Last September, I spoke to members of the Cambridge and Middlesex branch of National Alliance on Mental Illness in Massachusetts. I discussed the struggles of Dan and Kimberlee West, pillars of their community, and their son Tyler, who has been found criminally insane.
The Wests are a poster-family for all that is wrong with our courts and criminal-justice system as they affect the mentally ill.
Young Tyler is autistic and has bipolar disorder with psychosis. He also has command auditory hallucinations, according to his mom. He is currently stuck in Muskegon County Jail awaiting trial, where he has been for a year.
As an independent investigative report revealed, in Michigan, Tyler’s lengthy wait for a bed is not the exception; it’s the rule.
Dozens of mentally ill defendants are languishing in county jails for months waiting to get psychiatric treatment. Last year, defendants waited on average 177 days, about six months, to get into the state hospital system.
At 5 feet, 5 inches, Tyler was considered a sweet and gentle boy. He was diagnosed with pervasive development disorder, sensory processing disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder even before he was adopted. But he found passions in school, including musical instruments (he plays five) and computer design.
As he aged, his diagnoses grew more severe: mood disorder at age 12. Autism and bipolar disorder at 16. The psychotic symptoms started showing up less than a year later. He has admitted to hearing voices. He has made several attempts at suicide.
Kimberlee and Dan West took him to emergency rooms fifteen times in 2015 and 2016. They pleaded for a long-term commitment, but they were denied. They begged for a civil commitment, through an assisted outpatient treatment program known as Kevin’s Law.
Tyler’s lack of critically needed treatment and medications continued. And if the life inside his head was a nightmare, the life outside it was as well.
At age 16, Tyler vanished for a few hours with a 14-year-old girl. No medical evidence suggested sexual contact, but he was accused of statutory rape nonetheless.
At the time of the trial, Tyler was speaking in gibberish and lapsing into catatonic states. He avoided a sentence then, but police later found Tyler in a neighbor’s garage. Despite clear evidence of psychosis, a judge decided that the boy was sane, because he had taken his shoes off before entering.
Tyler did 90 days in the Muskegon County jail. Ten of them were in solitary confinement.
After that, Tyler’s reasoning capacities were pretty well shot, and so was his reputation with the Muskegon police and court system.
Last February, the young man’s fragile world came crashing down after he wandered across the family lawn – again, in a state of psychosis – and onto the property of another set of neighbors. As they slept upstairs, he opened an unlocked door, walked over to a sofa, and fell asleep.
When the neighbors discovered him, the wife insisted on calling the police, and Tyler was arrested on a charge of home invasion. He returned to the Muskegon County jail, where he has remained ever since, in a unit that houses violent offenders. He was severely beaten by a violent cellmate, and is in imminent danger of additional beatings.
Tyler has returned repeatedly to solitary confinement: in many experts’ opinion, an unconstitutional form of torture.
Some prison officials attest that they do this to keep mentally ill inmates “safe.” It doesn’t.
Tyler should not have been sent to jail at all; he belongs in a psychiatric hospital.
The Treatment Advocacy Center estimates that 50 psychiatric beds for every 100,000 people is the minimal acceptable number. Michigan offers ten, or about 680 beds for 5,000 patients in psychosis. The state provides the sixth-lowest number of psychiatric beds per capita in the nation.
But what the Michigan system lacks in psychiatric care, it makes up for in inmate capacity, with 93 county jails capable of holding over 18,000 people.
Like Tyler, many of these people are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of anything. In general a disturbingly large number of people behind bars have some form of mental illness. They are not getting help. No treatment. No medications. But lots of pain.
This is, by definition, the criminalization of mental illness. And it’s what, in my mind, makes Tyler West a national symbol: a symbol of all that is defiled and broken in our country’s mental healthcare system.
Kimberlee West and her husband are at the point of nervous exhaustion. But she believes “it is God’s grace” that has kept Tyler alive.
I would argue that God seems to need a little backup. It is up to us to provide it.
Ron Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and critic. His latest work is entitled “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America.”