CNHI
Somerset —
Dear Editor:
In the past three-plus decades I have been involved in one way or another with mental health issues in another state. For the past four years I have been making (unsuccessfully) attempts to give freely to this community, Somerset Kentucky, Pulaski County, what I have learned in those years.
The suicide rates throughout this entire state are at epidemic rates, and here in Somerset we have the highest in the entire state! The growing problem is so evident that the Kentucky cabinet just passed a law that school teachers and all aids must take a special credit course on the subject in this school year, 2010.
Whatever and whenever I am trying to bring to the attention of our city and county fathers has seemed to just pass along as something that ‘"will just go away someday with out anyone doing anything”
It won’t.
Mr. Jim Mitchell, City Coucilor, and many others elected to serve this community with wise and thought-out decisions unfortunately have no idea why we have so many folks just roaming about this city. They may have no homes and probably no job, not entirely due to the economic conditions, but because the majority of those may have a mental illness.
Mental illness can be a common type like bipolar disorder, or the more severe type, schizophrenia. Whatever its form, mental illness can create a life-long struggle due to the stigma of the inherited disorder.
I wonder how many of those “dregs of society” wandering along side our road ways he has actually stopped and talked to on a one-on-one basis and discovered what their lives are like or the problems they must face on a daily basis?
I already understand their problems, and have conversed with many over the years in our little Fountain Square on some summer evenings.
I have also have bipolar disorder and understand its dangers first hand. I have lost a brother and observed two sisters, a mother and countless friends, and neighbors make attempts—dozens succeeded—to take their lives due bipolar’s extreme mood swings and depressions.
You may recall some years ago when a national news story about a women that was found wandering about in a major city in California. She was dirty and unkempt and was disoriented. The local police had picked her up and thinking she was “just another problem alcoholic and vagrant” locked her up in a Detox cell. It was a few days later that this woman was discovered to be neither. She was a well recognized movie personality who had played “Lois Lane” opposite her co-star Christopher Reeve in the blockbuster movie Superman.” Her name:
Margot Kidder!
She neither drank nor was a regular roamer about the city, but for some reason ran out of her prescribed medication for bipolar disorder and was overcome by her mental illness.
I do have to take a strong stand on this obscene idea of gathering up anyone not breaking any laws and who seems to be disoriented, homeless, or possibly have a mental disorder and walks along a Somerset road side keeping to themselves (as most with a mental illness do).
Perhaps the local railway that rolls through this city can supply this city with an old box car to transport the ones who are to slow or old to out run the proposed law?
Maybe this city’s councilors could even toss in a box lunch as the special Gestapo “railroads” them to another nearby county?
Being born upon this earth in 1941 the idea of railroading millions to a place that was far away and never to return was a common practice in another place on this earth.
I for one do not want to see history repeat its self here even for just a few.
Is anyone listening?
I remain most respectfully,
Cliff Steele
Somerset, Ky.
