of individual employees.

Even under the best of conditions, doctors didn’t have many effective treatments for people suffering from mental illness. The only drugs they had at their disposal were sedatives. “If a person was terribly agitated, they might dose them with chloral hydrate, which would pretty much knock them out,” Mehr says. “That’s the ingredient in what used to be called a Mickey Finn in a bar.”

According to an 1886 state investigation, one of the sedatives used at Dunning was a mixture containing chloral hydrate as well as cannabis, hops and potash. The investigation also found that Dunning was serving two kegs of beer a day; patients as well as employees were apparently drinking the beer.

The same state probe harshly criticized the food Dunning served to its inmates. A lack of fruit and fresh vegetables had caused an epidemic of scurvy, with about 200 patients suffering from the illness. “The cooking, we are convinced, was bad,” the investigators said.

In spite of all their appalling discoveries, the investigators quoted one doctor who said “there were some attendants who were most excellent, who were conscientious, and endeavored to mitigate the sufferings of the insane in every way possible.” But these employees were in the minority, and they felt intimidated by Dunning’s irresponsible workers.

The situation inside the Dunning poorhouse seemed somewhat better by 1892. A journalist who visited that year didn’t encounter the same horrors others had witnessed in earlier times. But she reported that many of the poorhouse residents were “too old and infirm to do anything except sit about in joyless groups.” The superintendent told her that many people ended up in the poorhouse as a result of alcoholism. “Whisky brings the most of them,” he said, adding, “They’re foreigners mostly.”

Insanity cases in the news

In that era, Chicago newspapers often reported the stories of local people suffering from mental illness, openly describing their symptoms and sometimes publishing their names. In many of these stories, patients were taken first to the Cook County Detention Hospital (at the northwest corner of Polk and Wood streets), where judges ordered them committed at Dunning.

Here’s a sample of several cases reported in 1897:

Frank Johnson was committed to Dunning after he cut off his right hand in a fit of religious mania. “I think he will grow again,” he told a judge.
John E.N., 28, believed he was Jesus Christ.
Timothy O’B. became “a raving maniac” after a policeman struck him in the head.
William Mitchell, 43, an extremely emaciated African-American man, said he was hearing “the voices of spirits” and believed that people were “after him for murderous purposes.”
Theresa K., 35, was sent to Dunning after she refused to eat, declaring that her food was poisoned.
Catherine T., 56, “was something like a wild cat.” Maggie Mc., who may have fractured her skull five years earlier, was described as “silly, helpless, Irish, very poor, and 28 years of age.”
Fredericka W., 35, who was unkempt with a weather-beaten complexion, was sent to Dunning after a policeman found her sitting in a park. She said she “was searching for a prince, who had promised her marriage.”
William L., 45, was arrested when a policeman found him “wandering about the boulevards ogling women and girls.” After hearing the details of the case, a judge declared, “Dunning.” As the bailiff quickly hustled William L. toward the door, the patient turned around and shouted, “It doesn’t take long to do up a man here!”

Patients like these were sent by train from the Cook County Detention Hospital to Dunning. “It was a hospital car, and they had a doctor aboard and a couple of nurses,” Opitz says. “The train was called the ‘crazy train.’ … There was a guard on both ends so people couldn’t get out.”

About half of Dunning’s patients suffered from “chronic mania,” according to the asylum’s annual report for 1890. Other patients had conditions described as melancholia, impulsive insanity, monomania and circular insanity. The doctors listed masturbation as one of the most common “exciting causes” of insanity among Dunning’s male patients. According to the report, other patients had become insane as a result of religious excitement, domestic trouble, spiritualism, sunstrokes, disappointment in love, alcohol, abortion, narcotics, puberty and overwork.

Dunning’s unmarked graves

Throughout its early history, Dunning also included cemeteries — not only for poorhouse residents and asylum inmates who died, but also for anyone who died in Cook County and whose family couldn’t afford to pay for a burial. Some bodies were moved to Dunning from the Chicago City Cemetery, which was underneath what is now Lincoln Park. The people buried at Dunning include 117 victims of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and Civil War veterans — including Thomas Hamilton McCray, a Confederate brigadier general who moved to Chicago after the war and died in 1891.

One of the most notorious people buried at Dunning was Johann Hoch, a bigamist who was believed to have married 30 women and murdered at least 10 of them. After he was hanged at Cook County Jail in 1906, other cemeteries refused to accept his body. “In that little box that they had made at the jail, the remains of Hoch were buried anonymously somewhere on the grounds at Irving and Naragansett,” says Lindberg, who told the story in his 2011 book “Heartland Serial Killers.”

The same fate befell George Gorciak, a Hungarian immigrant who died penniless in 1895, succumbing to typhoid. His family took his body to Graceland Cemetery, apparently unaware that they needed to pay for a plot there. By the end of the day, they’d hauled his coffin out to Dunning, where burials were free in the potter’s field.

The burials at Dunning included many orphans and infants — and adults whose identities were a mystery. In 1912, an “Unknown Man” who’d apparently stabbed himself to death was placed in the ground at Dunning.

Scandals sometimes erupted over bodies being stolen from Dunning’s cemetery by people who wanted them for anatomy demonstrations. In one 1897 case, four bodies were taken as they were being prepared for burial. Henry Ullrich, a watchman who worked at Dunning, was convicted of selling the corpses to Dr. William Smith, a medical professor in Missouri.

The professor claimed that the watchman had offered to kill a “freak” and sell him the body. Smith recalled telling Ullrich, “I only want the dead ones.” Ullrich supposedly replied, “That’s all right, Doc … he’s in the ‘killer ward’ and they’d just think he’d wandered off. They’re always doing that, you know.”

County officials denied the existence of a “killer ward.”

State takes control

In 1910, Dunning’s poorhouse residents were moved to a new infirmary in Oak Forest. And in 1912, the state took over the Dunning asylum from Cook County, changing the official name to Chicago State Hospital.

Conditions had already been improving at Dunning over the previous decade, Mehr says. One reason was the construction of smaller buildings to house patients. And a civil service law passed in 1895 had decreased the problems with patronage. After the state took control, Mehr says, “It ended the scandals around the issue of graft and corruption.” But incidents of patients being abused still made news from time to time, he says.

Ross Goodrich says his great-grandmother, an immigrant from Prague named Fannie Hrdlicka (pronounced Herliska), was placed in Dunning when she became depressed after one her children died.

According to the family story, he says, “When the baby died, my great-grandmother rocked the baby for a couple of days, and wouldn’t let it out of her arms. And then she was placed in Dunning because they thought she was a little crazy. But we suspect it could have been a case of postpartum depression. … If she was having mental difficulties of any kind, I’m not sure that there were any other places available in those days for her to go.”

Hrdlicka was released from Dunning and then readmitted. She died there in 1918.

Steven Hill says he doesn’t know why his great-grandfather, John Ohlenbusch, was living at Dunning when he died in 1910. But the death certificate says he had dementia, so Hill suspects Ohlenbusch may have had what later became known as Alzheimer’s disease. Hill says his grandmother never discussed her father’s death at Dunning.

“People did not talk about the rough lifestyles they had and how poor they were,” Hill says. “But I do know they had a very, very tough life.”

Goodrich and Hill would like to find out more about what happened to their ancestors at Dunning, but documents are not easy to find. The Illinois State Archives in Springfield has Chicago State Hospital’s admission and discharge records from 1920 to 1951, but you need a court order to see them. Some early Cook County records, showing patients who were sent to Dunning between 1877 and 1887, are available for anyone to see in the state archives branch at Northeastern Illinois University.

Changing mental health treatments

In the first half of the 20th century, Chicago State Hospital used several different treatments for mental illness. Hydrotherapy used hot or cold water to soothe people who were depressed or agitated. Fever treatments induced high temperatures to kill off bacteria in the brains of patients with syphilis.

Lobotomies were not performed at Chicago State Hospital, but Mehr says the hospital did send some of its patients elsewhere for the treatment, which cuts the brain’s frontal lobe. “That’s like shooting someone in the head with a shotgun,” he says.

For a time, some patients at Dunning and other Illinois hospitals were given electroshock therapy “once a day, every day for years, which is just an absolute abomination,” Mehr says. “That was a terrible thing to do.”

A new era of psychiatric treatment began in 1954, with the discovery Thorazine, the first in a new wave of drugs that directly affected the symptoms of mental illness.

Mehr, 71, worked for a year at Chicago State Hospital, during an internship from 1964 to 1965. He says the conditions he witnessed were vastly superior to the travesties of Dunning’s early history. “My impressions weren’t all that bad,” he says. And yet, he adds, “The problem … was that these state hospitals were overcrowded.”

Chicago State Hospital’s buildings closed after it merged in 1970 with the nearby Charles F. Read Zone Center, which had opened on the west side of Oak Park Avenue in 1965. Since 1970, it has been known as Chicago-Read Mental Health Center. Today, for better or worse, fewer people with mental illnesses stay for prolonged periods of time in hospitals.

Bodies discovered in 1989

In the years after Chicago State Hospital closed, the state sold much of the property. Today, the land includes the Dunning Square shopping center, which is anchored by a Jewel store; the campus of Wright College; the Maryville Center for Children; and houses and condominiums.

State officials apparently didn’t realize that human bodies were buried underneath a section of the Dunning land when they sold it to Pontarelli Builders, which began work putting up houses. In 1989, a backhoe operator working on the project found a corpse. The state had recently passed a law requiring archaeological assessments before construction is allowed on any property where human remains have been found, so archaeologist David Keene was hired to examine the site. Keene was on the faculty at Loyola University at the time, and now he runs his own company, Archaeological Research.

“The area was just littered with human remains, with human bone all over the place, where they had disturbed things,” he says.

Keene has a vivid recollection of that corpse found by the backhoe. It appeared to be a Civil War veteran. Much of the body was still intact, probably because it had been embalmed with arsenic, a common treatment at the time, which would kill any organisms that would try to consume the flesh.

“He was cut in half at the waist by the backhoe,” Keene says. “His skin was in relatively good condition … I mean, you could see his face. But there was considerable deterioration on the face. You could see the mustache. You could see his hair. He had red hair, but it was patchy. The other distinguishing features of the face were no longer there. And he had a jacket on … it was obviously a military jacket. We only saw it briefly. We didn’t spend a lot of time with it — mostly because the odor was unbelievable, to say the least.”

Keene guided a careful excavation of the land around this gruesome discovery — stopping the digging whenever a coffin or human remains were revealed. He determined that a five-acre cemetery was hidden, just northwest of the current-day corner of Belle Plaine and Neenah avenues. As a result of Keene’s findings, that property was set aside as the Read-Dunning Memorial Park, which was dedicated in 2002. Construction was allowed on the land south of it.

This was just the second-oldest of three cemeteries on the Dunning grounds. The earliest cemetery was near the original poorhouse, just west of Naragansett Avenue and north of Belle Plaine. County officials had supposedly moved the bodies out of that cemetery into the second graveyard, but Keene says bodies did turn up there during another construction project. “We found a little over 30 individuals there, and we were able to remove them so (the developer) could build his building there,” Keene says.

And when Wright College was under construction on the former asylum grounds in the early 1990s, scattered human remains surfaced there, too, Keene says.

“A femur would pop up,” he says. “And it wasn’t associated with a grave of any sort. It was just mixed in with the soil from previous construction and removal of buildings in the past. In this area, you can walk into any one of these yards and dig in the flowerbeds and come up with human remains. They’re part of the scattered remains from construction activity that took place in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Every time they built a building, human remains would go flying.”

As Keene explains, state officials constructed hospital buildings between 1912 and the 1960s on this land without any regard to whether people had been buried there.

“The state came in and — as far as we can tell, from the archaeological evidence — removed any surface evidence of burials in the entire area,” Keene says. “They actually built right on top of graves.”

The third Dunning cemetery was located farther west — underneath what is now Oak Park Avenue near Chicago-Read Mental Health Center. While Keene was conducting his investigation in 1989, some workers walked over and told him they’d found human remains while they were working on a broken water main at Chicago-Read’s entrance.

“So we just walked over there,” Keene recalls. “And sure enough, there were human remains everywhere. And so we began doing some research there to figure out what the boundaries were.”

Keene says it’s obvious that someone must have known about the existence of those graves when the road was put on top of them. “It’s pretty clear,” he says. “When we were there — and this is just the plumbers trying to get to the leak — they were cutting right through coffins. So somebody had to cut through some of those coffins in order to put the original lines in.”

In 1989, genealogist Barry Fleig studied the available records about Dunning and documented that more than 15,000 people had been buried in the graveyards there. But the records are incomplete, and Fleig extrapolated that the total is closer to 38,000.

Opitz says the county’s record keeping was slipshod. “So consequently, the number of cadavers or people that were buried here is somewhat nebulous,” he says.

The exact figure is unknown, but Keene says 38,000 is a reasonable estimate. For Keene, the lesson of the Dunning graveyards is that burial places are not as permanent as many people think they will be.

Neighborhood resident Silvija Klavins-Barshney, 50, says she was shocked when she found out about Dunning’s graveyards a couple of years ago. She serves as the vice president of the church board of the Latvian Lutheran Zion Church, which is located inside a building that was part of Chicago State Hospital. After learning about the Dunning cemeteries, she created a Facebook page called “38,000 Souls Forgotten: The Read-Dunning Memorial Project.” She hopes she can persuade city or state officials to improve the Read-Dunning Memorial Park, such as adding landscaping or a more substantial monument.

The Illinois Department of Central Management Services owns and maintains the park.

“The more research I did, the more I felt that the story needs to get out,” she says, “because most of the people … who were buried here are people that were forgotten in life. They were just left. Or disposed of. Or hidden. And if that’s how they lived their lives, how dare we allow them to live their afterlife like that? … How can 38,000 people be buried and then forgotten?”

Michael Dotson — who posed the question about Dunning for Curious City — visited the Read-Dunning Memorial Park with WBEZ in April. “When you look around the vicinity, you see apartments and condos and houses and a college and construction going on in the background,” he said. “It’s really hard to … realize what was here. But if you can kind of separate yourself from all of that, there’s just that slight feeling of fear and dread and a little bit of sadness and also fascination. … It’s crazy to think what was here and what’s here now and that we’ve completely lost sight of that.”

Robert Loerzel is a freelance journalist and the author of “Alchemy of Bones: Chicago’s Luetgert Murder Case of 1897.” Follow him at @robertloerzel.

Without Means: The role of guns in suicide deaths

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:06:00 -0500

Lindsay Van Sickle’s dad loved to shoot. He lived on a farm and hunted as a little boy. As an adult, he spent time at the shooting range. He collected what she calls “cowboy guns” and loved the history behind some of his WWII firearms.

Van Sickle describes her dad as the life of the party. But he also struggled emotionally. In July of 2011, he took one of his guns, locked the rest of them up, left his house and shot himself at a park. He was 54. The year he died, of the 30,867 gun deaths in the U.S., 19,766 were suicides.

Van Sickle says her dad was a model of responsibility with guns.

“At the house they were locked up in the basement. I didn’t even know where the keys were,” she said. “Even a few of my dad’s cousin’s who grew up kind of like my dad, were shocked that he would take something he loved so much and use it to end his life.”

As Van Sickle watches the news, and sees all these debates about guns, she’s found herself wondering, what role these suicides play in the debate.

“When something like this happens, you can’t help but wonder about the what if. If laws were different, if rules were different, if the outcome would be the same,” said Van Sickle.

I posed that question, about laws and suicide, to Dr. Cathy Barber at the Harvard School of Public Health.

She says first, it’s important to note why the method of suicide matters.

A number of years ago, Barber was helping develop a new system for the federal government called the National Violent Death Reporting system.

“In the process of doing that, I would read through thousands of suicides, little thumbnail sketches of suicides,” Barber recalled.

Barber was surprised at how many of the suicides seemed impulsive. Barber, like many others, assumed that suicide is something people plan. In another study, people who almost died in a suicide were asked how long after they decided to attempt suicide did they actually try it. Twenty-four percent said under 5 min. Two-thirds said under an hour. Only 16 percent said a day or more.

“You’d think this is such a huge decision, you’d think it would be a more deliberative one,” said Barber.

This matters because even though people may have long battles with depression, the window of time in which they actually want to attempt suicide is small. And many people who survived suicide attempts, never go on to try again.

So Barber, came to a simple conclusion. What mattered in that tiny window was the instrument available to the person wanting to commit suicide.

“There is a huge difference across methods of suicide in how likely they are to actually kill. Firearms are actually at the top of the heap.”

Suicide attempts with a gun, result in death 85 percent of the time. Poisoning, for example, only results in death 2 percent of the time.

State suicide statistics illustrate this as well. Eastern states, like Massachusetts have a much lower rate of suicide death than Western states like Wyoming. They don’t vary much in depression rates or even suicide attempts.The biggest difference is the number of guns in each state.

This has gotten some public health workers thinking about a method called “means restriction.”

The term comes from the U.K., where gas—sticking your head in the oven—was once a leading means of suicide.

“Back in the 1960s, they started replacing the source of gas with a non-toxic source, and suddenly suicides in Great Britain went down by a third,” Barber said. “And so that’s when we started realizing means restriction actually can save lives.”

But of course, “means restriction” with guns in the U.S. is not as simple.

Gun control usually focuses on homicide. Even laws like waiting periods, or background checks, haven’t really been shown to help. That’s because people usually don’t go out and buy a gun for a suicide.

What matters is having a gun around. And no one is proposing laws that would get guns out of homes all together.

“I don’t see it as being in line what the courts have decided about second amendment rights,” said Barber. “I mean people can have their opinions about this, but personally, my interest is looking at this and saying ‘how do we save lives right now.’”

So Barber’s approach is a public health one. Her project based at Harvard School of Public Health is called Means Matters. She encourages programs that work with, not against gun owners. For example, a New Hampshire project trains gun shop owners in suicide prevention. In addition to learning about how to lock up and store a gun, gun purchasers learn about how to keep guns away from suicidal individuals. They also receive resources for mental health support.

But the politicized debates over gun laws sometimes spill over to these public health approaches too. Dr. Joseph O'Neil used to work as a family doctor. At appointments, he asked about general safety concerns.

“When I was talking about car seats, when I was talking about seatbelt use, I often asked families if there was a firearm in the house. And I had several families take exception to that.”

Some patients were so upset, that he would ask what they considered a personal, non-medical question, that they switched doctors.

But O'Neill didn’t stop. In fact, he expanded his efforts. He became part of the Indiana Violent Death Prevention Project. One of the organizations projects was training clergy in suicide intervention.

Over a third of clergy members, said they had actually lost someone in their congregation to suicide. The training helped them counsel potentially suicidal individuals.

“Clergy felt more empowered to say by the way I know you feel this way. Is there a gun in the home, would you be willing to get it out of the house,” said O’Neill.

But they never got to see how well it worked. Their funding, from the Joyce Foundation, the same private foundation that supports this series, ran out. Other funding for firearm injury research is scarce.

The Center for Disease Control funds research on causes of death and injury. But since 1996, most of their research on firearms was restricted by congress, who was pressured by the NRA.

Another problem: The Consumer Product Safety Commision, which regulates household products like toys or cars, doesn’t oversee firearms.

O'Neil said there just isn’t the same oversight or information on guns. “Since 1975, we’ve reduced the number of infants killed in motor vehicle accidents by 75%. For toddlers, 50%. I wish we could do that for firearm injuries.”

But without the research dollars and oversight, he thinks they won’t. “It’s sort of like going without a compass. We don’t know where we’ve been and we don’t know where we are going unless we have the data.”

Both Dr. O'neill and Dr. Barber say that the current political battles over guns are a catch 22. It brings more attention to their issue. But it makes any mention of guns so contentious their work becomes political. And it’s hard to talk to gun owners-- the very people most at risk of gun suicides-- without coming across as anti-gun.

As for Lindsay Van Sickle, the experience of actually losing someone to a firearms suicide has changed the way she feels.

“If you have a gun, even if it’s for hunting or protection, there may come a time in your life that you may be depressed. And that may be a means to take your life. So I am definitely more nervous and scared about guns now based on what my dad did to himself.”

She doesn't’ know if any policies or programs could have changed what happened to her father. But she does think, at the very least, it’s worth us asking the question.

Shannon Heffernan is a WBEZ reporter. Follow her @shannon_h.

Mental health advocates say gun debate misses the mark

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:11:00 -0500

Last month in Springfield, a committee gathered at 8 a.m. in a quiet hearing room to talk about the connection between mental health programs and guns. It was the same committee that had previously met three times to talk about gun control regulations. At each of those meetings, a velvet rope was set up outside the room to control the huge line of people waiting to get in. At the mental health hearing, the velvet rope was set up but hardly anyone showed up.

One person who did show up was Todd Vandermyde, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association in Springfield. He talked about how the NRA is somewhere between wanting to make sure those who need mental health treatment can get it, but also advocating so that those who want guns can get them.

“I want to make sure that we don’t stigmatize people in such a way that they don’t want to seek treatment and that we take other behavioral issues and start classifying them as mental illnesses that just start becoming broad prohibitors on people when they’re trying to exercise a fundamental right,” Vandermyde said.

That right he’s referring to is the Second Amendment. Vandermyde says the N-R-A wants to make sure mental health services are funded - but also that the rights of gun owners are respected.

In our ongoing series Front and Center: Flashpoint we’re continuing to a look at how the debate over guns is affecting mental health programs. Many politicians and mental health providers say funding for mental health has dwindled in recent years. But recent mass shootings have changed the political conversation.

Still, how do people who actually work in the mental health field feel about this debate?

“People are mixing apples and oranges with porterhouse steaks,” said Dr. Carl Bell, the head of the Institute of Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “There’s a lot of confusion in the conversations about mental illness and violence.”

Bell has been involved in mental health issues around Chicago for decades and he’s outspoken and blunt. Bell said the problem with how the mental health debate has been tied to gun violence is that the connection is complex. He goes down a list of the different types of gun violence.

“There’s drug-related violence, there’s hate crime violence, there’s inter-personal altercation violence, there’s stranger, robbery homicide, there’s serial killers, there’s mass killers, there’s suicide, there’s legitimate violence where people are doing self-defense,” he said.
Bell is critical of how the media has covered mass shootings and he said his solution is not a new concept.

“The way that you fix problems in people is you make sure they’re surrounded by community that’s going to take care of them: social fabric,” he said.

But so far, some state legislatures have taken on the issue through proposals by requiring more doctors like Bell to report patients who may pose a threat to themselves or others. Legislation like that hasn’t gone very far in Springfield.

Instead, Illinois has acted mostly by cutting mental health funding in recent years and closing mental health facilities, including one Bell used to run on Chicago’s South Side. Bell said it happened so fast, he doesn’t even know what happened to his patients.

“I think it’s egregious,” he said. “I think it’s reprehensible. I think it’s tragic.”

Here in Chicago a year ago, the city also closed six of its twelve mental health clinics to consolidate services. The renewed focus on mental health and gun violence comes as Governor Pat Quinn now says he wants to add $25 million to mental health programs.

That’s good news to Elizabeth Rahuba, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder and has encountered the stigma so many people who work in mental health say they want to avoid.

“If it ever comes up in a conversation where I reveal my diagnosis, most of the people have been pretty good about it, but some people can get kind of skittish,” she said.

Rahuba spent six years living in a nursing home where a lot of people seeking mental treatment in Illinois end up living. She now lives in Hyde Park on her own and said she used to work for a private security company in Texas. She even occasionally had to carry a gun for the job, but she said those days are gone.

“I was a commissioned security officer. I did carry,” she said. “But right now, knowing my illness, that I could trigger it at any time if it ever got that bad, I wouldn’t want one.”

Rahuba said people with mental health issues like her need to recognize symptoms before they become problems. She doesn’t like the idea of requiring more doctors to report patients who might pose a threat to themselves or others.

Rahuba says that’d make it harder for her to open up to people.

Yet another reason, she says, why the current debate about mental health and gun violence may be missing the mark.

Tony Arnold covers Illinois politics for WBEZ. Follow him at @tonyjarnold.

Arrest records in hiring process lead to marginalization, poor mental health

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 08:02:00 -0500

Englewood residents who are repeatedly denied jobs because of an arrest record experience mental health problems, according to a new report.

The Chicago-based Adler School of Professional Psychology looked at whether updates to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could increase employment in Englewood — a poor, black neighborhood where one of the city’s highest unemployment and arrest rates are coupled with dwindling mental health services.

Last year the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission updated its policy that prohibits employers from using arrest records in the hiring process. Adler researchers began conducting the study while the EEOC was considering revisions. They interviewed 250 Englewood residents, asking them about life satisfaction, use of the informal economy and discrimination. The school’s findings suggest that employment rejection created symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.

“In communities like Englewood where there’s a large number of people who are experiencing this, it had impacts community wide. So we found that things like psychological sense of community and cohesion were undermined as well,” said Lynn Todman, the study’s lead author and director of Adler’s Institute on Social Exclusion.

During interviews, respondents said Englewood residents typically seek low-skill retail jobs. Todman said employers sometimes found arrest records without convictions while performing background checks of applicants. And subsequently they weren’t hired.

“Our findings suggested that if the EEOC tightens its guidelines and employers follow those guidelines, that we would see reduction in depressive symptoms, anxiety and then some of the indicators of collective well being in the neighborhood would improve,” Todman said.

Despite the EEOC edict that says employers can’t use arrest records in hiring, enforcement is tricky. Advocates say there’s no money for monitoring.

Todman said the Adler report was also done to mobilize Englewood residents by letting them know they can report discrimination to the EEOC and organize to lobby for money. The neighborhood’s unemployment rate stands at 25 percent, while 42 percent of residents live in poverty, according to city data.

Anthony Lowery is director of policy and advocacy for the Safer Foundation, a nonprofit that helps people with criminal records get into the workforce.

“If you just look at the number of people who are denied opportunity, they lack hope in a community,” Lowery said. “These are the same communities that have escalation of violence because when a person sees there’s no hope, opportunity for legal employment, then they provide for themselves and their families through illegal means.”

Natalie Moore is WBEZ’s South Side Bureau reporter. Follow her @natalieymoore.

Dunning's dark past

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:37:00 -0500

Curious City is a news-gathering experiment designed to satisfy the public's curiosity. People submit questions, vote for their favorites, and WBEZ reports out the winning questions in real time, on Facebook, Twitter and the timeline above.

Mike Dotson from Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood is curious to know: "What’s the history behind Cook County’s former Dunning Insane Asylum and the people buried near there?" The site is now home to the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center. Freelance writer and photographer Robert Loerzel is digging into the history behind Dunning. Do you have family members or know anyone who was buried at Dunning or lived there? We'd love to speak with you. Comment below!

Preckwinkle, Dart sound alarms on jail overcrowding

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:25:00 -0500

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle Wednesday called on judges to release more people on electronic monitoring to help deal with overcrowding at Cook County Jail. According to Preckwinkle, as of Monday there were 10,008 people in the jail, which has a capacity of 10,150.

The jail population typically grows by a few thousand going into the summer, and Preckwinkle says allowing people accused of crimes to await trial from home could curb the problem.

“It’s a waste of public resources to put more money into jail beds,” said Preckwinkle, noting that 70 percent of the people awaiting trial in Cook County are charged with nonviolent offenses.

Speaking on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift Wednesday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart echoed the sentiment, noting that electronic monitoring costs about a fifth of the $150 a day it costs to house someone at the jail.

“They’re sitting in their house, they’re feeding themselves, they’re going back and forth to court dates by themselves, they’re going to work, they’re taking care of their families, all of the above, as opposed to sitting in jail where we’re paying for everything,” Dart said. “My overtime budget is exploding right now.”

Both Preckwinkle and Dart said they’re not sure why the number of people on electronic monitoring has recently dropped, and Preckwinkle also called on the Sheriff himself to use his power to release people.

Dart said he’s already doing everything he can, adding that bond hearing judges should be the ones taking action.

“The only people I was not putting out [on electronic monitoring] were people that didn’t have a house to go to,” Dart said. “There’s no one that has a more vested interest in making sure that the electronic monitoring is a robust system than me.”

But a statement by Circuit Court of Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans hit the ball straight back into Dart’s court, pointing to a federal court order that gives Dart the power to release people.

"According to Illinois law, the purpose of a bail hearing is for a judge to decide how best to ensure the return of the defendant to court and to protect public safety,” Evans wrote. “The purpose of a bail hearing is not to reduce the jail population.”

Neither Dart nor Preckwinkle suggested what measures they will take if the jail population isn’t somehow curbed by summer.

“Historically the system just wouldn’t handle it,” Dart said. “We’d just start putting people on the floors, we’d have three people in a two-person room, we’d have the living units ... literally covered with mattresses all over the place.”

Preckwinkle said overcrowding will be number one on the agenda at a meeting of public safety officials Friday.

Follow Lewis Wallace on Twitter @LewisPants.

Sparse attendance at legislative hearing on relationship between mental health and guns

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:40:00 -0600

Illinois lawmakers are continuing to hold hearings into issues related to guns.

They met Thursday to discuss guns and mental health issues, but the hearing was sparsely attended. When House members have held similar hearings on carrying concealed weapons, the room has been packed full.

A velvet rope was put in the hallway to control the line of people waiting to get in. For Thursday’s hearing on mental health issues and guns, the velvet rope was out but nobody was standing in line.

State Rep. Jil Tracy (R-Quincy) said the two issues are related. She said she was recently at a hearing discussing cuts to mental health programs, while at the same time there was a hearing on guns going on in a separate building.

“We need to fund mental health in this state far better than we’ve been doing,” Tracy said.

Most lawmakers raised questions about how people can get their gun ownership ID, or FOID card, revoked. One common way is for judges to revoke someone’s FOID card while they appear in court. Chris Kachiroubas, the clerk of circuit court for DuPage County, said most of those instances come from Cook County.

Kachiroubas also testified that there’s no mechanism for court clerks to send revoked FOID cards to the Illinois State Police, which oversees the gun card program.

“If the court doesn’t order that it be sent to the state police, it just sits in a file somewhere,” said State Rep. Dennis Reboletti.

Jessica Trame, with the Illinois State Police, testified that the FOID card owner may still possess the card, but it would be revoked in their system if a judge orders it. She acknowledged that might not matter, though, if the person were to try to get a gun through a neighbor or someone who doesn’t run FOID cards through the State Police’s system.

Meantime, throughout the two hour-long hearing, there were few questions about mental health issues or getting counseling for those who see violence first-hand.

North River mental health initiative passes

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0600

Chicago’s North River community is looking at next steps in providing additional free mental health services for its residents. Seventy-four percent of voters there approved a binding referendum measure that would expand preventative services, such as mental health outreach to schools, seniors, and veterans, through an additional property tax. The services might also extend to grief and couples counseling.

Under state law, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn have 90 days from Tuesday’s election to appoint a nine-member Governing Commission to oversee the program.

“They’re going to look at what kinds of mental health services are available in the community,” said Michael Snedeker of the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers, “and (to see) what kind of mental health services aren’t available in the community that will be needed.”

North River is the first community in Illinois to consider a local referendum for this purpose. The measure is enabled by legislation signed by Gov. Quinn last year, which gives communities the authority to determine whether to tax themselves for the additional services.

North River is a collection of neighborhoods on Chicago’s northwest side that includes Albany Park, North Park and Sauganash. Snedeker says the program aims to restore preventative mental health services that public clinics eliminated years ago.

Protesters arrested after occupying Chicago clinic

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:30:13 -0500

Almost two dozen people have been arrested after barricading themselves inside a Chicago mental health clinic to protest plans to close it.

The Chicago Tribune reports that at about 1 a.m. Friday police cut through chains that protesters had used to lock themselves into the Woodlawn Mental health Clinic and began arresting people

A police spokesman says 11 were released without charges and charges are pending against the rest.

The South Side clinic is one of six that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed closing.

The occupation began Thursday evening and organizers say it included facility clients and other "allies" of the movement.

The say 200 protesters were outside the building at the height of the protest.