Law Enforcement Meets Psychosis

“On June 4, 2018 my neighbors found me naked, lying on the floor in my den, apparently trying to insert a reacher/grabber tool into my vagina. They called my daughter and 911.

I remember being carried out of my house on a gurney and put into an ambulance. We whizzed by the trees on the side of the highway. I recognized the stick of a needle, but didn't remember anything more until sometime after I was transported to the local University Medical Center (UMC), a distance about two and a half miles away. The next thing I recall was being in an isolation room, where I remained on the gurney until I could be transferred to a locked holding room.

Later the UMC hospital staff told my son that sometime during my temporary unconsciousness I sucker punched a police officer in the face, knocking his glasses to the ground, and then tried to kiss him on the mouth when he bent down to pick them up. I don’t think I was tased, though I probably should have been! This incident was not recorded in my medical records, so I don’t know any specific details.

I must have been experiencing superhuman (also called hysterical) strength, as I did in several of my prior psychotic episodes that resulted in hospitalization, the first one being in 1982 and the most recent before 2018 in 1995."

[...Taken from: When Brilliance and Madness Collide: Bipolar Disorder Without Boundaries by Ruth Ann Manning, 2023]

Knoxville, Lakeshore State Mental Health Institution, 1995

In 1995, in the midst of the first years of my software business success, I experienced another psychotic episode. I gave my van to a neighbor down the street (who later returned it) and a few prized possessions to children, who had walked past my house, but I did not harm anyone. 

A domineering male business associate had convinced me to cut back on my lithium dosage before a human genome conference, where my company would be exhibiting, because he believed I would sell more software if I were a little manic. He would benefit financially.

This was the only time, before my psychotic episode in 2018, that I’d modified my psychotropic drug regimen without a doctor’s supervision.

On a Sunday, while neighbors were leaving for church services, several police cars showed up in front of my house. They broke into my home and found me in my bedroom reading my dad’s Bible. When I resisted giving it up, they handcuffed my hands behind my back, bound my legs with tape, and picked me up. One began beating me on my back with a billy stick, but they dropped me on the floor when I said, “I’m not Rodney King!”

Assessing that I was too berserk to mesh with their current patient population, the local state mental institution refused to take me, so the police took me to a small, little known private hospital, where I was locked in a cage with only a metal frame cot without bedding. Later I asked a nurse to check my back for bruises. She said there were many, but refused to believe my story about the police, saying, “Now Honey, you know it was a friend or family member that beat you like that.” 

I didn’t report the incident to the authorities because one of the last things a business owner wants is negative press on the front page of a newspaper! Though I didn’t know who sent the police to my house, I was too embarrassed to live in my neighborhood, so my children and I moved into an apartment across town for a few months. I paid both rent and a mortgage.

Knoxville, November, 2018

On Monday, November 26, 2018 at a residence about 5 miles from my house, Sierra McCauley, a 23-year-old black female, was shot and killed by a 23-year veteran police officer, James Gadd, in South Knoxville, TN. Only one shot was fired into her abdomen which lodged in her spine, causing her death. Officer Gerald George arrived first. He had a taser, but reported he hadn’t gotten close enough to her to discharge it.

Sierra was naked and in the midst of a mental health crisis. She wielded a dangerous 7” fixed-blade knife that was originally designed to be used by WW2 military troops. She had cut herself and a co-worker friend  and the officer felt threatened. There’s been a lot of controversy regarding the use of deadly force in this situation. One law enforcement official said the officer could have felt threatened even had it been a butter knife.

Two years later, June 5, 2020, the  Knox County Democratic Party Progressive Action Committee released Recommendations for Knoxville Criminal Justice Reform. Quoting from this report:

“In cases of use of force on whether an officer’s actions were reasonable, focus on whether the officer engaged in de-escalation measures, and whether the conduct of the officer prior to the use of force increased the risk of a deadly confrontation.

The committee believed that this and similar incidents occurred as a result of racial bias, excessive use of force, and/or insufficient mental health crisis intervention training of the officers involved. The fact that none of these incidents resulted in disciplinary action toward the officers involved, including when Knoxville’s Police Advisory Review Committee (PARC) publicly recommended that disciplinary action should be taken, shows a failure of the incident review process and accountability systems currently in place.”

It's sobering to think that could have been me just five months earlier. What if my virtual reality game had included a world that involved the machete in my disaster preparation kit just a few feet away from where I lay on the floor?  Had the neighbors not had a key to my house, they might have called the police who could’ve found me in a psychotic state with superhuman strength, swinging that machete.

When I returned home from the psychiatric hospital in 2018, I called the local police department to apologize. I think the officer I spoke with had heard about the incident. He told me to not worry about it. “It’s all in a day’s work.”

I believe God’s divine providence protected me.

Fighting Stigma

Mental illness gets a bad rap. Some people associate mental illness with serial killers like Ted Bundy or mass murderers such as the Aurora Theater Shooter, James Holmes. They often expect all mentally ill people to be violent. One mother wouldn’t let her daughter spend the night at our house, saying “Her mother is mentally ill and she might kill you!” It’s true that when the behavior is extreme, erratic, or psychotic, the patient can be dangerous to themselves or others. This is why it’s so important to educate the patient, family, friends, public, and law enforcement about the warning signals, signs, and symptoms of mental illness and de-escalation techniques . Early diagnosis and intervention is key.