My youngest daughter, Traci, graduated from Virginia Tech University this weekend with a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology. She maintained a perfect 4.0 grade point average her entire college career, was awarded Summa Cum Laude in her class of more than 5,000 graduates, and spent countless hours working on a suicide hotline as a volunteer. She plans to obtain a Master’s Degree in clinical mental health counseling.

My son’s diagnosis and breakdown changed our entire family. I became an advocate for mental health reform. My son works now as a peer to peer specialist for a county diversion program that helps persons, who have mental disorders and are arrested, by getting them into treatment programs rather than having them languish in jail. And now Traci has chosen a career in the mental health field.

Along with her siblings, Patti and I are tremendously proud of her achievements.

People who are in the midst of a psychotic break often do not think anything is wrong with them. In recent years, this lack of insight has been described as anosognosia (a word that does not roll off the tongue easily.)  It means that a person isn’t aware that he/she is sick.

Two years ago, there was a push to add anosognosia to the the APA’s  DSM which is currently being revised. I wrote about that campaign on my blog and it attracted a number of divergent comments.

The Treatment Advocacy Center, which lobbies for passage of Assisted Outpatient Treatment laws, has released a video this week about anosognosia.  Dr. E. Fuller Torrey argues that anosognosia is a key reason why it’s important for family members and mental health professionals to be able to intervene when someone — who has a history of going off their medications or a history of violence — begins showing signs of psychosis. 

Critics argue that anosognosia isn’t a real medial condition and that most people are capable of making their own decisions without intervention even if they have a mental illness and may be in the midst of a breakdown. 

What do you think of anosognosia and this new video? I’m especially interested in personal stories.

Thank you for sharing your experiences and thoughts.

Failure of Leadership at Abbott Breaks Its Promise

Yesterday’s announcement that the global pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories had agreed to pay $1.6 billion to state and federal agencies in criminal and civil fines made me furious. This is not the first time that a large drug manufacturer has been caught illegally promoting unapproved uses for one of its medicines.  But the Abbott case is especially egregious because it executives  exploited two vulnerable groups: persons with mental illnesses and the elderly.

The settlement ends a four-year investigation into a wide number of calculated moves by the Illinois-based company to push sales of its neurological drug Depakote into so called “off label” markets where it didn’t belong.  One of the more scandalous admissions was that executives created a special sales force to promote Depakote in nursing homes.  The sales force was told to push Depakote as a substitute for proper staffing since one of its side effects was turning grandma and grandpa into compliant zombies thus reducing the need to hire employees and provide decent care.  ”Abbott essentially preyed on…the most helpless patient populations,” one attorney noted.

Not only did Abbott prey on the elderly, it took advantage of persons with mental illnesses between 2001 and 2006 to increase Depakote sales. Two studies  funded by the company failed to prove the drug’s effectiveness as a booster for antipsychotic drugs, yet the company waited two years after the conclusion of the second study to notify its sales force and another two years to publish its findings.

Depakote was prescribed to my son during this time frame and, like hundreds of other concerned parents, I urged him to take it because I believed it was helping him.

Forcing Abbott to pay $1.6 billion is not enough. Not only did the company harm countless individuals, but it violated a public trust. Nearly all of us with loved ones who have a mental disorder depend on medications. Compliance with medications is a major issue.  Incidents such as this undermine confidence, causing ripple effects.

Abbott’s pharmaceutical sales last year were $20 billion, about fifty percent of the company’s sales.  Depakote sales dropped to $331 million from $1.3 billion between 2008-2009. That was because Depakote went off patent and is now available as a generic. Overall, Abbott generated revenues in 2010 of 35 billion and net earnings of 4.6 billion.

Abbott is not the first to be caught pushing off label uses.  Pfizer paid $2.3 billion for marketing drugs, including its painkiller Bextra.  Knowing there is limited time under patent laws to maximize profits, unscrupulous companies encourage their sales forces to push medications into areas where the drugs do little good and sometimes can cause harm.

Fining Abbott hurts its stock holders, but does little to punish those responsible. The executives who pushed the off-label sales should be fired. And the board of directors who were asleep at the wheel should be forced to publicly apologize. One way to embarrass them would be for the government to require each board member to write a letter of apology and essay about ethics that would be published in Abbott’s annual report.

Here’s who’s on the board of directors of Abbott. They are not individuals who you would think of as snake oil salesmen. But in this instance, that is exactly what they are.

They should be ashamed — especially Board Member Robert J Alpern, M.D., Ensign Professor of Medicine, Professor of Internal Medicine and Dean of the Yale School of Medicine.

Others include:

Roxanne S. Austin, President Austin Investment Advisors, Newport Coast, Calif.;

 Sally Glount, Dean, J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University;

W. James Farrell, retired chairman and CEO of Illinois Tool Works Inc., Glenview, Ill.;

 Edward M. Liddy, Partner, Clayton, Dublilier & Rice LLC, New York, New York;

 Phebe N. Novakovic, Executive VP – Marine Systems, General Dynamics Corporation, Falls Church Va;

 William A Osborn, retired chairman and CEO, Northern Trust Corporation and the Northern Trust Company, Chicago, Ill.;

 Samuel C. Scott III, retired chairman, president and CEO, Corn Products Internaitonal Inc., Westchester, Illinois;

 Glenn F. Tilton, Chairman of the Midwest, JP Morgan Chase and Company, Chicago, Ill.;

 Miles D. White, Chairman of the Board and CEO Abbott, Abbott Park, Ill.;

Nancy McKinstry, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, Netherlands.

I can’t remember now if the tip came in first to Howie Kurtz  or to me when we were both reporters at The Washington Post. But one of us heard that members of the Reagan Administration were taking part in a nifty little boondoggle that Charles Z. Wick had approved at the United States Information Agency.  Here was the scam. If a high-ranking government employee was willing to drop by the U.S. Embassy when he and his family jetted off to London, Paris, or some other exotic city on vacation, the government would pick up the cost of his airfare. All he had to do was give an hour long ”briefing” to embassy employees to qualify for the taxpayer paid ticket.

Wick was furious when we confronted him and during our exchange he blurted out that Reagan staffers were not the only Washingtonians who were getting free airfare courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Journalists were too.

Kurtz and I quickly obtained a list of media stars who had become USIA frequent flyers. One of them was George F. Will.  The job of confronting Will fell on me and he happened to be on vacation with his family at the beach when I tracked him down.  His answer made it crystal clear to me that I was a nobody when  compared to him and I certainly had no right to question him about his ethics.

I ended up writing a story about Will and the others on the USIA travel list, but my investigative expose got spiked by managing editor  Howard Simons .  I was never told exactly why, but later I heard a rumor that Will had telephoned the Post hierarchy and complained.  Will was the most popular columnist in the writers syndicate that the Post sold to other newspapers.

The release of my story would have embarrassed Will, in part, because he had come under fire in the media earlier for blurring the line between journalism and partisan politics. He’d been criticized for helping Ronald Reagan prepare for the 1980 presidential debates with Jimmy Carter. That little episode was part of a bigger scandal dubbed “debategate“  that involved charges that someone had given Reagan briefing papers before the debate that had been stolen from the Carter campaign. Will was one of the suspects. 

Based on my only conversation with Will, I came away thinking he was arrogant.  I didn’t think much of him as a journalist or a person, for that matter. But since then, my opinion of him has softened — not because of his politics — but because of the character that he has shown as a father.

Will has written previously about his son,  Jonathan Frederick Will, who has Down Syndrome.  But a column published this week in the Post on the occasion of Jonathan’s 40th birthday was a truly moving and insightful piece about parent/child relationships when an mental disorder is involved.

Perhaps this column says more about Will’s character than the brief dressing down that he gave me more than twenty years ago.

By George F. Will, Published: May 2

The Washington Post

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago — on May 4, 1972, his father’s 31st birthday — the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable.

The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon’s parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have necessarily bleak futures. Whether warehoused or just allowed to languish from lack of stimulation and attention, people with Down syndrome, not given early and continuing interventions, were generally thought to be incapable of living well, and hence usually did not live as long as they could have.

Down syndrome is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect — an extra 21st chromosome. It causes varying degrees of mental retardation and some physical abnormalities, including small stature, a single crease across the center of the palms, flatness of the back of the head, a configuration of the tongue that impedes articulation, and a slight upward slant of the eyes. In 1972, people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids.

Now they are called American citizens, about 400,000 of them, and their life expectancy is 60. Much has improved. There has, however, been moral regression as well.

Jon was born just 19 years after James Watson and Francis Crick published their discoveries concerning the structure of DNA, discoveries that would enhance understanding of the structure of Jon, whose every cell is imprinted with Down syndrome. Jon was born just as prenatal genetic testing, which can detect Down syndrome, was becoming common. And Jon was born eight months before Roe v. Wade inaugurated this era of the casual destruction of pre-born babies.

This era has coincided, not just coincidentally, with the full, garish flowering of the baby boomers’ vast sense of entitlement, which encompasses an entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps, and to a perfect baby. So today science enables what the ethos ratifies, the choice of killing children with Down syndrome before birth. That is what happens to 90 percent of those whose parents receive a Down syndrome diagnosis through prenatal testing.

Which is unfortunate, and not just for them. Judging by Jon, the world would be improved by more people with Down syndrome, who are quite nice, as humans go. It is said we are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and remain greedy. People with Down syndrome must remain brave in order to navigate society’s complexities. They have no choice but to be trusting because, with limited understanding, and limited abilities to communicate misunderstanding, they, like Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” always depend on the kindness of strangers. Judging by Jon’s experience, they almost always receive it.

Two things that have enhanced Jon’s life are the Washington subway system, which opened in 1976, and the Washington Nationals baseball team, which arrived in 2005. He navigates the subway expertly, riding it to the Nationals ballpark, where he enters the clubhouse a few hours before game time and does a chore or two. The players, who have climbed to the pinnacle of a steep athletic pyramid, know that although hard work got them there, they have extraordinary aptitudes because they are winners of life’s lottery. Major leaguers, all of whom understand what it is to be gifted, have been uniformly and extraordinarily welcoming to Jon, who is not.

Except he is, in a way. He has the gift of serenity, in this sense:

The eldest of four siblings, he has seen two brothers and a sister surpass him in size, and acquire cars and college educations. He, however, with an underdeveloped entitlement mentality, has been equable about life’s sometimes careless allocation of equity. Perhaps this is partly because, given the nature of Down syndrome, neither he nor his parents have any tormenting sense of what might have been. Down syndrome did not alter the trajectory of his life; Jon was Jon from conception on.

This year Jon will spend his birthday where every year he spends 81 spring, summer and autumn days and evenings, at Nationals Park, in his seat behind the home team’s dugout. The Phillies will be in town, and Jon will be wishing them ruination, just another man, beer in hand, among equals in the republic of baseball.

georgewill@washpost.com

“Psychiatry’s Bible: The DSM is doing more harm than good.”

This was the headline of a guest opinion piece printed in yesterday’s Washington Post. The editorial was written by psychologist Paula J. Caplan who argued that “hundreds of people  [are being] arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it.”  As an example, Caplan recounted the story of a ”young mother” who had been told after a quick assessment by an emergency room doctor that she had bipolar disorder. The woman was committed to a psychiatric ward and started on dangerous psychiatric medication.

  Over the next 10 months, the woman lost her friends, who attributed her normal mood changes to her alleged disorder. Her self-confidence plummeted; her marriage fell apart. She moved halfway across the country to find a place where, on her dwindling savings, she and her son could afford to live. But she was isolated and unhappy. Because of the drug she took for only six weeks, she now, more than three years later, has an eye condition that could destroy her vision.

Unfortunately, Caplan never identifies this woman nor does she provide us with the name of the hospital where the diagnosis was given. Instead, we are told the woman was simply suffering from nothing more than severe exhaustion.

Caplan writes that in our “increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization; even electroshock is still performed.”

She correctly points out that issuing a psychiatric diagnosis is unregulated. Medical doctors – regardless of their specialty – psychologists, social workers, therapists, even school officials can declare that someone has a mental disorder.

Narrowing her focus, she takes aim at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the manual that doctors rely on to diagnosis mental disorders. She challenges the notion that the DSM is based on any scientific information and claims its editors use poor-quality studies to support categories they want to include while ignoring or distorting high quality research.

Caplan concludes: “I now believe that the DSM should be thrown out.”  She announces that she is joining ten people who are filing a lawsuit against the DSM’s editors because the plaintiffs have been “harmed by a diagnosis” based on the DSM.

At last count, more than 350 readers had posted comments about her editorial. Several came from the anti-psychiatry crowd that is quick to rally around any article that attacks psychiatry.  (On her website, Caplan has posted a disclaimer that states she is not affiliated with the Church of Scientology.)

I found her editorial to be both thought provoking and troubling.

I was skeptical when I read her story about the young mother. I am not suggesting that Caplan’s concocted the anecdote. But what is missing is context. Caplan suggests there are ”hundreds” of persons in America today who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label. Is that true? Are there “hundreds” who are being hospitalized unnecessarily? Are there ’hundreds” who are being forced to take dangerous medications?

During the past six years, I have visited 47 states, toured more than 100 treatment programs and talked to persons with mental disorders and those who love them. What I have seen — and what countless studies have documented — is that community based treatment services are so scarce that it is nearly impossible for people who have serious mental disorders to obtain meaningful psychiatric care. This lack of services is a national scandal. This doesn’t mean that a young woman can’t be arbitrarily entrapped in our needy mental health system.

But hundreds?

I understand the importance of personal stories. My book describes my son’s arrest after I failed to get him help. But I backed up his story with research that showed 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have been diagnosed with a severe mental disorder. Studies have shown that the Los Angeles County Jail is the largest public mental facility in America today and that more than one million persons with mental disorders go through our criminal justice system.

Where are the statistics to support Caplan’s anecdotal evidence?

Caplan makes several good points.  Psychiatric problems are difficult to diagnosis. Because of stigma, they should never be rushed. My son has been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, schizo-affective disorder and schizophrenia. This has been extremely frustrating. However, an incorrect diagnosis doesn’t always mean a problem doesn’t exist. How many diagnoses made by doctors about non-mental related problems turn out to be premature or faulty?  A minor stomach pain proves to be something much more serious.

It’s also true that many of these diagnoses are rushed because psychiatrists have been pressured by insurance companies to become pill pushers. Few of my son’s psychiatrists have known anything but his name and symptoms. They have seen their job as simply figuring out which pill to dispense. This is bad psychiatry.

Caplan’s statement that doctors are quick to “classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder” is demeaning both to psychiatry and patients. Such claims pander to a popular prejudice that people who have been diagnosed with mental disorders really don’t have anything wrong with them, they simply are weak and looking for an excuse to explain their doldrums.

I agree when Caplan states that : “Mental health professionals should use, and patients should insist on, what does work: not snap-judgment diagnoses, but instead listening to patients respectfully to understand their suffering.”   I also agree that ”[Mental health professionals should ] help patients find more natural ways of healing. Exercise, good nutrition, meditation and human connection are often more effective — and less risky — than drugs or electroshock.”  Finally, she concludes that ”patients should not be limited in their choices of treatment, but they should be better informed. If someone knows about the many ways that suffering can be addressed, including a drug or a treatment with potential benefits and harms, and they still want to try it, they should be able to.”  Yep, that makes sense.

What does not make sense is her conclusion that the entire DSM should be discarded.  Improved. Yes. That is what the current rewrite is supposed to be doing. But there is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Does Caplan believe the DSM’s description of the symptoms of schizophrenia are invalid?

It’s true that we live in a society that depends more and more on pills to solve our problems. How else can you explain medication for such troubles as “relestless leg syndrome?”

But I found a troubling thread in Caplan’s editorial. It was the idea that because we have trouble defining and diagnosing mental illnesses that these disorders are not real.

Those of us who have seen someone, who is hearing voices that are telling him to kill himself, know better. Those of us, who love someone so depressed that it impossible for him to get out of bed in the morning, know better.  And the idea that the entire DSM is useless or that a person with schizophrenia simply needs a good night’s sleep is wrong.

This week I want to turn the tables.

What books about mental health would you recommend?

Is there a specific book that has helped you personally?

Have you written a book about mental health that you want to plug on my webpage?

Here’s your chance. Don’t be shy. I’ll start.

My friend, Clare Dickens, first published her book, A Dangerous Gift, in Iceland. It’s a moving story about her son’s struggle with bipolar disorder. When the big publishers in New York turned her down, she refused to give up. She kept knocking on doors. Recently, Politics and Prose, the Washington D.C. bookstore, published a U.S. version.  I’m happy that she is telling her story here.

Now tell me about books that helped or matter to you.

We need better laws and  improved mental health services.

Sometimes events in your life give you pause.  Last week marked two such events for me.  One was from the past and the other was current.

First, the past.

I was hired in 1980 by legendary journalist Bob Woodward at The Washington Post to work on what was unofficially called “The Holy SH*T” squad. We were a young, eager team of reporters who were supposed to write stories that made our readers exclaim “HOLY SH*T” when they picked up their morning newspaper.

It was a great time to work at The Post because the newsroom was run by Ben Bradlee, one of the finest editors in history and a wonderful boss. I also made two life long friends while assigned to the squad:  Mike Sager and Walt Harrington. Walt had an influential career at the Post before leaving to write several critically acclaimed books and become a professor and dean at the University of Illinois. Mike works today as one of the nation’s top magazine reporters on staff at ESQUIRE and also has authored several highly reviewed books. Both are skilled writers.

Mike and I were reporters on the squad, Walt was an editor, but the most infamous reporter was Janet Cooke, a beautiful, talented and determined writer who wanted desperately to get promoted to either the national or foreign staffs, which were considered the ultimate jobs at the paper.  Some of you might remember what happened next.

Janet penned an eye-popping front page story about a heroin addict who was only eight years old. He was named “Jimmy” and he was being injected with drugs by his mother and her boyfriend. The story not only captivated the city, but it later won Janet the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for general feature writing.

Jimmy turned out to be a figment of her imagination. The entire story was fabricated. Janet was pressured into confessing and then fired. The general consensus was that Woodward lost his chance to replace Bradlee as editor because of the scandal.  The Post lost some of the  luster that it had gained during the Watergate coverage.

And, oh yeah, the HOLY SH*T squad was dissolved.

Pete Earley, Mike Sager and Walt Harrington in 2008 at New York Book Party

Last week was the 31st anniversary of that stunning embarrassment in journalism and the BBC broadcast an interview with Sager who was romantically involved with Cooke at the time of the scandal. He later sold Hollywood the rights to a story for seven figures that he had written about her. Unfortunately, it never was made.

I have always felt bad for Janet. She was young and all of us were under tremendous pressure to write big stories.  I liked her both as a person and a writer. I remember Janet telling me one day in the newsroom that she had learned from a drug counselor that there was an eight year old boy who was addicted to heroin but she couldn’t find the child. She had spent days and days searching. I later was told that Janet had been called in by her editor. He was losing his patience and he told her that  if she didn’t find the boy soon, he would assign a more experienced reporter to find him and write the story. That would have been a crushing blow to Janet’s career. Not surprisingly, she announced a few days later that she had found Jimmy.

She made a mistake that ended her career.  You can listen to Mike’s recap of the Jimmy story here.

In addition to last week being the anniversary of the Jimmy fiasco,  another event that will always stay with me happened on Thursday when serial killer Davide Gore was executed in Florida.  I never thought that I would write a book that would help “greenlight” an execution, but that is what happened when readers in Vero Beach read Gore’s  gruesome letters that were printed in The Serial Killer Whisperer.

I could have attended his execution but didn’t. Instead, I relied on stories written by Russ Lemmon, a columnist for the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers, who witnessed Gore’s death.  Lemmon kept Gore’s case in the public eye for more than two years and used his columns about Gore’s victims and my book in a successful campaign to get Gov. Rick Scott to sign Gore’s death warrant.

Gore refused to speak to the media before his execution. After eating a final meal of friend chicken, French fries and butter pecan ice cream, he took pen in hand for a final time. In his statement, he asked for forgiveness from the parents of Lynn Elliott, the 17 year-old teenager who he abducted, raped, and murdered.  His statement was much different from the nearly pornographic letters that he’d written from prison earlier. In them, he gleefully recalled how he had tortured his six known victims and bragged about inflicting ”maximum” pain.

I would like to say to Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, that I truly am sorry for my part in the death of your daughter. I wish above all else my death could bring her back. I am not the same man today that I was 28 years ago. When I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, I became a new creature in Christ and I know God has truly forgiven me for my past sins.”

Gore was given three injections through intravenous tubes in his arms. The first sedated him, the second paralyzed him and the third stopped his heart. The drugs were administered by a volunteer whose name was not revealed, but who was paid $150.

There was no question that Gore was guilty and if you read his letters, you’ll see that he had no remorse and no empathy for his victims. At one point when writing my book, I had to stop reading his letters because they were so disturbing and stomach churning.

However, I have been opposed to the death penalty since writing my book, CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE: Death Life and Justice in a Southern Town.  That book helped free an innocent man from Alabama’s death row and showed me how prejudice, sloppy police work, and politics influence death penalty cases. Ironically,  THE SERIAL KILLER WHISPERER  helped speed up an execution.

This past week will be one that I will always remember.

(Click  on picture above to see video)

Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers columnist Russ Lemmon wasn’t looking for a crusade to lead two years ago when he happened upon a memorial notice in the newspaper placed by a grieving mother named Jeanne Elliott.

But when he telephoned her to ask about the tribute in honor of her deceased daughter, the veteran writer not only found a compelling story, but also a cause to champion.

Carl Elliott Jr., and Jeanne Elliott told Lemmon that their 17 year old daughter, Lynn, had been abducted, raped and murdered by Florida Serial Killer David Gore.  She was one of his six victims, all of whom suffered horrible deaths. Only one brave girl, who was only 14 years old at the time,  survived after he abducted her.

Lemmon began tracking down other family members. He listened to their stories and, more importantly, he began writing a series of columns about them. He became especially close to the Elliotts. 

Gore had been sentenced to death nearly thirty years ago, but no one seemed to care.

Why? Lemmon asked. 

At one point a reader complained in an email comment about Lemmon’s columns. The reader wanted him to write about happier topics. He didn’t want to read about the Elliotts, their suffering and Vero Beach’s most infamous murderer.  Lemmon was embarrassing the community.

But Lemmon refused to stop. Earlier this year, my publisher sent him a copy of The Serial Killer Whisperer and he became angry when he read letters that Gore had written about his crimes. In them, Gore bragged about how much he’d enjoyed “hunting” women and inflicting “maximum” pain. Gore showed no remorse, no regret, and no feelings for any of his victims.

On the same day Lemmon wrote an angry column about Gore’s letters, the editorial board for his newspaper happened to be meeting with Florida Governor Rick Scott. Lemmon showed the governor his column and mentioned Gore’s letters.  The governor reacted by greenlighting Gore’s execution.

Tomorrow — on Thursday, April 12th — David Gore is scheduled to be put to death.  Many of the families whose loved ones he murdered will be attending his execution. After years of being dragged through trials and appeals, they will see him face-to-face for a final time during the last seconds of his life.

Russ Lemmon will be there too with them watching David Gore die. When it is over, he will write a column about it. His crusade to get justice for the victims’ families will end.  But his friendship with the Elliotts and other victims will not.

They consider him a hero.

If you wish to read more about this case click here.

Mike Wallace and I didn’t start off as friends.

The great CBS newsman, who died Saturday at age 93, telephoned me when I was writing my first book, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring.  It was 1986 and Wallace had learned that I was the only reporter who had gotten John Walker Jr. to talk to me.

At the time, Walker hated the media and didn’t want to talk to anyone about the 18 years that he had spent spying for the Soviets or how he had recruited his son, Michael; his brother, Arthur; and his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, as traitors.

For those of you who haven’t read my book or might not remember the case, John Walker Jr.’s arrest in 1985 was the biggest spy scandal in the U.S. history since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed in 1953.

Walker’s treachery stunned the nation and Mike Wallace was eager to get the first television interview with him.

I was flattered that someone as important in broadcast journalism as Mike Wallace would call me. I immediately went to work to help him. I got Walker to agree to give Wallace an exclusive for 60 Minutes. At one point when Wallace was interviewing Walker, they took a break in filming and Wallace called me from the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, to check some facts. 

Wallace’s interview with John Walker Jr. was mesmerizing. It was Wallace at his best as an interrogator. In one memorable scene, Wallace eviscerated Walker by asking him how he could be so cruel as to groom his only son to be a traitor. It was such an incredible interview that Wallace was rewarded with an Emmy, one of some 20 Emmys that he won.

And what of my book and me?

Wallace never mentioned either. He and 60 Minutes basked in the limelight.

I felt duped and hurt.

As fate would have it, Wallace called me again two years later. He had read my second book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, and was fascinated with the case of  Thomas Silverstein. At that point, Silverstein had been locked in solitary confinement for six years. (Today, Silverstein has been kept in solitary confinement for 28 years! The longest any prisoner in the U.S. has been held in such isolating conditions.)

Mike Wallace asked if I would help him get an interview with Silverstein.

 I told him that I was angry that he had never given my book or me any credit in the Walker case.  What happened next shocked me.  Mike Wallace apologized.  He told me that he had been going through an extremely tough period in 1986 and that he had done some things that he regretted.

The interview with Silverstein never came about. Wallace’s producers didn’t believe the American public would feel empathy for a convict held in isolation who had killed a correctional officer and also had been convicted of three other murders, although one conviction was later overturned.

Our paths did not cross again until 1996 when my book, Circumstantial Evidence:  Death, Life and Justice in a Southern Town, won an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The center happened to be honoring Mike Wallace for the many contributions that he had made to social justice during his career.

Mike and I spent time chatting during the award ceremony. He was incredibly smart, quick on his feet, worldly, personable, and not vain or pretentious despite his fame and accomplishments.

When my son, Mike, was arrested several years later after he broke into a stranger’s house to take a bubble bath during a delusional mental breakdown, I sent a  fax to Mike Wallace’s office. I was desperate, terrified, and I asked for his help.

I explained that my son had been hospitalized, but his doctor had telephoned and said the hospital was going to discharge him even though he wasn’t ready. Our insurance company didn’t want to pay for any more of his care.

Fifteen minutes after I sent that fax, Mike Wallace called me and we spent an hour on the phone.  I knew that he had suffered from clinical depression, but I hadn’t known how sick he really was. He told me about how he’d become exhausted by the pressures that he was under, especially because of the legal problems that had been brought on by the infamous Westmoreland lawsuit against CBS.  He mentioned how he had talked openly on 60 Minutes about how he’d considered suicide in 1986 — the very year when we’d first met.

He told me to “have hope” and then he did something truly incredible.

In my book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, I write that I called the hospital and told them that I was friends with Mike Wallace. I explain in my book that that threat was enough to make hospital officials reconsider their decision to discharge my son.

 But that wasn’t the entire story.

I wrote it that way because Mike Wallace asked me to write it that way. He didn’t think CBS would appreciate what he actually did for me. Now that he has died, I can tell the rest of the story. 

Mike Wallace called the hospital too. He telephoned and said he was curious why the hospital was discharging my son when his own doctor didn’t think he was ready.

The result. My son wasn’t discharged. He got the help that he needed.

Although he was busy, Mike Wallace telephoned me several times after that to ask about my son. We became friends and in one of those calls, he mentioned the Walker story and how I had helped him and he had not given my book or me any credit.

He told me that he had repaid his debt. 

I told him that what I had done for him paled in comparison for what he’d done for my family and me.

Mike Wallace was a hero of mine in journalism long before I ever met him. His journalistic contributions are legendary and the rest of the world will remember him as a crusading, bare knuckles journalist.

But to those of us with mental disorders or with loved ones who have mental disorders, Mike Wallace will be remembered for his bravery in speaking out about his own personal struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts — and by doing so, fighting stigma and prejudice.

He was a champion for our cause and he was a true friend to me.

I will miss him.