8. My brother still believes he was victimized by mind control

Chapter 8 in a series on mental illness.

This post includes recent updates and will be updated from time to time since my brother’s recent relapse.

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After my brother was released from the California Department of Corrections back to free society, I asked the question Is my brother cured of mental illness?

That question is naive and simplistic. And, as you can see for yourself from my brother’s own post here in this blog Am I Really Mentally Ill? , he is as convinced as ever that he was subject to mind control by nefarious forces operated by Masons, he remains anti-jewish, and his beliefs that certain scientifically impossible phenomenon are possible (such as beaming thoughts into his brain or reading his thoughts) remain an entrenched part of his belief system.

So, I am letting him have that last word in these pages. You may judge for yourself if “cure” applies to my bother.

I am at a point in my life where even for my own brother I prefer to distance myself from spending time with people who have egregiously irrational prejudices against jews and who believe in nefarious forces governing the world with simplistic explanations such as masonic cults. I will try to be there for my brother as a friend when I can be.

But, using my prerogative as editor and publisher of these pages, for now at least, this will be the last post in this section of the OP Column on the subject of Mental Health. I am making the editorial decision to provide my brother with his last word on this subject but not to enable these pages to become a forum for vitriolic ravings against jews, masons, mind control conspiracies, etc.

If Tony chooses to make such posts on some other blog site I will provide a link here to that site.

If a time comes where my brother Tony is amenable to republishing an edited version of our original YouTube interview and doing a follow up conversation with me, both of those videos will be published here.

I hope some of the writing here by both me and by my brother are instructive for those who have relatives who have these kinds of thoughts.

UPDATE of June 5, 2016: Unfortunately, a few days ago I got a call from my other brother saying that the police had taken my brother to a medical center for psychiatric observation, a 72 hour hold which has since been changed to be a two week hold. I don’t know the details. It appears my brother has decompensated or is in the process of so doing. I will not continue chronicling my brother’s history any more. If he manages to regain stability I will ask him to write another post in this blog at some time in the future.

Up until a few weeks ago, my brother was doing pretty good. He had made it through a six month program at a half-way house and had been renting a room at a fairly low rent that he could afford. He seemed stable and was not going around threatening people or damaging property, so that’s all good. But then he decided to leave his room rental situation and move to a hotel room in Hollywood and now I get this call from our other brother that Tony has been taken in again for psychiatric evaluation. Oh my.

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UPDATE of December 8, 2016: Tony’s relapse in June lasted a couple of weeks but then he began taking his meds again and was able to continue living in a room he had rented in Lancaster. He was not happy with his situation there and changed to renting a room in Palmdale. I thought it fortunate that he was able to find landlords who would rent him space since he was up front with them about his recent incarcerations and treatments. Partly, he was accepted because his landlords had themselves been in treatment programs. But after another three months all of that came to naught. He gambled away the last $3000 he had in savings. For reasons I cannot myself remember, I made the mistake of agreeing to let him live in a spare room in my house starting in September. The situation at first was stable. Tony helped me do some repairs and seemed stable. He helped my fix up our little house out in the desert, very competently designing and installing an interior cover for our swamp cooler vent. He also designed and built a fiber-glass extension to my fence. It was very good work. I was being a “nice brother” letting him live rent free as he would hopefully save enough money to go visit a friend in Brussels who he claimed would provide a room for a very reasonable rent and permit Tony to do some writing. But around mid November things degenerated again. Looking back on messages I exchanged with him it all happened so fast. One day he’s normal Tony, within a week or two he’s a different person. The pattern of the past was repeating. Tony began talking very quickly having rampant fight of ideas. He became paranoid about some young French friends who had been visiting me, became very agitated, falling back to expressing anti-semitic views, and then moved out and stayed in hotels because he “did not like” my young French guests, one of whom was the daughter of friends of mine in France. These young adults would not harm a fly. Tony has already been obsessing about politics again and was for the first time I recall becoming a right wing bigot. It was confusing and frustrating. Tony was becoming delusional again and I told him I did not want him to live with me and to please find another place to live (as he had proven he could do in Lancaster and Palmdale). The situation worsened. I was going through my own issues and this was an additional concern for me that was hard to cope with. Tony left by bus to go North, his belief being he could visit a friend in Santa Barbara and another in Portland. Neither of those friends expected him nor did they wish to nor did they have the ability to house him in his condition.

During that time, my other brother and I received phone calls from Tony after Tony had borrowed someone’s cell phone or asked someone to make a call on his behalf. He told me that his shoes had been stolen and he was barefoot. One night he called me from San Jose so I looked up a homeless shelter near by but he hung up before I could arrange for him to go there. The next night he called me from SFO airport. I refused by buy him a ticket to L.A. but I did arrange for Lyft to take him to the homeless shelter I had found the previous night down in San Jose. That is the Silicon valley, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. I hoped the shelter there might be a good one. The next day he called to say he disliked that shelter, that the bathroom was filthy, and that he only got a couple hours sleep and when he awoke someone was standing over him looking at him. The next night he was in Santa Cruz and called my brother asking him to arrange for a “private ambulance” because he could not walk. He was barefoot and had been barefoot for one or two weeks. Eric told him no but talked to the stranger whose phone Tony has borrowed. The stranger told him they had dialed 911 and an ambulance was on its way. We were able to determine that Tony was taken to a hospital but had no other information. A day later Tony called me again from Santa Cruz. He told me he had stayed in an ER where the ambulance had taken him for a couple of hours but then asked for a bed and was told to leave. They had given him some thick socks but no shoes. He said he just walked around in the early morning air to avoid getting hypothermia. He has a friend there who he had met at Atascadero State Hospital. That friend has housing in Santa Cruz but is not in a position to house Tony. It struck me that his friend’s housing was the kind of thing the Tony could use and that seems to work well for some people who accept that kind of help. Tony never likes being housed ini government subsidized housinig and is what could be termed resistant to treatment. At some level I don’t blame him but in reality, it is the only thing that seems to have enabled him to stay stable for long periods of time.

Continuing with the story, two more days went by.

Yesterday Tony showed up at my door, having taken the bus back to L.A. I had taken the day off from work sick and was trying to rest. But of course I let Tony in. He took a shower and a bath. I gave him some lentil soup I had made and he retrieved some clothing, which I had laundered for him during his absence. But then he left, supposedly to “take a train to Portland” where he has another friend, someone from our neighborhood when we were teenagers. I was numb. I did not wish to house him but had offered to take him to an emergency shelter that I had found via a homeless hotline phone call. He would not accept that. One of his feet was swollen. I gave him my sandals so he had some protection for his feet. I also offered to go to New Balance and buy him some large shoes (he is 6′ 3″ and has size 13+ very wide feet – and the swelling makes it nearly impossible to fit shoes). He refused the shoes idea. I let him go. That’s not even the right way to say it. I did not want him to stay and he was determined to leave. I both have feelings of guilt for somehow not wanting to nor being able to help him while at the same time feelings of annoyance at a society that is unable to provide services for someone like my brother, forcing the family to suffer the results of the mental illness.

Today I got a call from Tony who said he was in San Jose again. I have no idea where he spent the night since the train to Portland did not leave yesterday evening – he had to wait until this morning at 10 AM. I did exchange email with his friend Robert in Portland who had seen Tony briefly in Lancaster a few months ago. They went bowling. Robert bowls over 200 and Tony had made a video of Robert doing so. Robert said that Tony was doing OK at that time. But that was then and now is now. Robert had not know of Tony’s plan to visit him and expressed dismay that Tony was on his way to Portland expecting to “stay one week” with Robert before continuing to Seattle. Tony must imagine he will reunite with his co-video producer friend of his from 35 years ago who now lives in Seattle.

Tony will find that none of his friends will want to house him and, in fact, no one of his friends will be able to house Tony in Tony’s present condition. He needs structure and mandated medication, something he had this past Spring while on parole but now that he is a “free” man, is in a society that will not provide that structure nor require it.

Thanks for reading.

Dennis G. Allard
Santa Monica
May 12, 2016, updated June 5, 2016 and December 8, 2016

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Am I Really Mentally Ill?

( Note – This post is written by Tony Allard and is an adjunct to a series on mental illness written by Dennis Allard. That series may be accessed via the following links:
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Hello, my name is Tony and I’m not anybody’s Schizophrenic brother.  I was initially diagnosed as such in the mid-1980’s, but have had 4 or 5 different diagnoses since.  Personally, I believe I am a victim of what was a prolonged and persistent mind-control agenda by the Zionist and Free Masonic cults.  Oh, another one of those, eh?  I will be adding to this file as time permits me to and you will be able to decide for yourself if I really am Mentally Ill.  I will describe here my perception of historical events which occurred.  My tendency in the past before I was ever diagnosed as “Mentally Ill” by a Licensed Psychiatrist, until about 1986 or so, was to try to fit reality into neat conceptual boxes, (“Christian”, “Communist”, etc.), and to explain reality to myself using such “readymade” models which provided some mental comfort to me.  However, starting around 1986 I started having real problems facing reality and my life basically “fell apart”.  I sought help, both voluntarily and because of social coercion of my family and friends, (or you can call it persuasion I suppose if that sounds more “caring”), in yet another conceptual model called “Psychiatry”.  That has been a total wash.  No help what-so-ever.  It only augmented my self-doubts and the (ever changing prescribed) medications they at first prescribed and I took voluntarily, and then in a dozen instances was forced to take or injected with by the County or State Authorities further deteriorated my sense of well-being and personal self worth.  At that point, despite the fact I believed that I was under a constant barrage of psychic attack by those just referenced Satanic Cults’ practitioners, I came to agree with my Doctors and intimates that I had an actual physiological mental defect.  I have been trying to understand what happened in the ensuing 25 years, with a much clearer perspective, for the last 5 years.  I have come to certain conclusions to explain my past and current mental states, which have invariably lead many people to dismiss my accounts, and myself, as delusional.

For a hypothetical yet actual example that happened to me, if you tell an NSA (ie. NIH) Psychological Operative, “Psyop”, (take California State Forensic Psychologist Brandy Matthews at Atascadero State (Psychiatric) Hospital for instance), that you are the victim of NSA and CIA experimentations, and that you believe that you are a Special Agent for the FBI, she will always misrepresent your statements and write down something to the effect that you believe you are a CIA Agent being persecuted by the FBI.  That just a joke.  Seriously though, I’m not joking.  The connections I’ve made between disparate events that I have observed in my life and my explanations for their causes have in many cases changed from year to year.  But that is because as I get new information I have to try to be flexible and adjust my “conspiracy theory”.  If I knew all the facts about the Robert Kennedy murder then maybe I would know why I’m supposed to vote for Bernie Sanders for President now 50 fucked-up years later.  But I don’t and I won’t.  As far as my delusion that I was an undercover FBI Agent, that was the result of a couple of clandestine conversations I had with a couple of individuals back in 1985 and it is now apparent to me that even if I was being recruited to be such an Agent back then, I cannot possibly actually be one now because since 2003 I have become a twice Convicted Felon.  The FBI does not employ Felons and I have never received a cent from the FBI for any services, so I am not only not a Special Agent, undercover or otherwise, I am not an Informant either.

I have lived an active life in Los Angeles for those 50 years and worked in and around the Motion Picture Industry for 20 of them, mostly for my older brother Eric Allard’s All Effects Company in the San Fernando Valley.  I was a participant in the early LA “Punk Rock” scene as a video artist from 1978 (to 1987), and I have some stories about events in both my professional and personal lives, which I will relate to you, that affected my personal development and reflect on my current understanding of the world and my place in it.  Some of you reading this may have known me, or of me, and maybe I can help your own understanding of seemingly inexplicable events in your own life.  Frankly, along with clarifying my own understanding, helping others better understand themselves and others better is one of my primary goals in spending time writing this stuff down.  Maybe you will know something that I would like to know and you can email me and tell me something I don’t know.  I can always use new information.  I have my B.A. from UCLA in Communication Studies in the Mass Media from UCLA, 1981, with a Minor in Interpersonal Communication.  I also studied color video production there under the tutelage of NYC transplanted “Neorealist” Filmmaker, Modern Dancer, and early 60’s Pop Art/Chelsea Hotel/Warhol Factory Scenester Shirley Clarke, and made about 10 short video art pieces which included a number of alternative music videos, mostly before that advent of digital video and even MTV.   All of that was before my emotional and legal troubles started to seriously interfere with my economic and ability to function socially in society.  I have been interned in Jails, Prisons, and State Psychiatric Hospitals for 11 ½ years out of the past 15, on various small crimes and a couple of Felony Criminal Threats Convictions.  I also had numerous Psychiatric detentions throughout the past 30 years prior to and during that period, not really directly related to any specific crimes but because of questionable behavior and non-criminal actions that local police and Psychiatric Emergency Teams ruled merited Psychiatric observation.  Unfortunately, because of my brash reactions to efforts of the Free Masons and Jews to direct my behavior, and my resistance to their directives and also because my inability to break out of long standing alcohol and drug (marijuana) use which I started at age 13, as well as a gambling addiction I acquired as an inappropriate response to my psychological difficulties and as an effort to “escape reality”, I’ve wasted many years staring at Prison, Jail, and Mental Hospital walls and being heavily drugged both voluntarily and involuntarily on legal and illegal drugs and prescription medications.  I did manage to accomplish quite a bit in spite of being incarcerated for most of the past decade and a half and treated basically like a grade school student by Psychiatrists and Social Workers.  But what can you do?  As any Convict and ex-Convict will tell you, eventually I came to the conclusion: “If you’re willing to do the crime, be willing to do the time”.  I did and I did.

So what’s the deal with Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Social Workers, etc.?  In short, “Mental Health Professionals”?  They want to “help” people?  In the past 29 years, I have been diagnosed with 5 different “Mental Illnesses” and been prescribed over 30 different Psychiatric drugs.  I do not believe that I am “Psychotic”, as many Psychiatric Doctors who have interviewed me in the past 29 years have contended.  I have certainly acted that way a number of times.  But I don’t want to get into a discussion of “Nature vs. Nurture”, which is to say the physiological versus the environmental “causes” for psychotic behavior.  All I can say is that I believe my psychotic reactions were primarily “drug induced”, in combination with other psycho-social forces, and that I can only take partial “responsibility” for my so-called “Crimes”.  The fact is, other than engendering fear through verbal assaults on some individuals, perhaps, whom I know to be actual political enemies of mine, and in a few instances doing a few thousand dollars worth of property damage, I am not really a Criminal.  I certainly have never done anything that has left permanent physical damage on the bodies of any of those enemies, whereas, I have been attacked a number of times and I do have permanent scars, missing teeth, and bitter memories of physical pain that took months to heal in some cases.

Talking about Psychiatrist and their motives here’s some irony, if you want to call it that.  I first met a Dr. Schneider when I was incarcerated in TTCF fighting my 1st Strike Terrorist Threats charge in 2002, brought against me by a “Sex Therapist” and phone sex service operator Susan Block.  Dr. Schneider, who was assigned my case as my attending LA County Jail Psychiatrist in late 2002, spoke with me on probably 3 or 4 occasions during that internment.  He spoke English with such a strong accent, which I thought was Russian, that I could barely understand what he was saying, during my Psychiatric Interviews with him.  I recall saying to him one day just that, that I could barely understand him, and I asked him why he was practicing Psychiatry in Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Twin Tower Correctional Facility in the United States.  His response was, “That’s a good question.”  But he didn’t elaborate and I didn’t question his National origin at that time.  Jump forward to 2010 to an “ICC” (Institutional Classification Committee) meeting in Los Angeles County Prison (“Lancaster Prison” in the State’s CDCR, not the County Jail mind you), where I had to face Dr. Schneider again.  I had been placed in what is called the “SHU” (Segregated Housing Unit”) in Lancaster for having chased down the tier and in the yard a young homosexual and known member of the “GBG” gang, (“Gay Boy Gangsters”), who had been harassing me.  I was still in the SHU after 3 months of solitary confinement, and the ICC was to determine if I could be reintegrated into the general population, (not on “the Main Line” but at least within the general population of a Mentally Ill Housing Unit and with a cellie).  Oddly enough, such ICC’s are generally attended by about 8 Prison officials, including a sub-Warden or Warden, a Lieutenant and/or Sergeant, your Psychiatrist and Social Worker/Clinician, a Nurse, and a couple of Correctional Officers for security, but for reasons unknown to me there were about 30 people at this one.  Seriously bizarre and unusual.  I recognized Schnieder immediately upon being led into the room and was surprised to see him there since he was not my State Shrink and I had not seen him since years before in County.  In waist chains I was led to my seat in front of my initial questioner, a ranking Forensic Psychologist as I recall now.  I don’t remember the ICC Facilitators name, but he was obviously Jewish and he started to question me.  (I did not ask him if he was a Free Mason, (part of my sentence was the result of threatening to have a Free Mason, Steven Mikulan (past Theater Writer and long time Theater Editor for the LA Weekly free newspaper and former associate of mine) and his wife Sandra Ross, killed if they testified in Court on Felony Vandalism Charges I had incurred by scratching her car with a pocket knife).  I did however, ask this guy who was about to start the ICC inquisition if he was Jewish.  He refused to answer my question saying that it was his “prerogative” not to answer.  I asked him what that meant, and he replied that it meant that it was his choice to answer or not, and he refused to do so.  I didn’t argue at that point and answered his questions that followed though I don’t recall now what else he asked me.  Next, I was questioned by the at that point I had just discovered now California State Psychiatrist Dr. Schneider.  I didn’t ask him if he was Jewish or how he got his job in a State Prison, an apparent upward move from the County Jail I thought, but I asked him if he remembered me from about 8 years previously.  He denied remembering our Twin Towers relationship.  I then asked him again about his accent, saying: “It’s odd that you speak with a Russian accent but you have a German name.  Are you Russian?”  He didn’t exercise his prerogative and answered, “No, I’m Jewish.”  He then went on to tell the Committee that I was indeed still Mentally Ill, if I recall correctly, and as a result I had to spend a couple of more months in the SHU until I was sent out to the State Hospital at the Salinas Valley Psychiatric Program as a 2684 Prison Commitment for stabilization.  Ironic.  What happened at SVPP was a whole story apart from this one which I’ll get to later.  Why does Dr. Schneider practice Psychiatry?  Because he “cares”?  I believe that it is much more likely tied to his car/house/and Visa Card Payments, but then, I’m Mentally Ill.

If you are not knowledgeable about the finer distinctions in the Psychiatric categorizations of Mental Illnesses, I can tell you that a Psychosis is a cognitive, or thinking (ie. brain), disorder, and a Mood Disorder is considered an emotional problem.  The mind/body duality is taken as fact by modern American Psychology/Psychiatry, and in fact, if you look at their 12 Step Programs for substance abusers like me, which are based on “Spiritual Principles”, they also preach that we have a “Spirit”.  I don’t buy any of it, but hell, I’m not a Doctor, a Social Worker, or a Priest, so I don’t have to or say that I do even if I don’t.  From my initial “Psychotic Break” in 1987, (what they called my social withdrawal and emotional reaction to my excess drug abuse patterns catching up with me combined with, I believe, National Security Agents attacking me with a number of psychological, electronic, and chemical weapons), through about 2004, I was diagnosed with a number of “Disorders”, or “Mental Illnesses”.  First I was a Paranoid Schizophrenic.  Then around 1991 I somehow had instead Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (NOS).  By about 1996 my Mental Disorder (I always try to remember to Capitalize these terms, it seems more serious, official, and objective that way), with Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type.  These were all thought Disorders if I understand their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s definitions correctly.  Then, somehow, in 2005 as I recall, when I was sent to ASH Psychiatric Hospital in San Luis Obispo as an MDO, (“Mentally Disordered Offender”), for supervised Parole, (their term for further kindergarteny treatment when they feel like you haven’t sufficiently rehabilitated (or maybe they just need more money?)), I was diagnosed for the first time with a Mood Disorder – Bipolar Disorder with Schizoaffective Episodes – and there was a qualitative shift in the type of Psych Meds that I was required to take.  I went from atypical anti-psychotics to a mood stabilizer, Depakote (similar to Lithium).  In around 2014, in my second go around at ASH as an MDO, is when I think I was reclassified once again, to my current diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Type I, Manic Type.

I am going to write an account of my own interpretation of my personal history which will perhaps not prove as a “fact” that I am not really Mentally Ill, but I will at least communicate a what I perceived happened in a number of historical events and get down my own interpretations which I prefer do not die with me.  In the overall scheme of things, I don’t think my own “suffering”, which although it has been fairly extensive, has had any kind of lasting traumatic effects on me as to the way I think or act now.  If anything, my punishment has “cured” my so-called Mental Illness.  As I’ve repeatedly denied, I don’t buy into the “Mental Illness” conception of me, but I do now have 2 “Strikes” in California and I cannot afford to be convicted of any further Felony Criminal Offenses without spending the rest of my life in Prison as a 3 Strike Loser.  So now, even when I “think bad thoughts” I mostly just keep them to myself whereas in the past, and particularly when drunk or min Psych Med withdrawal, I would “act out” and be both rude and threatening, in some cases I freely admit, to people who had done nothing to merit such a response from me.  I suppose “constructive venting” is one of if not the main purpose of my writing this.  What I do want to communicate, however, with the evidence I have in my mind, as well as a lot of actual documentation I have now and will obtain in the future, that I have indeed been the target of Government mind control experimentation.  Because of the nature of the National Security Act and the limitations on the information it is permissible for US Citizens to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act, it is likely I will never know “the true story”.  By structuring my thoughts here, I will clarify for myself through this process some of the things that have bothered me for years, and hopefully, really for my own personal satisfaction, come to a closer approximation of understanding what “the true story” is.

Basically, I currently believe “MK Ultra” was not discontinued by the CIA in the early 1970’s and in fact, whatever you want to call it, I think “Psychological Warfare” is an ongoing procedure being carried out on a daily basis everywhere in the United States and the rest of the world.  The effects on my own behavior of the broad cultural rot rammed down my senses daily by both the mass media and what I feel are the deteriorating social morals and ethics in my interpersonal interactions, have been further magnified in my own person through focused and direct personal attacks by NSA’s aimed at specifically at me.  If you want to know why I think I was singled out, I would say I was and I wasn’t.  I was culled out of the crowd, along with others, because of my exceptional smarts and creativity combined with my lack of “groundedness”, if I can call it that.  In 1976, when I was still at the dorms at UCLA, I wrote my brother Eric a letter, which I still remember, in which I was bubbling with enthusiasm for Marxist ideas.  Shortly thereafter, I had a “religious conversion” and became “Reborn” as a Christian.  For multiple reasons, I dropped that pose (or “belief system”) and slide into the “counter-culture” on the “Punk Rocker” and “New Wave” worlds.  I was ripe for picking by the behind the scenes manipulators to do their bidding.  It seems like I would be looking for a new mind set within a few more years.  I think that’s why I was picked for mind control experimentation and social manipulation.  The King Makers thought they could get me to do their bidding and I was invited to go into the Hollywood Cult of Celebrity as an “Art Star”.  For a number of reasons, mostly my own intransigence and monogamous/heterosexual obstinacy, I was rejected and blackballed by the Freemasons  for further initiation into their Satanic Cult.  I’ll get into specifics as to how I’ve come to this conclusion, not to worry.

I’ve met hundreds of individuals in the past 30 years who have suffered similar psychic attacks on themselves as I have and I’ve shared notes with them.  For me, such personal attacks have come in the form of directed energy weapons (ELF) projecting “thoughts” into my mind and infrared devices used to monitor my activities used in conjunction with ELF bombardments striping me of any sense of personal privacy and depriving me of my personal space.  The most outlandish claim I make and believe, is that these Cults have advanced technology called “Remote Neural Monitoring” (RMN).  Basically, I have believed for years that there are individuals (and of course they are in groups which I believe are centered around Zionist and Free Masonic sub- Cults) who can “read my mind”, which includes being able to “see”, literally on a video screen, both what my eyes see and what I see in my “minds eye” which I believe is related to my visual cortex in my brain, and the can hear what I hear and they can literally know what my thoughts are in language in real time.  I don’t know how this is accomplished and I know how insane this claim sounds, but I am convinced that it is possible and can be done to anyone.  I used to believe that such RNM was only possible in conjunction with skull and/or dental implants, but I believe that I was either misguided about that or that the technology has advanced now to a stage where implants are not required.  Also, chemical weapons have enhanced some of my delusional states of mind.  Substances such as crystal meth have been put into my food which I unwittingly ingested and I’ve taken Psychiatric “medications” willfully and naively in good faith.  Worse, have been the injections of “medications”, on many dozens of occasions, into my bloodstream in Court Ordered forced medication procedures, when I had no more faith in Psychiatrists mythical solutions.

What I have come to believe in the process of living my 58 years on earth, mostly here in Los Angeles, is that I am not really seriously Mentally Ill at all, but rather have been victimized by the Zionist and Freemasonic cults’ through their use of mind control, including hypnosis, electronic devices, unnecessary medications, organized slander, and inappropriate and severe punishment which has included at times extreme sleep deprivation and mental and physical isolation, as well through physical attacks in which I was targeted (“green lighted”) in over half a dozen instances in attacks by both LA County Sheriff Departments Deputies and by fellow TTCF Inmates and California Department of State Hospital Psychiatric Patients.  As a result of those processes, I have had to endured some rather extreme physical, emotional, and psychiatric/psychological torture and pain.  Perhaps you have heard such charges by others and you prefer to write such claims off as the paranoid concoctions of the Mentally Ill.  Undoubtedly, in many cases that is surely the truth.  But it’s not like I’ve had my legs blown off by an IED or land mine or was next to a good friend who suffered such a fate, so that’s why I won’t really complain about having acquired PTSD because of having had a few ribs broken or a couple of teeth knocked out.

In many cases I have had an abnormal disregard for the opinions of others regarding my actions effects on my “public image”, which has been further degraded by the incredible effectiveness that the above cited Cults’ activities have had on my thinking and resulting reactive Criminal Assaults and other behaviors for many years and in many situations.  In more cases than I can remember or innumerate I have appeared to others, at times believed myself to be, literally and totally “insane”.  A great number of people, especially including the vast majority of Psychiatric Doctors, Psychologists, Social Workers, etc. I’ve interviewed with in the past have believed, or said that they did, that I am seriously Mentally Ill and that my “delusions” of persecution and belief that I was an undercover FBI Operative are actually symptomatic of a Personality Disorder with Delusions of Grandiosity.   Some of my best friends have told me that they believe that that was, and to some still is, the case.  I agree that in a great number of instances I’ve acted crazy, but in most of those instances I was drunk or in a toxic state of mind from stopping taking my “meds” cold turkey and not tapering off the dosage as required.  Such rash behavior can be actually drug induced, in the sense that psychotropic drug withdrawal produces severe behavioral side effects in itself.  I do not have sufficient verifiable “facts” which I can report to you which will prove “beyond a shadow of a doubt” the veracity of the above seemingly outlandish allegation that the Jews and Masons activities (“dirty tricks” if you will) have been at the root of my sometimes erratic behavior others resulting perception of me as Mentally Ill.  Much worse has been the resulting medical diagnoses by a multitude of Psychiatrists that my behavior reflects that I am actually Mentally Ill.   To myself, the most significant proof that I will describe within these pages is the large number of non-random events and ritual abuses I have experienced in my life.  As I am not a Member of the Zionist (Cabal) or any Free-masonic Lodge, my knowledge of the history, rules and methods of those social Organizations has come in bits and pieces, and is basically limited.  Those organizations are called “Cults” because, by their very nature, as the “Punk Rocker” “Darby Crash” AKA “Bobby Pin” named at birth “Jan Paul Beahm” claimed in the title of one of his records, “What We Do Is Secret”.   A band that I had peripheral involvement as a video artist in 1980, “X”, is still playing 40 years after their inception, (as I suppose they have to), and just last week they had a “Secret Show”.  Big fucking deal.  I saw somebody on their website actually call them God.  In their cover of the old Doors song, (the Doors for Christ’s sake), there’s a line about “light another cigarette, and speak in secret alphabets, and learn to forget . . . . . ”  Secret alphabets?    I wish it were so easy, and that’s why I drank for 20 years too many too much.  Too try to forget.  But in Al Pacino cum Michael Corleone said in the God Father “ . . . but they keep dragging me back . . . “ or some such horseshit.

Perhaps I was “supposed” to go the way of the “tragic hero” and kill myself.  I’m pretty boring sometimes, but not that boring.  Therein lie my delusions, according to the Psychiatrists.  Head Doctors have assured me for years that when I thought people were “talking about me” or making “cryptic references” to other people or referring to past or future events in my life in order to influence my actions, that I was actually suffering from a mental disorder and experiencing “Referential Thinking” and/or “Thought Projection”.  I certainly cannot deny that many of the things I have thought in my own mind and communicated verbally, and in writings, over these many years have been completely delusional.

In 2002, on 3 separate occasions I perceived persons not well known to me saying verbatim and I quote: “If you don’t marry A. we’re going to kill you.”   They said it in non sequitur fashion and totally out of context of what we were talking about.   In a 4th instance, I overheard radio Schlock Jock Howard Stern make a similar comment on his televised replay of his NYC radio show on his E Entertainment cable TV show while I was cooking dinner in an apartment in Santa Monica that Summer.  He said, verbatim: “If Tony doesn’t marry A. we’re going to kill him.”  These perceptions were perhaps all complete delusions.  I’m as sure as the fact that I’m not dead now that these things were said though.  Of course, I’ve been counseled by friends and family that my perceptions were all shear delusions and to let it go, just forget it.  Well, why should I, I’m not a fucking Christian.  Am I supposed to be “grateful” that I wasn’t killed by the Jewish Mafia after all and let sleeping dogs lie?  I was involved in 1980 in a May – September sexual affair with a woman named A.H. when I was a student at UCLA 1980, 20 some years previous to those threats.  I assumed this was the “A.” these persons and Mr. Stern were referring to.  I have no “rational” explanation for why these people would say such a seemingly absurd statement or why three different people would repeat it to me?  The fact is I was told by a coworker during the production of the 1st Tim Burton version of “Planet of the Apes”, on which I worked on in the Art Department as a Prop Maker, that A. H. is a Mason.  That was before the threats even occurred.  I’ll have more to say about the H. lady at a later time.  For now, suffice to say, I did not marry her and I have not been killed, so if my perceptions were accurate and those people who said that actually did say that, then there must be an explanation as to why they did.  I don’t have that explanation.   All I’ll say now is that I have heard that A.H. is married now so I guess I missed my chance.  And I say good for her, I hope she is content with her salt water Jacuzzi in her home in Rancho Park, or wherever she lives now.  But I also heard from a good friend, and usually reliable source of information, that one of H.’s sources of income is directing pornographic films.  C’est la vie, I suppose.  I have some theories about that person and her “problem”.   Which are by their very nature “conspiracy theories” which I will get to at a later date.  All I can say for now is that her problem is as clear as the nose on her face.

It must be apparent already at the outset of this blog that I do not share some of the assumptions of my brother Dennis Allard, who operates this website, oceanpark.com.  I appreciate much of what he has done for me during my life, especially in providing me at times material assistance such as a roof over my head, which he has done on a few occasions.  I’m even more grateful to him for tending my finances and “putting money on my books” during my many incarcerations in various Government Penal and Mental Institutions.  But his somewhat obsessive documentation of my Legal problems and my Psychiatric Care is a different matter for me.  His documentation on his Ocean Park Blog was by necessity limited in the extreme because he winnowed out a few dozen pages of written history from the vast quantity of Legal and Medical (ie. Psychiatric) information involved in over six and a half years of my struggles in Courtrooms and Hospital Doctors’ Offices and Ward Hallways, between July 23, 2009 when he started that process and February 15, 2016, which marked the end of his documentation.  His Oceanpark Column’s blog’s “Mental Health” category on this website are not really in the genre of favors that he has rendered me which I can say I really appreciate that much and I will tell you briefly why that is.

At the very very head of that series of documents, he put the following statement:

“Category Archives: Mental Health

The saga of my brother who is afflicted with Paranoid Schizophrenia. Eventually I would like to provide a resource page where people can share their ideas for how to improve what is a very broken system in the United States for dealing with Mental Health issues.”

The real “saga” of my life, if that word can be defined as “a long story of heroic achievement,” is not over yet.  As far as heroic, there has been nothing brave about my past and continuing struggles against the forces that have oppressed me, rather it has been a struggle for shear survival on my part.  And the fact that Dennis denies is that those forces are in part organized Jewry.  My “struggle” has led me to my current state of mind, I am not “schizophrenic” (and haven’t even been diagnosed as such for more than 2 decades), but rather, I’m angry and disillusioned.  What I am, not by choice or because of some irrational hatred, is anti-Jewish.  And I know that because of the incredible power of media Jews, that such an opinion is always equated by the “mainstream” mass media as “anti-Semitism”.  The predominant Politically Correct interpretation of reality contends the same thing.  And as David Duke, who will have been a “Grand Dragon in the KKK” until the day he dies, has to be denigrated 35 years later for his youthful involvement with a group that in itself is, in my opinion, is a front organization of Zionist disinformation specialists and agent provocateurs.  My “story” is a thousand fold more complex than portrayed by Dennis in his Mental Health blog, which I’m sure he is well aware.  In my view, I think his own belief system and faith in “Science”, and particularly in “Medical Science” in this case, have adversely colored his interpretations of the various facts he has reported, and even more significantly his choice of and manner of describing which facts he did choose to report.  Also, his undying, yet uncritical, denial of the power of international Jewish organizations, both financially and culturally, blinds him to the horrible racist and totalitarian nature of the Jewish people.  In short, I may indeed be Mentally Ill, but Dennis and a large percentage of the world’s Goyim are unwitting dupes and naïve sheep.

So anyhow, what I believe is that to even consider certain intuitive truths that by now I feel my brother should better grasp, like that there is at least a possibility that instead of suffering from some kind of physiological mental disorder as has been whispered in his ear (and mine and just about everyone I know) by a little angel for almost 30 years, that I have instead actually been a victim, (and only one of millions of us worldwide at that), of the Zionist/Masonic Cult’s mind control and a politically motivated slur campaigns.  As I said before, my belief is that there was an option open to me for years to join up with the Cult.  At a certain point I was “black balled” by the same Hollywood elites who had proffered offers of Cult initiation and acceptance with ritual loyalty tests coupled with what to me were unbelievably coercive threats spoken at me by their proxy stooges for years.  I really don’t need to know any more about the true nature of plausible deniability which the Cults’ Mucky-Mucks use to hide their identity from public revelation.  After I failed to respond with appropriate sexual abandon to certain offers of gratuitous sex with extremely desirable women and a few times in group setting testing my willingness to participate in multiple partner bacchanals, a campaign was launched against my psyche which has lasted for years.  I perceived their goal after they turned on me was to ruin any chance I had to gain social status social status or maintain material wealth.  By labeling me as an “anti-Semite”, a term which is like being called a “nigger lover” at a KKK rally, they have destroyed my reputation and ability to find work in Hollywood.  Really, truthfully, I think they were actually trying drive me to literal self-destruction via suicide.  I believe the flip-flop from their initial encouraging activity in my life toward Cult membership and participation in their rituals into actual MK Ultra style methods of mind destroying psychic warfare, came a s a result of my refusal to become a crypto-fascist supporter of their materialistic, one world agenda, and pursue their chosen Jewess Cult Practitioner towards marriage.   After that refusal of their crypto-commandments to pursue that front woman when they ordered me to do so in 2001, as I had refused their hinds masny years previously to pursue her further, I found it even more difficult to deal with my day to day confrontation with their subliminal bullying than I had for the previous 15 years.  Only an extreme pleasure in and interest in life sustained my will to live in the face of their relentless onslaughts.

Getting back to the theme I want to finish with in my initial entry to this new blog, in all fairness, I have to say that that I my brother Dennis, my brother Eric, and myself all have a strong sense of filial responsibility, which were bred into us by our father’s own paternal instincts and actions.  My father, and both my brothers always acted in good faith towards me, at times despite what can only be described as what was bafflingly stupid and self-destructive actions on my part.  I didn’t always agree with their actions, particularly my father and Dennis in a number of situations where they found it necessary to exercise “tough love”.  I may not have made it this far without economic help across some of my bleaker self destructive years that seem to have been interspersed between other much happier and prosperous times.  Also, I was addicted to excess use of alcohol and marijuana for 30 years, habits which I have effectively ceased since 2000 due to a combination of determination and incarcerations.  Those activities, which when coupled with the constant onslaught of psychological attacks by the Cult’s operatives, caused me to have many erratic behaviors and exacerbated my inability to remain economically self-sufficient at times.  I have to own up and take most of the blame for putting both my father and Dennis in a position to feel obligated to help me financially, especially since my brother Eric cut me tons of slack in the odd behavior department, even as I earned my living primarily by working as a prototype machinist in his Special Effects shops for 15 years between 1985 and 1999.  I am truly fortunate that I have had financial support from all the men in my immediate family over the span of my adult life.  It’s ironic to me that as a result of my supposed mental disability I now have financial stability, by way of Social Security Disability Income, for the first time in about 15 years.  Certain elements in our society find it so fashionable to decry our “paternal” culture, as if men should not feel and exercise filial responsibility towards their wives and offspring.  In my case, I let those freaks get the upper hand on my consciousness for long enough, but it’s all over now.

Having set out the above, I don’t really feel the need or have the time to refute the errors that I believe are incorporated within the texts of the 7 chapters of my Dennis’ Mental Health blog.  If you followed that blog in the past perhaps you will probably be interested in what I will say in this new blog of my own.  I do not deny that he reported various historical occurrences accurately in that old blog, but I don’t intend to try to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as truthfulness of his accounts.  There are some blaring errors and omissions, but I don’t feel like rehashing old news.  He has offered to take the entire text of that Mental Health blog off-line, an offer which I appreciate, but I don’t believe he should.  It stands as his interpretation of some of the struggles he and I have gone through together, and as such I think he should keep it there as long as he wishes to.  My purpose from now on will be to try to describe as accurately as I can, the process by which I myself came to the conclusion that I don’t have to believe what these freaks tell me, because they are big liars.  I want to state for the record some of the conclusions I have come to about what has happened to me, and what has happened since I made a firm resolve to ignore for the most part what other people tell me I must do or not do, what is true or untrue, and what is going to or not going to happen.

I’ve known for years I must do to remain sane and out of punitive environments.  I am on a small dose of Depakote which I’m not convinced I need.  I eating well and getting some exercise, and I believe my thinking is now more in line with empirically verifiable reality.   I have rejected the supposed validity of something called “dialectical materialism” which I never really understood very well anyhow.  I have recognized the absurdity of the Jewish supremacist world view and can now separate my dislike for those types of Jews who populated the Palestinian’s homeland and call it Israel from ethnic Jews who have about as much in common with Zionists as I do with the Pope.  As for all those pretentious assholes who are on top in Hollywood Illuminati’s echelon of obscenity I just brush the dust of my lapel and kept walking after groveling for about 20 years trying to please the unpleasable.  Call me what you want, but having now rejected Psychiatry’s twisted proscriptions which I allowed to define me for 25 years and no longer accepting those “Doctors” pronouncements about my knowledge and beliefs, their interpretations of the causes of my “deviant” beliefs, my “anti-Semitism”, and my previously uncontrolled behavior no longer affect me as before.

I mentioned Dr. David Duke before.  I know how David Duke feels, and a really have much respect for him.  Every time the people in the media mention his name, they have to preface it with a “He’s the KKK guy” clause.  As somebody who has been maligned for years as Mentally Ill, I know exactly how that makes him feel.  Like him, I don’t deny that I’ve acted in many situations in the past as a maniac.  But if I was a Jew named James Osterberg, Jr. who took on the persona of (Z)Iggy Pop, I could have made millions or dollars at being a self-destuctive Psychopath.  Personally, I think Dr. Duke is wrong in his belief that Jesus was and is the Son of God, because I don’t believe the Jews ever had the “Truth” in the first place and their “Law” is meaningless to me.  I don’t believe I need to be forgiven for violating rules that were a complete fiction to start out with.  But he can believe that if he wants and clearly Jesus message is in every way superior to that of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary and all his CIA Freak Show MK Ultra spiritual descendants.  I know that Duke would not force his beliefs about Christ on me either.  I have other friends who call themselves Christians, and I believe after what I’ve discovered about life, that they too are delusional.  But in a good way if that is possible.  After working in Hollywood’s myth factories for 20 years and watching their dreck of movie screens and TV for much longer than that, I know how good Jews are at spinning tales.  Since the entire Bible, Old and New Testament was written by and for Jews, I think Mr. Duke is in the same boat as the Pope when it comes to the conceptual box he confines himself to.  Or let me say at least they seem to be in the same fleet.  Personally I’d prefer to sail on Duke’s ship at this point, however, if I had to choose.

The Psychiatric establishment’s view of me, judging from the overwhelming consensus of Shrinks I’ve spoken to, is that I am genetically predisposed to some constantly shifting and ill defined “Mental Illness”, that has changed as often as the President of the US, and that really doesn’t line up with the reality that I am living.  They have rammed their biological deterministic concept of my mostly environmentally engendered emotional problems down my brain for so long that even good old gullible me can’t believe their horse shit du jour any more.

One final point I need to make at the outset of this new blog, “Am I really Mentally Ill?” There was a 10-minute video clip that my brother had posted here of an interrogation he did of me back in early September of 2009.   When I was released in July of 2015 from the California State Hospital in San Luis Obispo, ASH, I reviewed that interview and requested that Dennis remove it from his website, which he did.  Back just days prior to when we recorded that interview, in 2009, I had just been acquitted in a previous Robbery case which I had been fighting for six months while locked up in the LA Sheriff Department’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility.  When Dennis asked me if he could ask me a few questions on video I mistakenly acquiesced, thinking I suppose, that I could prove to him that I wasn’t “Mentally Ill”, like he and just about everybody I knew were convinced of.  My presentation in that document is certainly not “normal” by any standard of judgement, my speech was pressured, I was gritting my teeth, and I was very angry.  I also had a sever cramp in my left hand which I kept closing and opening into a fist throughout his questioning, reinforcing the impression that I was crazy.  I also made several clearly delusional references to things which I no longer believe are accurate.  I did claim in the interview to be a victim of mind control in unequivocal terms and I obviously still believe that.

Unintentionally I believe, near the start of the interview when I told Dennis “I’m moving on now”, he responded to my comment in an exasperated tone with “it sounds to me like you have long rooted delusions that are very real to you” and that “all these [delusions] come from inside your head”, a couple of statements that more or less brought home to me not only Dennis’ longtime conviction that I am seriously Mentally Ill.  He then continued throughout the rest of the video in the adversarial role of an inquisitor, trying to ascertain my “med compliance”, asking me in various form, “Are you taking you’re meds or not?”  Unfortunately, that is the basic stance that for years so many people have taken toward me upon discovering that I have been diagnosed with Mentally Illness.  In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I met with a new Psychiatrist, from the CDCR Parole Outpatient Clinic, via “Telemed”, Skype like video meeting with me here in Lancaster, CA and he in Sacramento.  Of course, the first thing he asked me was my dosage and if I was taking, my “Psych Meds”.  You get tired as a NSA victim of political oppression and historically repeatedly reinforced disinformation about having a mental “Disorder”, that at time you just want to burst.  That is the exact one down role that Patients are put vis-a-vis even low level “psych Techs” in State Hospitals, who after one year of training, most of it on the job, they are permitted to treat any and all of the “Patients” in the hospital with a similar, what I have to call for the lack of a more precise word because this one sums up so well just what the attitude is, condescending attitude toward.  These Psychiatric sycophants believe that because somebody has been defined by the “State of California”, as “Mentally Ill”, that they automatically have the right to treat them as children or mentally retarded adults.  Seriously, it gets old.

Upon viewing the tape again last week, which some of you readers who followed Dennis’ blog previously have no doubt seen, for only the second time since it was made, I became quite upset when I counted the number of times my brother asked me in the recording if I was taking or planning to take my “meds”.  10 fucking times he asked me that and nine times I sidestepped his question.  It was blatantly obvious that I was not on meds and just as obvious that I didn’t want to answer his question.  I just want to point out to anyone reading this who saw that interview that I had just been release a few days prior to that after having been tortured, by what I considered then and now to be draconian measures compared to the behavior I was accused of having done.  When I finally answered him that I was not taking my prescribed Abilify, (and had not been for 14 months previously to that, both out of Jail and then after arrested and incarcerated by faking swallowing it or “cheeking” the pills at my Jail cell door), Dennis then continued to goad me on.  That interview will not be put back on the Internet again as I really have moved on since then.  Dennis had hoped to have it remain, even as an edited down version if I could take out the parts that I found objectionable, but unfortunately, during the entire 10-minute conversation I did come off as Dennis’ “schizophrenic brother” and that is probably why he misinterpreted my behavior in the title of the short which was “An interview with my schizophrenic brother.”  I do want to make video addendum to his Mental Health blog to demonstrate to those of you who saw that previous curiosity that I am not really like I was presenting at that time, when not fresh of six months of brutal treatment at the hands of LA County Sheriff Deputies during the height of Sheriff Lee Baca’s reign of terror.  The new video will be posted on this site very soon.  Thanks for your interest in this blog.

— Tony Allard

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(  Note – The above post is written by Tony Allard and is an adjunct to a series on mental illness written by his brother Dennis Allard. That series may be accessed via the following links:   [ch.1] [ch.2] [ch.3] [ch.4] [ch.5] [ch.6] [ch.7] [ch.8]

7. Is my brother cured of mental illness?

Chapter 7 in a series on mental illness.

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It has been over five years since I penned the previous chapter in this chronicle. My brother was incarcerated in the California correctional system for most of that time. He was released this past June of 2015 after being convicted on crimes of felony vandalism and criminal threats. He did those acts while off his meds, fully delusional, and in a state of what his friends and I refer to as insanity. Much of that story is recounted in early chapters (see the links above). After five long years, the last of which was spent on parole at Atascadero State Hospital, Tony is finally a free man once again. As Tony puts it, he has spent eleven of the past thirteen years of his life incarcerated in various institutions. That is a story that only he can tell. In time, he will tell it. I know he will and I look forward to hearing the whole story.

For now, I will just say that my brother is doing well, under the circumstances. He is staying on meds, he has housing, and we enjoy spending time together again.

Is my brother cured of his mental illness? My answer to that is no, I don’t think so. I believe that the reason he is rational now is due to him staying on his medications. If he were to go off his meds, as he has done in the past, I think he would “decompensate” as he puts it, and fall back into a pattern of irrationality that I have tried to describe in early chapters of this saga.

I will let Tony tell his own story going forward if he so chooses. Tony asked me to remove the original interview we did from YouTube because it contained some personal information he preferred to not be in the public eye as well as some inaccuracies. Tony once told me that he did not want to make a career out of my his mental illness. Still, he is a good writer. I hope he will write about his experiences in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It is a fascinating story. And I hope he will allow our original interview, perhaps edited a bit, to be public again and do a follow-up interview.

Until such time as Tony writes about his own life or collaborates with me, this brief note will be the last chapter in the story I’ve had to tell.

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Society ignores the mentally ill. Everyone suffers.

As the shooting of Gabriell Giffords in Tuscon shows, a mentally disturbed person who is left to fall between the cracks can end up going totally insane and in some cases harm other people. Futhermore, the afflicted person also suffers from the mental illness since their thinking becomes tortured by obsessions, fears, and delusions. They are left untreated. They suffer. And sometimes society suffers.

In the case of Jared Loughner, his mental illness was evident to many yet that mental illness was given the right to rule his mind and degenerate. An article in the Washington Post, January 9, 2011, by David A. Fahrenthold, Sari Horwitz and Amy Gardner illustrates this point. According to that article, Loughner was attending classes at Tucson’s Pima Community College. School administrators ignored warnings of his fellow students and his teachers that his behavior was threatening. According the article, the administrators were reported to have said, “He hasn’t taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn’t provoked anybody. He hasn’t brought any weapons to class…. We’ll just wait until he takes that next step.”.

But what can a school do? Should school administrators reject a student just because he manifests quirky behavior or some fellow student makes a complaint? To answer that question, we needto realize the the issue is much larger than what happens in schools. Consider the case of the Virginia Tech Massacre in 2007 . Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people, had been diagnosed with mental illness long before enrolling at Virginia Tech. Yet, due to federal privacy laws, Virginia Tech was not informed of Seung-Hui Cho’s diagnosis at the time he enrolled!

On a daily basis, in Los Angeles, police officers do not detain or transport mentally ill people to a hosptial even when they have been reported to be making threats unless they are deemed “a danger to themselves or others or severely disabled”. The bar for arresting disturbed people or for placing them in treatment is very high. Often, after being reported to police, a mentally ill person who was harassing someone will simply be taken to some other part of town and dropped off. Or taken to an emergency room where they will be given some pills then turned loose.

It goes from bad to absurd. Some scientologists have been known to try to convince mentally ill people to not take antipsychotic medicine.

In my opinion, when a mentally ill person has gotten to the the point they are delusional and making threats, there needs to be a fair judicial process, with due process, that requires the afflicted person to take medication, involuntarily if necessary. That may sound harsh. But, in fact, it is more humane than letting the mental illness dominate the life of the afflicted person and people the afflicted person comes in contact with on a daily basis.

6. Competent to Stand Trial?

Chapter 6 in a series on mental illness.

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The process of obtaining a conservatorship for my brother has been suspended. The reason, according to William Ortega of the office of the California State Public Guardian, is that my brother is on a hold to determine his competency to stand trial on charges of felony vandalism in a matter unrelated to his original incarceration on a misdemeanor.

While delusional and psychotic, my brother allegedly keyed the car of an old acquaintance and is now facing a second strike felony on those charges. The judge in the case found reason to doubt that Tony is competent to stand trial. So Tony was moved to a hospital where he is required to take anti-psychotic medication while he is “restored to competency to stand trial”. No matter that he committed the act of keying the car while delusional. He just has to be sufficiently stable after taking medication so that he can shuffled back into court and make a decision about his case and be put on trial.

The actual process of “restoring” him can take up to three years of incarceration in the hospital/jail.

In other words, the conservatorship process, which those close to my brother believe to be one last hope for my brother to be required to receive treatment and become stable, is being thwarted by the very criminal justice system that initiated it. The conservatorship process was initiated by the doctors at LA County jail while he was awaiting his hearings. Now that is all to naught. This is bonkers.

Knowing my brother, even after being restored to “competency” he will be in total denial of his mental illness. He will not accept a plea bargain whereby he agrees to a treatment program. He really wants to be normal and not mentally ill so he believes he isn’t and, if the past is any indication, will plead not guilty and prefer to go to prison for a second strike violation. Once in prison, the system will see that he is not stable and will continue to require medication. As before, he will end up in a psychiatric ward of the prison or in a mental hospital/prison, but this time for years as he serves his second strike violation for having been delusional and removing some paint from the side of a car.

This is not to justify vandalism. And, when delusional, my brother can become threatening to both strangers and friends who, ironically, like him and enjoy his company when he is stable. Although he has never harmed anyone, he sometimes makes threats and is a big guy and can be scary. It is his insanity telling him that people are out to get him and his delusions working on his mind, causing him to react in a way that almost makes sense except he is not rational. So the insanity affects everyone. It affects him first and foremost. It affects those he comes in contact with, both friends and strangers. After many years, he continues to relapse. Which is why the disease should be treated by a mandated treatment program. But we have almost no mechanism in U.S. society to require treatment. It falls on the criminal justice system to handle a large percentage of our mentally ill. That is not the kind of society we should accept. Change is needed.

My hope, as reported in https://oceanpark.com/blog/2010/03/mentally-ill-brother-thrown-back-on-the-street/#latest-update , was that his doctors at Los Angeles Twin Towers Correctional Facility would succeed in the effort they started to create a conservatorship. The conservatorship would have been instituted by the State of California and would have provided a mechanism to make legal decisions in Tony’s place about his living situation and his money. He would not have liked it, but it seems to be the only method available to the state other than direct imprisonment to require Tony to take medication and remain stable and functional in society. Now that one hope for progress is being delayed and thwarted by a different court in the bureaucracy while Tony is “brought back to competency to stand trial”.

[Note: Elsewhere see video interview with my brother on September 1, 2009.]

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpt’s of my brother’s writing about his own mental illness .]

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5. Mentally ill brother thrown back on the street

Chapter 5 in a series on mental illness.

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Click here to scroll to the latest update to this chapter.

Six days ago my brother was released early from LA County jail where he had been incarcerated since violating my restraining order last fall.

He is now homeless again, has enough money to stay in cheap hotels for a while, but is refusing to see a doctor or get meds or help of any kind, has only the clothes on his back and a pair of sandals, no supervision or treatment, and no friends willing to house him any more.

He was released on his own, without meds, without any requirement that he receive treatment, and without any form of housing or structure for his life. He was manic and is very quickly degenerating each day.

The system basically is saying to my brother: “Screw you. And screw all of your relatives and friends. Your mental illness is going to resurface as your meds wear off, you will become an incoherent dazed obnoxious homeless person making life miserable for yourself and anyone you come in contact with.”

The U.S. system is a failure here as it is in so many other areas of health care. Libertarian fundamentalists must love this. After all, it is up to each person to fend for themselves.

[Note: Elsewhere see video interview with my brother on September 1, 2009.]

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpt’s of my brother’s writing about his own mental illness .]

I just got a call from one of his old friends in Santa Barbara. My brother is going up there on a train, unannounced, thinking his old friend will help him. He won’t, he can’t, and he should not have to. Friends and family of the mentally ill do not have the resources, skill, or time to treat a mentally ill person. And in most cases, they don’t have the money. My brother’s friend said he will meet my brother at the train station and ask him to get back on the train. My brother’s friend will tell Tony the same thing I have told him by phone and email the past several days, i.e., to see a psychiatrist, get back on meds, and find a structured living situation. We are willing to help you find that but we will not house you ourselves. That has not worked in the past and takes too much out of our lives. The U.S. system should provide that structure and care and obtain information and background from relatives. The system does not work that way. Worse, in the case where the mentally ill person is incarcerated, a travesty of common sense and human rights to begin with, the system compounds the problem by giving the mentally ill person rights to prevent his relatives from talking to his doctors.

So, society, here comes my brother again. Be on the look out.


In January I had made a comment in these pages that I was going to provide information to his doctors in jail since one of them had indicated they might be able to pursue a conservatorship for Tony. That never happened. I did not send them any new information and I have no knowledge that they pursued a conservatorship. They never contacted me about doing so. I have my own life to live, was burned out trying to help my brother, and all previous efforts had failed. The initial efforts toward that end were stymied last fall when Los Angeles Mental Health Court judge Melissa Widdifield threw the case out of court and put my brother back on the street. Conversations I had subsequently with social workers indicated that the process of obtaining a conservatorship was arduous, as well it should be, and would have to be renewed annually. Even though I was burned out on trying to help my brother, that is just making an excuse. I am now regretting I did not follow through on that effort, however futile it may have been. Looks like I may have another chance pretty soon, after my poor brother becomes incarcerated yet again.


[next update]
Update of ~March 24, 2010:

My brother is degenerating rapidly. His friend in Santa Barbara spent a couple hours with him but would not house him and told him he should go back to LA and get help from a doctor. The next night, my brother was homeless and could not find, or was not competent enough to find, a hotel. He told me that by phone this morning.

Since his release last week his state of mind has gone from having some insight into his situation to one of delirium, as evidenced by a string of phone calls and emails he made each day. At first, he was overtly apologetic about the

“outrageous and sometimes very offensive nature
of some of my past e-mails, as well as the sometimes
insane personal behavior”.

He BCC’d his friends:

“so as not to give any body’s e-mail address out to
persons they may not know or wish to share that
information with.”

He asked old friends to email him if they wished to renew contact.

But within a couple days he was sending very derogatory emails to some old friends, then, a few hours later, calling them or emailing them again with apologies.

He also called me this morning and was in tears asking if our Mom was still alive. She is 92 and lives in as assisted living home. My brother had made threatening remarks about the care givers there so that home is now off limits to him via a restraining order. I arranged to make a three-way call so he could speak with our mother.

The call was a monologue controlled by him. First, our mother has dementia. Second, my brother tends to have conversations more with himself than others. So on both counts, not a lot of communication was going on. I called him afterwards and tried to three-way call with a worker from the LA County Mental Health hotline. We got voice mail so we left an 800 number for him to call.

I called him later and gave him the number again. He seemed to accept it. At this point I doubt he will get help on his own. I predict he will become delusional and get into trouble with the law. What can I do? What can any of us do?


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Update of ~March 25, 2010:

This morning I succeeded at hooking my brother up with the LA County Mental Health Department Help Line. Tony had called me from a hotel near downtown Los Angeles. He sounded less manic but still manic. I convinced Tony to let me call the Help Line and hook him in to the call via 3-way calling. Elsie, the councilor who answered the call, has been working in this field for thirty years. She was very patient with Tony as he went into myriad details on a number of topics about his life and recent events. Elsie listened patiently, as did I, although at one point I suggested to Tony that Elsie needs to help other people so let’s get to the point. She gave Tony the address of a center at Maple and 5th, close to where he was, where he could see a doctor and get meds and possibly housing. Tony said he wanted an appointment because he did not have time to wait for hours for his meds. Elsie pointed out to him that the center is busy and that other people also need help and, if he does not get his meds, he is going to end up back on a 5150 hold, which is not something he wants. We must have been on the phone for at least a half hour with my brother. Bottom line was that Elsie gave him the address of a facility where he can see a doctor and get meds and Tony said he would go there to “make an appointment”.

After the call Elsie called me back and agreed that Tony seem paranoid and manic and that it would be a mistake for me to attempt to house my brother, something that has not worked in the past.

If past history is any indication, Tony will either not get meds or go off of them at some point. And he is unlikely to accept an offer of housing if it means any kind of supervision or structuring of his daily activities.

But at least we made one step towards hope.

Now it is wait and see.


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Update of ~March 26, 2010:

Tony called me this morning at 7:30AM while in line at the help center at Maple and 5th. I suggested he ask the Doctor for meds and a place to stay. I reminded him that the most effective medicine in the past had been risperidone. I was not sure Tony was processing what I was saying. He was moderately manic but we were able to converse. I then called the Mental Health Help Line who told me that what would happen is that Tony would go through an intake process.

Later Tony called me and said he had gone through the intake process. But he said he had to go back in four days for his meds. So I think he was not given any meds. I told him four days may be too long to wait. He had a new phone, replacing the old phone he had lost.

He said he was going to find an internet cafe to “play on the internet”. I am a professional software developer who makes a good living working on the internet. My brother’s illness has reduced him to a person treated as a criminal, often homeless, who is alone in the jungle and has to go to some internet cafe to find some joy. I find it heart wrenching that I myself cannot help him and that he is being forced to act as his own case manager.

Editorial Remark: I have nothing but disrespect for the Republicans who have thwarted good cost effective health care in this country in general and correct care for the mentally ill in particular. I have nothing but disrespect for the oligarchy in this country that allocates the benefits of our society to itself. Yes I am getting up on my soap box here because I hope that even one reader of these words who blames government for everything and thinks our system is fundamentally so good might wake up. The only hope for my bother is the limited help he is getting from the government. We should all be working to allocate more funds to those wonderful workers in our government funded programs that help the mentally ill.


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Update of ~March 27, 2010:

This morning my brother showed up at an old friend’s house unannounced. That friend was threatened by my brother a few years ago when my brother was fully delusional and had not been in contact with him since then. The friend did not answer the door and did not give any indication he was home. My brother fell asleep on the friend’s front porch. The friend called another friend who called me, since I tend to act as a clearing house on Tony’s activities for various of his old friends.

We then jointly called the LA County Mental Health Help Line. They wanted to dispatch a PET team (Psychiatric Evaluation Team) to assess the my brother’s state of mind and possibly take him in on a 5150. But the PET team was busy. By the time they could get there, my brother had left. His friend said my brother made an attempt before leaving to pry open a window but failed to do so.

Later in the day, my brother sent me an email to which I replied:

Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:34:39 -0700
Subject: Re: Health Care Problem.

On 03/27/2010 04:42 PM, Tony wrote:
> Hey Bro,
>
> I’m doing my best to get back on “meds”,
> but they make you jump through hoops
> dun they. I have an appointment for 3/30
> at 1:30 with LACMH to talk to a Sighcriattrist,
> at Maple and 5th. Mobhy he can get me hooked
> up with the psychmeds I need to sleep.
> No sleep again last night. I’m walking the
> street for funny. It’s a matter of opinion.
>
> Love,
> Tony

Dear Tony:

I called LACMH Help Line (800-854-7771). They said that the 5th and Maple place you went to does not give meds out on the first visit.

You can get meds immediately from an ER that has a psych doctor on duty, such as County USC or Harbor UCLA.

Go to one of those and get meds there.

I am willing to drive you to one of those if you want.

I would recommend that you call Matt Wells at Harbor UCLA. His number is [number not shown here]. He wanted to help you last year.

I heard from [your friends] about your attempt to get into [one friend’s] place this morning. [That friend] just simply does not want to see you again since that time you woke him and threatened him.

You will need to find housing on your own and get meds and become stable for many months first, then try to work at having a normal relationship with [him] or other of your friends who simply do not want to see you when you are off your meds and a manic and raving as you have been in recent days. That includes me.

love,
Dennis

The good news is: my brother does seem to be aware he needs meds.

Some bad news, which caught me by surprise, is that the LA County Mental Health clinic where he did go on Friday did not provide him with any meds.

In LA County there are several agencies not all of which communicate with one another and even within one agency, different units do not share data or communicate.

So in those, what are for my brother, rare moments where he agrees to cooperate, it is all the more frustrating to find that the most crucial care was not provided in a timely manner.


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Update of ~March 29, 2010:

During the past two days my brother has tried to visit different old friends of his but was turned away, since they see he is manic. In some cases he shows up at late hours. In one case, he was crying when the friend asked him to leave. His friends want to help bit have learned from experience that when he is manic and delusional there is nothing they can do and they no longer can support him or humor him when he is like that. He must get help and he is going to have to do it on his own.

Good news. Much to my surprise, my brother just called me and asked me to go with him to an appointment he has with a social worker tomorrow afternoon. He told me that would be a good idea since I am the most familiar with his case. This is the most forthcoming and rational my brother has been with me in the 12 days since his release from jail. It is a hopeful sign, however slim, that he is going to accept treatment. I will go to the appointment and be able to provide information to the social worker. I hope my brother will actually show up and not get into trouble between now and then.


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Update of ~March 31, 2010:

News not so good today.

The short version: I give up.

The long version:

It didn’t work out how I had hoped. I did go with my brother to the LA County Downtown Mental Health Center. I picked him up in my car on Wilshire in front of the Wiltern Theater and drove on Wilshire to downtown. My brother was in less bad shape than I’ve seen him in the past. He was relatively clean and was wearing shoes. His pants were somewhat dirty but overall he looked like a fairly clean homeless person. He was fairly manic but not raving. He told me that he has reinstated his disability income so that means he will have enough to get by assuming he can stay stable. That was the one piece of good news today.

We got to the Downtown Mental Health Center on time but when it came time to do intake, my brother would not agree to sign the intake form. And he wanted meds but would have to still make an appointment to see a psychiatrist, which seemed to agitate him.

Also, I don’t think he wants anti-psychotic meds but, rather, something to help him sleep. He advised me that he had still been “cheeking” his Depakote but taking Seroquel. He seemed to believe that Seroquel is to help him sleep. In fact, Seroquel is for treating his disorder.

As he is wont to do he had to be controlling the situation. He didn’t want to speak to a woman councilor, so she said she would just do the intake but then transfer him to a male councilor. He asked her if she was drinking and said he smelled Bourbon. I was right there and detected no such odor. He said he was told he would be given meds today and didn’t like that he would have to get yet another appointment with a psychiatrist to get meds at a future meeting. When he wouldn’t sign the form there was nothing the councilor could do since it is necessary that the person receiving care sign papers to agree in writing that if they are harming someone or abusing a minor then they can be reported to the police. The councilor could not help Tony since Tony refused to sign the form, so the appointment ended with nothing accomplished.

I had gone there naively thinking he would talk with a councilor and get setup to see a doctor regularly and obtain other advice. I had some documentation of his history with me that I was planning to give to the social worker or doctor. What was I thinking? Really, nothing happened. I was wasting my time.

We left the center having achieved nothing. I made an video interview of Tony but then accidentally deleted it. I drove him to the L.A. Mission and made another video there which I will eventually edit and publish here.

He said he would ask his “driver” to take him to County ER to get meds, by which he meant Seroquel. He has hired some black guy he met in the neighborhood to drive him around. That means he is burning through his money fast and who knows what kind of guy the driver is. The driver’s name is “D”. I spoke with him by phone briefly a couple of times and he seems pretty together. Somehow my brother is establishing relationships with some new friends, so to speak.

The driver came by and picked Tony up nearby in front of the L.A. Mission. I didn’t get a good view of him and was not particularly in the mood to establish a relationship with him myself in any case. They drove off.

Later in the day I got a call from Tony. He was more on the raving maniac side, asking me for the rest of his money. Should I give the rest of the money I was holding for him back all at once? What do you think? I considered making it conditional on him having an address where I can send the money. Instead, I told him I would transfer it on Friday. But I suspect he will spend it all in short order. I am tired of giving my brother an excuse to resent me. I feel like shutting the door on my brother until such time as he actually does obtain the help he needs.

I think what I am going to do is send the remaining money to him at an address he gives me. In other words, get an address, you’ll get the rest of your money.

Otherwise, I am exhausted and fed up with trying to help my brother. I am behind on my work and have my own problems in life to deal with.

I give up. For now least.

He is back on the street and his destiny will be determined there.


[previous update] [next update]
Update of March 31, 2010:

My brother was arrested today, early in the morning at 1:30 AM.

I don’t yet know the details. Here is the body of the email I sent to his various friends, who are also my friends.

I had not heard from Tony for nearly 24 hours.

I just checked the LA County Sheriffs Web site.

He was arrested this morning at 1:45 AM.

My heart bleeds for my brother.

This concludes this chapter of my brother’s saga. When I find the time and energy, I will write a more succinct summary of all that has transpired. I will visit my brother in jail and urge him to continue his writing about his life and ask that he share that with everyone so that more people can understand what people such as my brother endure. With awareness might come some efforts to improve how we as a society deal with this malady to help the afflicted and, in doing so, also support their loved ones.


[previous update] [next update]
Update of ~April 3, 2010:

Not so fast.

Yesterday I found out that my brother had been released from jail again after only two days. He called me saying he had “only” violated his probation so they let him go. In his call, yesterday, he said he wanted the last half of his savings and was very agitated. I told him I would deposit his money the following day (today) into his bank and that he could go there to get it. I had decided I didn’t want money to be an excuse for him to harangue me going forward. And, after all, it is his money.

Flash forward to early this morning. At 6 AM this morning I got a call from Tony. He was at Norms restaurant on Lincoln about a mile from where I live. He said he did not have enough money to pay for his meal. That meant that he has already spent the first half of his savings I had transferred back to him 14 days ago. That amount of money should have enabled him to get by for three months given the resources available to him in this town. Now, 14 days later, it was gone and he wanted the other half of his savings immediately.

The short story of this morning:

I went to Norms and gave Tony enough of his money to get by on for several days, with an agreement in writing, that we both signed, that he will go back to the Downtown Mental Health Center, sign the intake agreement that he had refused to sign last Tuesday, and make an appointment to see a doctor. He also agreed (and signed the agreement) that he will stop using my address, get a PO Box or other address by Monday, and that I will send him the rest of his money to that address.

I don’t believe he will be able to carry through on this, but at least I now have it in writing and if he does not follow through I can remind him about our agreement and use that as leverage to not take his calls or give him any further help until and unless he keeps his side of the bargain.

The unabridged story of this morning:

After he called me, saying he had no money to pay for his Norm’s breakfast tab, I called 911 and dispatched S.M. Police to Norms. I thought about just leaving it at that but then decided it was better to be involved with the situation, since in any case they would probably not take Tony in since he was relatively high functioning this morning. I called one friend to see if he might want to go to Norms with me but my friend’s cell phone did not pick up or his phone was malfunctioning as cell phones are wont to do. I would have been imposing on my friend anyway, so it was just as well he didn’t pick up. I went to Norm’s myself and interacted with both the police and Tony. The police said he was not acting in a way that was threatening to himself or others so they would not 5150 him. But if he didn’t pay his bill they could arrest him for defrauding Norms. They interviewed him out on the sidewalk and were very professional. They let me talk with him for a few minutes. It was coming down to me having to decide to help him pay his bill or let him be arrested. It was as if the decision to have him arrested was for me to decide. After Tony started rambling on about going to rent a room from one of his friends and making other unrealistic statements, I told him I was sorry but I was not going to pay his bill. I walked away.

I then noticed that the cops talked with him briefly then let him go back into the restaurant. They themselves left the premises.

I went into Norms to talk with Tony. I figured this was going to be the last time I was going to see him for a long time and I did not feel right about just leaving. I saw Tony looking out the window to see if the police had left. I approached him and said I wanted to talk with him. Tony told me that he could not leave without paying his bill or he would be arrested.

I had still not decided what to do.

We took a table in the corner seat with a view of Lincoln and the morning light coming in through big windows. I didn’t know quite what to do. On the one hand I am weary of his money being an excuse for him to contact me. On the other hand, I still retain a faint hope that he will have some insight to his condition.

I wanted to call the LA County Mental Health Helpline but could not remember the 800 number and it was not in my cell phone. So I told Tony to wait there and went home to get the 800 number. I called the Helpline from home because I felt I needed some help deciding what to do. But, after a few minutes talking with the Helpline person, I concluded there was nothing they could do to help me or anything they could say that I didn’t already know. They were asking the usual questions about whether they should send out a PET team. But the PET team would not find that Tony was a threat to himself or others at this very moment since, in fact, his behavior was quasi-normal. I tried to ask what they thought I should do about the money I was holding for him but that was not a topic they could advise me about. I realized there was no point.

I went back to Norms. I called the Helpline 800 number again and handed the phone to Tony. He went on and on with the patient Helpline worker talking about myriad details of his history, asking her what her qualifications were, wondering if she knew what an MDO was, going over the various levels of certification that social workers have and asking what her’s were, explaining that he did not want to sign a form that gave social workers rights to 5150 him, etc., etc., ad nauseum. He was not going to be getting advice or accepting it from that phone call. This went on for a good fifteen minutes. I asked him to give me my phone back.

A tiny bit of progess then happened.

At this point I was not sure yet what I was going to do. I knew I was tired and do not want Tony bothering me anymore. Tony had suggested I only give him a part of what remains of his money that I had kept for him while he was last in jail. I said I’d give him that now if he agreed to go sign the intake form at the Downtown Mental Health Center, stop using my address, and get an address where I would send the rest of his money to him. He agreed to that in writing.

The money is not an enormous amount but it would cover housing and food for a couple of months or more. The problem will be that he is not stable enough to locate and maintain that housing on his own. So the hope will be that he actually does go to the Mental Health Center and obtain some form of housing with their assistance.

Overall, I have to say, it was good to be sitting there at Norms with my old little brother having some kind of conversation. Tony seems almost on the verge of being able to hold it together. Yet two nights ago he had been arrested. He didn’t want to tell me the details and was evasive. But it came out in bits that he was with his new “driver” “friend” somewhere in South Central. Evidently he was staying with that person at some house there along with that person’s girl friend and I don’t know who else and really don’t want to know. He indicated he had threatened them in some way and they had called the police on him. I did not push for details but what happened was something along those lines. For, you see, no matter who Tony comes in contact with, part of him becomes paranoid about those persons or persons they know or sometimes a complete stranger who is passing by. My brother then sometimes makes threatening remarks to those people and gets into trouble.

Since his release 14 days ago, he seems to cycle about every 24 to 48 hours, having a manic phase where he becomes belligerent and verbally threatening to strangers or even friends by email or phone or in person.

He has sometimes stated that he was taking Seroquel before his release 14 days ago. Other times he insists he has been off meds entirely for 18 months or some other period of time. I have no idea what the truth is. But he is manic, has no realistic grasp of his overall situation, and per phone calls he has had with friends, has probably been drinking (even though he says he hasn’t) and/or taking some other form of drug that causes his speech to slur in those phone calls. He’s a mess. He needs help. I find it impossible to provide that help, and the system is incompetent to require him to receive help.

I do not know if I was doing the right thing by giving Tony any of his money. I was doing it more for myself to be rid of that excuse for him to contact me. And I am glad he agreed, in writing, to get an address before I hand him the rest of the money.

Frankly, I predict he will not go to the center and sign the form and not get an address. But that’s the rules. If he follows them, I’ll send him the rest of his money. If he does not follow the rules, I will not take his phone calls.

I handed him my Flip video camera so he could make some video as we drove first to my bank and then to his bank branch in Venice. I later realized he wanted to go there since he gets massages from George at Venice Beach.

I left him at his bank and drove home.

Before I left I told him that I didn’t think he was going to make it but that I hoped he would and that I have done all I can do for him.

I’m done helping Tony for now. It seems to be an impossible task.


[previous update] [next update]
Update of ~April 7, 2010:

The next night Tony called asking me to come and get him. I told him I was not willing to do that. He also called our other brother who told him the same thing. It does not work. I tried that when I let him stay at my apartment in 2002, at my house in 2007. He was also not able to maintain stable behavior when he had an apartment in Korea town in late 2007. Ditto when he got stable again and lived with roommates for a few months in mid 2008 until he went bonkers, accused one of them of poisoning his food, began vandalizing things, and they kicked him out.

I realize the boundary I am drawing is a tough one, but I cannot help my brother by housing him and, frankly, when is is off his meds and manic, I don’t even like the guy anymore and do not want to live with him. I am only willing to help to the extent the system will help him or he helps himself. The system has proven itself incapable of requiring him to receive treatment, so he is on his own.

I didn’t hear from him for about three days until he called and said he had made an appointment in nine days to see a doctor but needed more money. He still did not have an address and was still manic. The money I gave him should have lasted at least a week and it was gone in three days. He said he would send me an email but has not done so.

This morning he called asking for money. His bank account is overdrawn. That means that in three weeks he has gone through money that could have lasted a couple of months or more were he to get the kind of housing he can afford on his disablity income.

So far Tony has not done what he agreed to do. He says he went back to the center and filled out the form but I have no way to be sure he did that. The other part of the agreement was that he obtain an address. Yesterday I sent my brother two emails and BCC’d several of his friends who are taking the same position I have taken. Here is the body of those emails:

Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:47:17 -0700
Subject: Call from Tony to Dennis

Tony:

For the record, you called me today, April 7 at 1:56 PM.

I am BCCing all of your friends who have been concerned for
you or been affected by your recent activity, including L.
and T.

You said your are down to $300 and been staying at hotels, most
recently the Royal Pagaoda in Chinatown.

You called from a FAX machine, which seems to be a trick
you use now. When I call back I get a FAX tone.

I told you I would deposit money tomorrow.

That was stupid since it goes against the deal we signed.

So, no, I won’t do that. You have to get an address, per the
agreement you signed.

I’ll do a three way call with LA County Mental Health Helpline to
get advice on how to get you an address.

So call me back, any time, and we will do that three-way call.

The second email sent later in the day was:

Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:15:24 -0700
Subject: Rules for Tony

Dear Tony:

Since you are off your meds and behaving manically, I don’t
know how much of this will get through to you, but I’ll try.

First, I love my brother Tony when he is stable and takes his
meds. I do not love the person my brother Tony becomes, a
paranoid vulgar bully.

But even the bully Tony I am will to help, since there is
some of my real brother inside there somewhere.

But there are rules. I think any of your friends would
say the same thing to you. I am sure L. would, since
we have spoken and agree there has to be these rules.

One rule is that you accept living for however long
it takes in a place where there is some supervision and
that you can afford on your SSDI income.

If you do not do that, experience has shown that you will
fall apart again, increase your bullying and vandalism
and end up back in jail. The experiences in Eagle Rock,
at 5TH Street, in Korea town, and on Corning Street all
prove that.

Another rule is that you obtain an address before I
give you all of your money. You have spent or lost
$6000 in three weeks since being released.

We suspect that your driver “D” may be taking advantage
or you, or that you are gambling, or that you simply
lose your money and don’t remember where.

Obviously that means you only have a couple weeks
left before you run out.

After that you will be homeless.

So when you call me, I will take your call only if you
agree to talk to the LACMH Help Line and get their advice
on how to find housing.

Otherwise, when you run out, you will be coming to me
asking for more. I cannot support you Tony. It is all
I can do to support mom at this time.

Also, just like for Steve, another rule is that you
maintain your housing for a period of 12 months in
order for me to accept you back into my life on any
kind of normal basis. You have proven unable to do that
in the past seven years.

I realize you want to live without taking meds. That
has not proven possible, outside of jail for any extended
period, in seven years. So if you don’t get back on meds,
you will be on your own. We all give up, Tony.

Hence, the final rule is that you get back on meds under
the supervision of a doctor. Seroquel or whatever works,
but you simply do not function well enough to stay out
of jail unless you take meds.

Also, I know you want to start a Web site and write.
That will only happen if you start thinking straight
and there will be time for that after you accept these
rules and get stable.

I doubt that you will accept these rules, since you
are off your meds. But I hope you will.

To repeat, the rules are these:

(1) you accept living for however long it takes in a place
where there is some supervision and that you can afford on
your SSDI income.

(2) you obtain an address before I give you all of your money.

(3) you maintain your housing for a period of 12 months in
order for me to accept you back into my life on any kind
of normal basis.

(4) you get back on meds under the supervision of a doctor

If you cannot see that these actions are necessary, you are lost
Tony. Ask your other friends if they agree. Let’s take a vote.

Dennis

Finally, this morning I had the following email exchanges with one of his oldest and best friends…

o o o

dear dennis,

i couldn’t have said it any more clearly and succinctly. tony has a big
fear that his friends will listen to what you have to say, and, will
somehow circle the wagons w/o him at the center. for example,
i would have never given him any money if i had talked to you first.

you are a big threat to his being able to manipulate any of us. i am
thankful for all that you have done for tony, i just wish you had
more to show for your efforts…don’t we all.
sincerely,

L.

o o o

thanks for your support L.

Tony called me collect this morning at 8:30 as I was
getting going but I refused the call, since I wanted
to check a couple of things first.

I have access to his bank info via telephone so I
called and found out his account is overdrawn. So
the $1000 I gave him Saturday is gone and when I told
me yesterday that he had $300 left, either he was
lying, was delusional, or got ripped off.

If he calls me again today I will do as I said
in the email. Otherwise I will tell him to go
to the mission or sleep in the street. He can
sleep at the Mission for free.

Once he gets help and follows the rules I will
supply money directly to his housing.

There is no way in hell I am going to put more
of that money into his bank account.

I’ll also offer to pay a cheap hotel directly and hand
him some food money to get by for a couple weeks while
he arranges other housing.

Dennis

o o o

dennis,

all of this sounds good. if and when he gets more stable,
you might start thinking about a dialogue with him about
a conservatorship. also, scaling back your expectations of
him might take some pressure off both of you. the fact
that he hasn’t been able to hold a job, and, may never
be able to work, might help him to see your point of view
more clearly. he needs to know EXACTLY how you are
willing to help, and on what terms. when he is stable,
housed, and, medicated effectively, you will be able to
figure out if he can be employable, and, perhaps his
awareness of his inability to work will give you more
leverage. if he becomes willing and able to work, having
him contribute in a small way to helping him support
your mom could be beneficial to him….etc

i really am thankful for all you have done.

sincerely, L.

o o o

thanks again L.

Tony just called my from a pay phone but when I started to
tell him the rules, he started to talk over me. I will only
talk with him if he will listen and I will stick to the rules
I outlined (and the offer to pay directly for a cheap hotel
and food money for a couple of weeks).

Thursday April 8, 12:06 PM:

Tony called me collect from a pay phone to say he wanted another thousand dollars cash if his money.

I began to remind him about our agreement and to inform him what the rules are. He would not listen and talked over me and said he would go to the police to levy charges against me. I hung up the phone.

Thursday April 8, 3:50 PM:

Tony called asking for his money. I told him I would pay for a place to stay after he found it. He hung up on me.

A few minutes later he came to my place. He was yelling at me, calling me a “cunt”. I called 911. I have a restraining order so Tony was in violation of that and could be arrested and taken into custody where yet another effort could be made to treat his condition. Tony had left immediately so even though the police arrived within a few minutes, he was gone by the time they were on the scene. The SMPD officiers looked around the house for him and took down my summary of recent events to add to their report. During the interview, one officer suggested, effectively, that I just give him the rest of his money as a way to no longer give him an excuse to contact me. I pointed out to the officer that such reasoning is based on an assumption that my brother is rational. I.e., that if you do this then such and such will follow because that is how rational people act. In my brother’s case, rationality is not present. Of course, the same can be said of my attempt to define “rules” for my brother to follow. There is an assumption that he will be rational enough to follow the rules. After today’s incident, I am more than ever tired of the situation and tired of trying to help. Giving him his money would surely remove that excuse for him to come to my place.

I am going to the bank now to extract all of his money in cash. If he shows up again, I am going to give it to him and tell him to go away and not come back.

Thursday April 8, 7 PM:

I went to the bank and extracted the entirety of my brother’s money, $1500 in cash and $3000 in the form of a cashiers check made out to him. He has spent or lost a total of $6500 in less than three weeks so there is no reason to believe that this additional money will last more than two weeks. But I have had it. If he shows up again I am going to give him all of that money and ask him to leave. I will call the police and tell them what happened and to be on the look out for my brother.

A few minutes ago, an old friend of his, S., called me. After Tony left my place he showed up at S.’s house asking for his old hard drive (a computer disk on which Tony has some of his old writing). Tony also told S he has no money so S. handed him $5, enough to cover bus fare back to Downtown Los Angeles, where Tony said he was headed. Tony told S. that he was going to burn my house down. I don’t think Tony will do that, but I’m not taking chances. I am letting friends know that Tony is a threat and to be careful until he is under wraps. S. said that he kept Tony on his porch and did not allow him inside. He said that Tony was talking to himself and raving on about this and that. Then Tony left. No one knows where he is.


[previous update] [final update]

Friday April 9, 2:30 AM:

At around midnight Tony showed up at his old girl friend’s house in Echo Park. She and her husband would not let him in and called the police. Tony went around to the back of their house and started to sleep on their rear balcony. Then he did some push ups. Then he went down to their basement and entered their basement office. The LAPD arrived but would not arrest him since he was determined to pose no threat to himself or others and was an old friend of the family, so to speak. They took him in their car and released him a few blocks away, with no money, in the middle of the night, telling him to not return or he would be arrested.

I witnessed this by phone and spoke with the officers, urging them to arrest him on any charge, such as trespassing, so that he could be taken in and evaluated and receive treatment. I even called SMPD and tried to get them to go out and arrest him based on the earlier incident at my place. None of this had any effect. My heart goes out to my brother.

His ex and I agreed to call each other in the morning and strategize as to how to handle this when he shows up again.

Friday April 9, 9 AM:

My brother showed up at my place at 6AM.

I think he had walked 12 miles barefoot from Echo Park or maybe the LAPD brought him here. Maybe I will tell the full story another time maybe I won’t because right now I am just sad.

He was dirty and was in tears so I let him take a bath and sleep on my floor while I called the police who then came and arrested him for having violated my restraining order. Somewhere in my brothers mind he wants help but he won’t ask for it. Maybe this was his way to ask for help. I don’t know and I didn’t know what else to do.

Part of me knows that he just wanted a place to sleep and a friend, something he has had so little of for years now. He just wanted to be my brother and deep inside I so much just want to be his brother like we were so long ago. But that ignores the problem. He refuses to take meds or to get treatment and accept help from professionals. He is manic, has a repeated pattern of showing no ability to survive on his own, deteriorates once he is left on his own has a pattern of degrading to the point that he harasses people and vandalizes objects. I am a problem solver and never give up, but this time did. I can’t solve this problem. It seems hopeless. It hurts.




[previous update]

Today, May 4, 2010, is my brother’s birthday. He is 53 years old. He is in jail because he is mentally ill.

A process for placing my brother under a conservatorship has begun. Dr. Eide, director of the LA County Jail Mental Health Clinical Program, and social worker Esmeralda Hernandez who is handling my brother’s case, are going to submit an application to the California State Public Guardian. I have provided them with documentation of Tony’s history, details of past cases, and a summary of all of the events in his life of the past few years.

I am not optimistic that the conservatorship will go through. Tony will fight it. I can’t blame him. But he is not able to make the right decisions for his own life, so I hope this conservatorship will succeed.

According to the LA County Sheriff’s Web site, there are two cases pending against my brother: the restraining order violation described above and a more serious felony vandalism case. I do not know any details about the vandalism case.

And I don’t know if the process of obtaining the conservatorship will be somehow in conflict with the criminal case against him.

Each morning, each day, once or twice, my brother crosses my mind and I feel a sense of loss and I grieve a little. Each day. In time, I will go for days without thinking about him, as he sits in jail, as the system turns him into a “criminal”.

This closes out this chapter of Tony’s history, as we wait for the courts to rule on the conservatorship and the criminal cases.

[top] [ch.1] [ch.2] [ch.3] [ch.4] [ch.5] [ch.6] [ch.7] [ch.8]

4. Back through the revolving door

Chapter 4 in a series on mental illness.

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It is starting all over again. It’s like a bad dream. It is defeating. I attended my brother’s court hearing today and want to comment on how I feel. How the system is broken.

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpt’s of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness .]

The entire morning was for servicing the homeless. The judge, who I was told would not be his trial judge, seemed to be acting more as a clerk, issuing edicts to the litany of homeless defendants who were parading through the court this morning prior to my brother’s appearance. His decisions were delivered in a monotone script-like sequence of statements. He seldom looked up to see who he was issuing his edicts to.

The judge and clerks and attorneys all dressed in nice suits. The defendants were all disheveled in prison garb or tatters, hair unkempt, one being told that she could no longer sleep near the California Incline.

Then it was my brother’s turn.

The system is converting my brother, who suffers from mental illness, into a criminal. And, surely in my brother’s mind, pitting him against me and me against him.

This morning, he refused to enter the court room since I was there. So his public defender pleaded not guilty on his behalf to his having violated a restraining order I have filed against him.

His next court date is a pre-trial hearing on September 29, three weeks from now.

So, after having just been released from six months in jail after being sentenced to time served on a charge of assault and battery for what was really being delusional, grabbing a woman’s purse, throwing it on the ground and walking away, one week later he is back in jail and awaiting another trial.

He is back through the revolving door.

The system is broken. It presupposes that my brother is able to make his own decisions in his interest. He is not able to do that.

During his one week of “freedom” he was homeless. He showed up at midnight at an ex-girl friend and was asked to leave. He spent one night sleeping in the back of a pick up truck of an old friend who called the police on him. He went barefoot after throwing away the shoes I had given him, and evidently spent all of his money I had returned to him, most likely gambling it away.

During all his recent times in courts his mental illness was not considered and, in jail, barely, if at all, treated. He is kept isolation most of the time and given some meds, which he claims he does not take. It must be torture for him, that lonliness.

The system is broken. In most respects he is treated legally as a threat to society and a criminal or suspect and not as a person with a severe health problem requiring treatment.

It is pathetic. Here in America. Where we spend $1 Trillion per year more then necessary to enrich health insurance company executives and stock holders and operate a provably inefficient system.

Do you wonder why I or other friend’s of my brother do not offer him housing? It is because he is acting like a raving maniac. We have all been pushed to the brink. We have lives of our own to deal with. Life becomes intolerable when Tony is raging against everything and everyone. I am practically the only person left trying to get him some help and the system will not let me do that since it imputes rationality to Tony and expects him to ask for help. So, another homeless mentally ill person is the result.

The hearing today was for a violation of my restraining order issued last March after my brother had made threatening remarks about our mother’s care givers. I do not believe he will carry through on the threats but I cannot take a chance since his illness makes him irrational. And, by having the restraining order, I have one legal way to make the system take him into custody, in the hope that will lead to his getting treatment.

But that hope too seems futile.

I went to the hearing equipped with a letter for the judge and attorneys. The Public Defender, Kimberley Green accepted my letter. The DA did not seem very interested in it and successfully argued that my brother remain in custody by citing my brother’s growing record of arrests and convictions, not mentioning his mental illness. The public defender did tell the judge that mental illness was an issue. The judge isn’t the judge who will hear the case, so there was no point in giving the letter to him.

The letter was a summary of my bother’s history and a recommendation, really just an expression of hope, that he be treated again at Harbor UCLA hospital, where the staff is willing to pursue a conservatorship.

Three weeks from now I will attend his next hearing and give the letter to the trial judge, if that is permitted. Maybe it won’t be permitted. I may not have a legal right to help my brother.

And I am tired, so tired of this.

One ray of hope for my brother, not that he would view it that way, is based on a phone call I received from Jose Colon, who was his public defender in the purse grabbing case. Mr. Colon seemed to indicate to me that if my brother were conserved, the state appointed guardian would have the legal ability to choose to house my brother in a lock down facility were that necessary. At this point, after twenty three years of this, and with my brother increasingly unwilling to take his meds, that seems like the only hope there may be for him to survive.

[ story continued: excerpt’s of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness .]

[top] [ch.1] [ch.2] [ch.3] [ch.4] [ch.5] [ch.6] [ch.7] [ch.8]

3. Not guilty, so now what?

Chapter 3 in a series on mental illness.

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The system is brutal. The courts and the laws support the view that mentally ill people should be free to suffer from their illness and not receive treatment. The entire trial of my brother was a piece of theater with the judge, lawyers, witnesses, and jury all playing their part in a farcical charade. The system failed.

The following video interview with my brother shows him in the state he was one day after being released from jail.

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpts of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness .]

Tony was released Sunday. I saw him Monday. Here is the story…

During my bothers trial, the fact of his mental illness was not mentioned. There was no testimony about his history of mental illness and no information provided to the jury about his condition. Instead, the public defender, Jose Colon, chose to treat the case by defending against the charge of robbery, arguing that there was no intent to deprive the victim of property. The judge had issued instructions that my brother could be found guilty on lesser charges and Jose Colon admitted to the jury that those lesser charges could apply to the act committed.

In the end, the jury agreed.

My brother was found not guilty on the charge of felony robbery but found guilty on two lesser charges of misdemeanor assault and battery. The verdicts were rendered on Friday, August 28, 2009 at about 11 AM.

After the jury was excused, the defense agreed to immediate sentencing.

My brother was sentenced to six months time served.

The recommendation I had prepared for the judge was a moot point now. I never had a chance to provide that letter to the judge. It would have asked her to consider his mental illness in deciding on a sentence and asked that, some how, some way, my brother be put into a treatment program to receive care for his illness. Nothing in my letter, none of his history of mental illness, was so much as mentioned during the trial.

So Tony was a free man. He is back on the street. However, it took two days for the prison system to release him. He wasn’t actually released until yesterday, Sunday, about 48 hours after being found not guilty and sentenced to time served.

About an hour ago he showed up at my home, bare foot, dirty, and I believe somewhat manic. He asked if he could take a bath. He’s doing that now as I write. I just wanted to get my thoughts down as I decide how to proceed in my relationship with my brother.

He has some money that I have kept for him and will give back to him. But I am not going to provide housing for him. I can’t do that anymore, at least not this time, not now, until, somehow, he proves himself able to remain stable and not go off his meds and become the obnoxious nuisance he can be when off his meds.

I am willing to take him to a shelter or drive him to a hotel or room somewhere.

He needs some kind of supervised environment but he’s not going to get it from the system and I can’t provide it. I’ve tried before and it doesn’t work.

Tony’s getting out of the bath. I am making some coffee and am going to talk with him now.

After his bath he also washed his clothes, the only ones he has, using my washing machine and dryer. The conversation I had with him is not your normal kind of conversation. My brother tends to free associate during conversations and does what I believe is jump from thought to thought and remain at a shallow level of understanding of whatever topic is being discussed. He has a good memory for names, dates, and events mixed with his delusional interpretation of what goes on his life.

I asked why it had taken two days after he was found not guilty for the jail to release him from custody. He told me that the jail was understaffed since many sheriffs were called away to help evacuate neighborhoods near the La Canada brush fire raging near by. But inmates who are in the psych ward have to be given an exit interview before being released. So it took two days for the release process to occur.

While we waited for his clothes to dry in my dryer, he went out into my yard to smoke a cigarette. I took that time to talk a bit with him then went to the bank to get about half of his money I had held for him. Part of me did not want to give him money that he may as likely gamble away. But part of me wants nothing more to do with him and to just tell him “here, take your money, go away, I can’t see you any more.”.

I asked him if I could interview him on video and he consented. I recorded two video interviews with him. I have placed the shorter of the two interviews with my brother on YouTube. You could entitle the video “Everyone is a Mason”, since my brother labels many of the people he comes in contact with as Masons, some sect he believes controls the world and, in particular, has been involved in monitoring his thoughts. Or maybe its not the Masons, per se, that monitor his thoughts according to him. But he told me that some dental work he had done over twenty years ago resulted in implants in his mouth that are used to monitor his thoughts and transmit them. For example, he believes that one time when in jail, his thoughts were monitored and retransmitted over the public address system. He told me that today, his first full day in freedom after being found not guilty of robbery and guilty of assault for an act he did in snatching a woman’s purse when, in fact, the act was that of a mentally ill person who had been off his antipsychotic medicine and was delusional. He told me that the Armenian women whose purse he grabbed is a mason. I asked him how he could tell that was the case at the time he saw her at the bus stop before he grabbed her purse. He responded that it became evident from her testimony in court. I attended the entire trial and there was at no time anything in her testimony other than a simple description of a man accosting her and physically wresting her purse away from her and making her afraid. Tony told me that her testimony in court confirmed what he has intuited at the bus stop. I have this all on video and plan to replay it for Tony at some point in the future if and when he is more stable to see if it will in any way enable him to reflect on his own delusional behavior.

He talked of his girl friend of twenty five years ago, who lives in Paris, and how he spoke with her by phone and plans to visit her. He talked of his more recent girl friend who he was with for seven years during the 1990s and how she had “saved his life.” Tony, so lonely now, so unable to see his condition and want the help he needs to be able to survive.

In brief, my brother, who showed up this morning bare foot and dirty, has just spent six months in L.A. County Twin Towers Correctional Facility and been convicted of assault and battery for an act that was done while off his meds and delusional. Two full weeks of court time were spent involving a judge, public defender, deputy district attorney, court clerk, court secretary, forty pre-trial jurors of which fourteen were selected as jurors and two alternates, and various other court house staff, and the police, two of whom took a half day for testimony. None of this effort and expense has helped my brother or helped society in any way. It may conform to Scientology and arch conservative and other selfish stupid people’s views of how society should deal with mental illness, but it represents a total failure of reason and of our system.

Tony’s pattern is likely to continue. After interviewing him, I asked him to leave and not come back for some time, because I cannot help him and do not want me or people I know to become the next victims of his delusions. I even refused to answer questions he had about some of my friends when he tried to remember their names or where-abouts or activities. I think he is just trying to include them into his delusional framework so I protect them and myself by not giving him that information.

I provided him with his now cleaned clothing and also some shoes I had purchased for him during his court appearance (although the court sheriffs did not let him wear the shoes in court — he had to just use his jail sandals). At least now he has shoes and clean socks.

I completed the video interview. It went on for about 45 minutes. By the end I was convinced Tony is either not taking his medicine or it is not the right medicine. At times he states he is taking 20mg of Aripiprazole (generic for the product marketed as Abilify). Abilify is not abilitating my bother, no matter how clever the name or how much money the pharmaceutical company is making selling it under that name. Or maybe, as my bother claims in the interview, he was just “cheeking” his meds and not really taking them during his stay in the TTCF psychiatric ward.

We had talked about going to have lunch. But after the interview I was no longer in the mood to be with my brother. It was late in the afternoon by then and I have a day of work ahead of me yet to do. Intuitively Tony knew it was time to go.

Then Tony reached out to hug me before leaving. I was startled at first, not sure what motion he was making. Then I hugged him. I think he gets very few hugs in his life these days.

It is a sad fact that he is likely to remain or become more delusional, go off his meds if he is not already off them, and get into trouble with the law again. I know he does not want to go back to jail. But his mind is not well and, unless somehow he takes and continues to take antipsychotic medicine, he will surely slip up and act in some way that leads back to that horrible environment in spite of it all.

If the pattern repeats, as it surely will, Tony will commit some act of vandelism or harass someone and end up back in the jail system. In the mean time he is likely to gamble away his money and end up homeless.

I feel defeated. Like everything is back to square zero. No progress has been made. I am sad for my brother, who is lost in his self-created world, utterly unable to perceive reality and think rationally.

The court system and, at a larger level, the entire legal and medical apparatus of our society, seems utterly unable to provide the correct measures to help both my brother and society cope with the mental illness that afflicts him and, in very real sense, all of us. The situation is absurd.


UPDATE (three days later, September 2, 2009): Tony hauled in again for observation

Tony showed up at my place this morning. I had come back from breakfast to meet my Spanish tutor, who had just arrived. Tony was also sitting out on my deck. He was basically off his rocker. Any attempt at rational conversation with him was futile as his responses were a litany of vituperative vitriol against everyone he knows and doesn’t know. I told him that I could not help him and asked him to leave. There was nothing I could do for him. Or was there?

I have a restraining order for him on file from earlier in the year when he made verbal threats against our elderly mother’s care givers (she lives in an assisted living home in another town). I told Tony about the restraining order and that I could use that to have him arrested. I did not wish to do that but it could be a measure of last resort. He replied that I should call the police. I think he wanted me to call the police. It was his way of asking for help.

I called the Santa Monica police homeless unit. Tony went out to the front of the house and at first I thought he was leaving. Instead, he was pacing up and down on the sidewalk, talking to himself. I went out to talk with him and gave him some water, which he accepted. I asked him where he slept the previous night and he said he hadn’t slept. I asked him where his shoes were and he said they didn’t fit so he threw them away. He used very ugly language as he raved about some neighbors who are gay and used clang speech such as saying “Djew know that” to mean “Did you know that” combined with the word “Jew” expressing his antisemitic complex. That is just one example of a long string of incoherent speech he uttered, combined with some coherent replies such as when I said I would get him some more water, he replied “OK”.

It was as if he wanted to be taken to a hospital. He said more than one time, “I don’t want to do this any more” or something to that effect.

Three policemen arrived about twenty minutes later. They handcuffed him but were gentle in their questioning, asking him if he wanted to hurt himself. “No” he replied. And if he wanted to hurt anyone else. He replied, “No, not anymore than I hurt.”

I briefed the officers on his recent and past history. Each time officers are involved with Tony, it is a new cast of characters and they are starting from square zero. However, they suggested they take him to Harbor UCLA, which was good, since that is where he received care in January. The staff there is familiar with Tony and they had started a process of obtaining a conservatorship for Tony before the Mental Health Court threw him back out on the street. Maybe this time the court will be wiser. This is assuming they have the resources to hold him and agree to proceed with that process again. I have already left a message with the staff expressing my hope they will do so and that I will provide whatever information is needed to assist with that process.


UPDATE (September 3, 2009): My wake up call

I got a call early this morning from Paul, an old friend of Tony..

He found Tony sleeping in the back of his pick up truck this morning.
That’s right. Tony must not have been admitted by UCLA Harbor hospital yesterday, where he had been taken by the Santa Monica police.

Tony “presents” well. The ER must have determined he was not sufficiently crazy to be admitted to their psych ward.

Paul is concerned about his 90 year old parents and about his apartment building, thinking Tony will show up at one of those places. From talking with Paul it is clear to me that he likes Tony but has grown weary of Tony. Paul mentioned that when he saw Tony there earlier in the year he had considered getting his gun out of its box. And, he keeps a baseball bat next to his door. So, yes, he likes the sane Tony, but he is very very tired of Tony’s crazy behavior.

I advised Paul to call the Van Nuys police and ask them to call me so I can give them more background.

I called Harbor UCLA hospital and was transferred to someone who I think works in the ER. She was not permitted to give me any information about anyone. The gal I was talking to said it was a “patients rights” issue. I mentioned that really it was giving rights to the mental illness and not to the patient. She did not understand. You would think someone who works with the mentally ill would understand that point.

Anyway, I told her not to take this personally. And I asked if there was some way I could pre-brief the ER about my brother. He’ll be back. They’ll see him again. He’s been there several times in his life. Matt Wells, social worker in the psych ward, *wants* Tony to be admitted.

She told me I’d have to talk with someone there when Tony was already there.

Later I will try to call the ER again and speak with the attending physician. Good luck Dennis.

I then called Matt Wells, the social worker in the psych ward of Harbor UCLA. He is a very good guy. Matt told me that the ER is a different unit than the psych ward and that the ER will often not admit someone. The goal of the ER is to not admit people. They are swamped so to some extent that is understandable.

But Matt wants to see Tony back there so we can continue to pursue the conservatorship and get him treatment he needs. I know Matt by now and in January had talked at length with him during Tony’s stay there. Matt will help. We just need to get Tony into Harbor UCLA.

I asked Matt if he could have a word with the ER intake. He said it is not easy. It’s really a different world, but that he will talk to some techs he knows. They can informally put the word out.

Next time Tony goes to Harbor I am going to drive down there myself and provide information to the intake doctors.


UPDATE (September 4, 2009): Tony shows up and is arrested

I got an early start today at 7AM, trying to have a normal day of work.

At about 10 AM I hear Tony shouting my name. “Dennis, I want the rest of my money back, you fag thief”, or some such. I am not gay so am not sure why Tony is calling me a fag. I think he is calling people fags now instead of masons, or maybe both. Anyway, he was screaming loudly although staying toward the front of my deck and not approaching me.

I call 911. I am trying to talk to Tony and the 911 operator at the same time so the operator asks me to go back inside so he can hear me. I ask if someone is rolling and the answer is yes someone is already there. I look out and see that a SMPD motorcycle cop has arrived and taken Tony out to the front street. Within a few minutes an armada of Santa Monica police vehicles is out in front of my place. A large SUV and two patrol cars. I walk out to the street and talk with officier Rinski who had taken Tony to Harbor two days earlier. Tim Jackman, chief of police is on the scene. I know him from my volunteer work with a neighborhood association. Officer Rynski informs me that someone fitting Tony’s description had approached a doctor at St. John’s hospital earlier that morning and at arms length picked the doctor up by his shirt and lifted him off the ground. The doctor, who is about my size (six feet, 175 pounds) was not hurt but had felt helpless. Assuming it was my brother accosting the doctor, this is the first time I have known my brother to be physically violent. He’s getting worse. This is not good. It never was good.

I make a case to officer Rynski to take Tony to Harbor, but now, later, on second thought, why bother? First of all, Tony was arrested this morning for violating a restraining order I have on him. That is different than just being hauled in for a psychiatric evaluation. And Harbor UCLA proved itself inadequate to access the situation and does not even talk to its own psych ward about admission, so the decision by Rynski to take Tony into custody in Santa Monica makes sense.

Tony bumped things a notch up if he was violent this morning. I will continue to contact the SMPD liaison officers and do what I can to see that Tony does not cycle through another useless criminal trial in lieu of getting placed into some kind of treatment program.


UPDATE (September 5, 2009): Tony in S.M. Jail awaiting hearing on Wednesday

I called the SMPD this morning, who informed me that Tony is being held in the Santa Monica jail awaiting a hearing next Tuesday (but a police web site indicates Wednesday).

I think the hearing will be for violating my restraining order.

The court date and address on the web site is shown as:

Next Court Date: 09/09/2009
Next Court Time: 0830
Court Name: LAX LA MUNI COURT DIV 145
Court Address: 11701 S. LA CIENEGA BLVD.
Court City: LOS ANGELESUPT

So, now what?

Does the system just recycle my brother once again through the jail?

Is it my responsibility to advocate for my brother?

If not me, who? He won’t advocate for himself.

The system does everything in its power to prevent treating him and even makes it difficult for me, the surrogate advocate, to obtain information or to provide information.


[ story continued: https://oceanpark.com/blog/2009/09/defeated-by-the-revolving-door/ ]

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpt’s of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness .]

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2. My mentally ill brother is scheduled for trial

Chapter 2 in a series on mental illness.

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[Note: this article includes excerpts of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness.]

Today, in court, Tony was deemed competent to stand trial. So, even though he was delusional when he took a woman’s purse, threw it to the ground and walked off without out taking anything or harming anyone, next Tuesday, August 23, 2009, he goes on trial on a charge of felony robbery. He faces a sentence of up to 17 years in prison, since he has one strike on his record for a prior conviction of stalking. In short, although what my brother and society needs, is for him to be treated for a mental illness, he may end up serving time in prison.

Tony, who was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic twenty three years ago, refused to agree that he was mentally ill for the first twenty of those years.  In recent years he was able to gain explicit “insight” (as it is called) into his condition.  Yet, when he goes off his medications, he seems to lapse into a state of delusion and resents me for using those words to describe his condition.  And I can’t say that I blame him.  Although he has a condition that makes him different than “normal” people, it also causes him to be more bluntly honest about the world and what he sees as wrong in the world than most normal people ever dare to be.  I have learned much from his blunt honesty in those periods.

When Tony is on his meds, he seems as normal as you and I. Many of his friends think he is one of the most brilliant people they know. They find his presence enjoyable. He is insightful, writes and speaks articulately and insightfully, and is fun to be around. He is a good video editor and has produced very creative works. He has worked in Hollywood as a machinist for our brother Eric, who does special effects. Yet Eric will no longer hire him in recent years since Tony becomes paranoid and does not fit in at the work place.

Because Tony goes off his meds, his condition prevents him from fitting into society or maintaining a steady job in spite of his ardent desire to be normal and have a job and be part of what normal people do.  It is a contradiction.  His condition is not “normal” and his behavior becomes obnoxious. He comes to believe he is well and goes off his medications. Yet his desire to be normal is prevented by his going off his medication.

He has never hurt anyone physically but he is six foot four, weighs 230 pounds, and goes into raging tirades so can be very intimidating. He has targeted many individuals, including some very well known personalities (including Blase Bonpane, Michael Miner, Susan Block, and Steven Spielberg’s mother) and numerous other people, including me, our 91 year old mother’s care givers, and some of his friends.  He has delusions about people that he expresses in writing or in phone calls to the point that people take out restraining order against him.  In one case, he made so many harassing phone calls to a certain personality’s office that they filed charges of stalking which resulted in a felony conviction.  Tony ended up spending nearly two years at Atascadero State Mental Hospital.  That hospital stay helped him.  Upon leaving the hospital he was very stable, very rational, and appeared to many as if he had been “cured”.  Were you to meet him you would think he was a totally normal highly intelligent person and quite likable.  His release was some three years ago.

Unfortunately, his “cure” was short lived.  Twice since his release he went off his meds and ended up being kicked out of his living place.  First time from a one bedroom apartment where he was living on his own in Korea town, then the next time from an apartment where his roommates ended up having to lock him out to retain their own sanity.  It was after this most recent eviction that he became homeless and committed the alleged crime for which he will go on trial next week.

I have been attending the pre-trial hearings.  In a way, I, his brother, have become his case manager.  I will report here on the trial when it happens next week.  In the meantime, I had wanted to provide a letter to the judge in the trial, Teri Schwartz. However, I learned from the public defender, Jose Colon, that the judge will not accept information from sources outside the context of the trail, i.e. not from either the public defender or the district attorney.  The purpose of my letter is to present the point of view that Tony had a mental illness and that the charge of robbery and a subsequent incarceration is not a good substitute for the medical treatment he requires.  Since it was not possible to provide the letter to the court at this time, I am choosing to publish it here in a public forum.  I will let it speak for itself.

Re: Case GA07600501

Honorable Teri Schwartz
Pasadena Superior Court
Pasadena, CA

Dear Judge Schwartz:

I am the brother of George Anthony Allard, Tony to his friends, who has a mental illness yet is in your court on a charge of felony robbery for an act that any normal person would not describe as robbery. While delusional, he snatched an old ladies purse, threw it to the ground and walked away. For this act he is facing up to 17 years in prison.

Tony was first diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia in 1985. Since you are the presiding judge in his case on a felony charge of robbery, I write to bring to your attention facts and history that should bear upon the case and for which I am in the best position to provide relevant details, since I have been acting as his de facto case manager in recent years.

Whatever the letter of the law, the interest of justice is surely served by bringing facts and positions to light that would otherwise remain unknown. I have been witness to legal proceedings involving my brother for many years. So, although I am aware, as a lay person, that a system of prosecution and defense exists to convey information to the court, I feel compelled to provide information and a point of view often not adequately considered in trials where mental illness is, or should be, a predominant factor.


My brother Tony faces a second strike felony conviction of robbery. Yet at the time of the alleged crime he was delusional. Tony had gone off his meds four months prior to the alleged robbery, resulting in a number of 5150s and a 5250 stay at Harbor UCLA Psychiatric ward. I had been discussing Tony’s condition in detail with social worker Matt Wells and Dr. Walker of Harbor UCLA and exploring the idea of placing Tony under a state controlled conservatorship. The preliminary steps toward a conservatorship were starting to fall into place. Then, on February 13, 2009, Judge Melissa Widdifield of the Los Angeles Mental Health Court found “for” Tony and denied a request by the psychiatrists and social workers at Harbor UCLA to keep him for further observation. Tony was, ipso facto, released, i.e. put back out on the street. He was quite delusional at the time. He had told me a few days before that he was, indeed, an agent working for the FBI. Upon his release to “freedom”, he immediately proceeded to Hollywood Park race track where he gambled away whatever money he had and remained homeless. The alleged robbery in Glendale occurred nine days later, on February 22.

There are times when Tony is taking his meds and is highly functional. There are times where he is just recently back on them or a new medicine and is able to “present well”, which was the case before the Mental Health Court and very possibly before your court. And there are times where he is off his meds and is completely delusional. When in a functional state, he has written about his own condition and history.

The following excerpts from my brother Tony Allard’s writings are illuminating…

I thought that I was world famous, and that everybody in the hospital, doctors, nurses, and patients alike, were all talking about me all of the time. This was and is not unusual for me, at that time, and even to some extent to this day, for when I am or have been at work or at play on the outside, I have and have had similar delusions. Everybody, wherever I go, is or was preoccupied with me. Glorious me. Oh the delusion. It is hard for me to even think about those days anymore, when the delusions where as concrete as a freeway overpass, but now that I have been stabilized on meds for several years it is not the same. However, the delusions are never that far from my consciousness. Even to this day, whether I’m on the bus or in a restaurant, in a crowded theater or in traffic driving on the street, I often have delusions that people nearby are talking about me in a tangential way. I don’t think I’ll ever really get beyond it, it’s so deeply ingrained in my consciousness, but I can hope, and I can and must and do just ignore those thoughts. What else can I do, after all, because I cannot just stop my thinking processes. I have a constant inner dialogue, like everybody else, only mine is skewed with some elements of fantasy that make it scary sometimes to just be me. Because intermingled with those delusions that people are talking about me, I sometimes also think that they are saying that I will be killed by so and so, an old friend of mine or someone else, or that I will end up committing suicide. These thoughts are not my own and they are not somebody else’s. I don’t know where they are from, but I do know that the medication that I am on now, Risperdal, make such thoughts much less prevalent in my thinking. But they are always there. I guess it’s probably like someone who has been raped or has been through a war zone and has Post Traumatic Stress syndrome. I don’t know, but I don’t like it, and I only know that I have to live with it for now, and hope that some day these thoughts just fade away and stop coming back. But after more than 20 years, I doubt that they will ever go away completely. It is probably a lot like an insomniac who, despite his best efforts and the best medications, every night must face the same dilemma of going to sleep. Only in my case, it’s not sleep that won’t come, it’s just simple peace of mind.

o o o

I would have constant delusions while working or off of work about people “talking about me” and I would just have to ignore my ears. Sometimes, I just resorted to wearing foam ear plugs so that I couldn’t hear conversations near me second hand and suffer the fears that resulted from my psychotic misinterpretations of what people were saying. .I don’t know how common it is for bi-polar patients to have such delusions, but I had them. I was diagnosed at that point as Psychotic Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specified). That had come after years of a Paranoid Schizophrenic diagnosis, but I believe that my Psychiatrist, Thomas Carter, thought that I was too high functioning to be considered truly Schizophrenic. Whatever it was, it wasn’t fun. My social life was still somewhat active, and I would, as I’ve said, just ignore my aberrant thoughts and pretend that everything was fine. Many people, from that time of my life, have told me that I must be a very good liar, because it was never apparent to those friends and acquaintances that I was having constant delusions during that period. Of course you learn to lie when you are mentally ill, because if you don’t, you cannot function in a “normal” life.

o o o

At some point around New Years Day, 2004, I decided again to stop taking my meds. As I rationalized it, I was not drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, or taking any other drugs, and besides, as is common among mentally ill people, I was feeling fine because I was on Risperdal and consequently deluded myself into believing that I was no longer mentally ill. (If I were to say the one biggest problems, for me at least, and I know for many other if not most of the mentally ill, is coming to terms with the fact that your illness is permanent and requires lifelong treatment with psychotropic medication.) Consequently, my mental condition started to deteriorate rapidly. I started to suspect people were “talking about me” again and had several persistent delusions relating to some old acquaintances and my belief that I was a Special Agent for the FBI. My brother Dennis, who had seen me deteriorate in a similar manner several times in the past, noticed my deterioration, but I lied to him and assured him that I was still taking my meds.

 

The above excerpts indicate not only an ability on the part of my brother to be rational and write coherently, in sharp contrast to much of his writings and poems in a large opus of documents I have compiled (and can make available to the court), they also constitute an admission by Tony that he lies to hide his illness or being off his meds.

Tony may be “competent to stand trial”. But beware. The mental illness he is afflicted with is, to use an analogy, like a computer virus that takes over a computer. Except in this case, it is a form of consciousness that takes over a host human being’s psychology and thought processes. The behavior of the host victim may seem on the surface to be normal and rational at some standard of competency. Yet, since the virus is not my brother, it follows the standard cannot apply. There is no jurisprudence of which I am aware that applies. If that is true, that leaves the court in a bit of a bind. It is like a body snatcher in the movie “Invasion of the body snatchers”. There is no sense that the pronouns “he” or “him” or even the name “Tony” refers to my brother at the those times that the body snatcher has control. Worse, the virus acts in a way to defend its existence, duping its host victim into experiencing things that are not happening (delusions) and causing the host to claim to be sane, duping his friends, relatives, his lawyers, and the entire judicial system including you yourself, your honor, with all due respect.

I’ve seen this happen before and it is happening again. It is the pitiable state of affairs whereby the police, judicial, and prison system in California are acting in lieu of medical treatment for a medical condition and engaging in a charade following a script of rules that do not or should not apply.

Recommendation:

What can be done to better the situation in a just manner? In my opinion, a just solution would involve imposing (not “offering”) a supervised treatment program and living situation on my brother, a kind of probation with parole, that provides him with the ability to seek employment while further imposing the condition that if he violates various conditions of his parole, such as going off his meds or committing unlawful acts, he would be subject to incarceration at a secure institution such as Atascadero State Hospital. I believe that my brother would be responsive to such a solution even if he is not capable of agreeing to such treatment voluntarily. The result would be just, practical, cost effective, and in some cases ultimately rehabilitating. I urge the court to consider this course of action if at all legally possible.

Dennis G. Allard
Santa Monica, CA
August 14, 2009

[ story continued: https://oceanpark.com/blog/2009/08/not-guilty-so-now-what/ ]

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1. My brother has a mental illness so is in jail

Chapter 1 in a series on mental illness.

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This is my first column.  I will dedicate this column to my brother Tony who was first diagnosed with a mental illness in 1986.  The saga of his life and how it has affected those close to him is a story I will tell.  I will tell it here in future columns.  Tony himself has written about his life and journey that has been so affected by an illness that most of the time he does not acknowledge as real.  His writing is creative, illuminating, and entertaining on many topics, including the illness.  With his permission I will share some of his writing here in future columns.

[Note: Elsewhere see excerpts of Tony Allard’s writing about his own mental illness .]

Much of the time, the illness does what can best be described as taking over the consciousness of my brother and running his life.  My brother deserves respect for the wonderful, caring creative human being he is while the illness deserves no respect.  The illness only deserves treatment and the only treatment that has allowed my brother to be himself and run his own life has been in the form of certain medicines.  Without those medicines, the illness takes over his life.  Anyone who objects to those medicines is not defending my brother’s right to a life but, rather, is defending the illness’ right to conquer and take over my brother’s life.  The illness is not my brother and my brother is not the illness.  The illness is like a computer virus that makes the computer screw up big time except this virus-like illness is a consciousness of its own, takes over people, and runs and ruins their lives.  It must be treated, with medicine when necessary.

My brother is allergic to the soap in the LA County “Twin Towers” jail so he buys some special soap from the jail store.  He had no money and already owed a friend in jail ten dollars so he needed the money by Thursday, the day he is allowed to buy things from the store.  Yesterday was already Wednesday.  Tony called me collect from jail, the only way he has to call me, reminding me that he needed the money.  I had been procrastinating a bit about getting out there to visit him, busy with my life and work out here in freedomsville.  But I’m one of my mentally ill brother’s few contacts in the outside world who is willing to help him out.  I decided to drive out to Twin Towers and deposit $200 into his account.

It is his money, since for over a year now he has been receving disablity income.  That was the one good stroke of luck he had in the past many years, getting qualified for that income.  Because beyond that little stroke of luck, having a condition most recently diagnosed as bipolar with schizoaffective disorder results in a long continuous string of events that might best be characterized as unlucky in a big way.

I manage Tony’s money for him when he is in jail.  When he is out of jail and sane, he manages it pretty well, being able to keep an apartment and maintain friendships.  Then, when he goes off his medication and has delusions and thinks he is an FBI Agent and that everyone is talking about him, he most often gambles away all of his money at Hollywood Park or one of the poker casinos in Gardena that still let him in.

One time, when sane, he took a class to become a poker dealer.  He did well in the class but then on the first live test day, he got nervous and froze up.  I won’t recount the bitter irony I felt when I heard he was striving to make a career working in those casinos where so much of his life has passed in what I view as a lonely existence.  He does not see it that way but then again he does not see most things the same you or I see them.

I stopped at an ATM up on Ocean Park Blvd near where I live to extract the two hundred dollars.  I put the money in my right front pocket instead of in my wallet.  I was going to a jail and I just assume that the chances of being mugged are  higher in that part of town so I keep my wallet and money in separate pockets for expeditions like this.  I had checked Google maps and saw a traffic jam on the 110 Harbor Freeway so I took the longer way around, taking the 10 to the 5 then off at Main Street and over to Vignes to get to the jail.

There was a parking place on the street right across from the jail so I snapped that up to avoid the seven dollar parking fee in the bunker-like parking structure and walked over to the IRC, the Inmate Reception Center.  I walked up what has become a familiar concrete stairway to the second floor cashier.  I filled out the slip with Tony’s official name and booking number and, after a short wait in line, handed over the two hundred dollars that would soon be in Tony’s account so he could buy his soap and whatever other small luxuries might help his stay in jail.

I didn’t take time to visit him since it was not a visiting day and, even if it were, visiting someone in jail is a very time consuming process.  That will be for another day and a future column.  I will also report on his progress in the court system on his recent felony charge of robbery, which occurred when he grabbed a woman’s purse, threw out the contents on the ground, and then walked away.  He faces a second felony conviction for that act and up to ten years in prison.  For not taking his meds.

[ story continued: https://oceanpark.com/blog/2009/08/my-mentally-ill-brother-is-scheduled-for-trial/ ]

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