One Mother Speaks Into Georgia’s Mental Illness Crisis

By LYDIA BERGLAR
News Editor

Earlier this month, the Sentinel covered mental illness from the Dade County Jail perspective. We then had the honor of sitting down with Sandra Gentry, a mother who knows all too well how severe mental illness impacts a family.

Gentry’s daughter, now in her early 50s, had her first psychotic break in her late 20s. While tearing up, Gentry told the Sentinel, “She is so desperately ill and needs help, so anything that can bring attention to this very big problem, I’m all in.”

The first sign that Gentry’s daughter was dealing with something serious came after she gave birth to her one and only child in her late 20s. She and her husband were living with his family at the time. Gentry remembers her daughter calling to say that her mother-in-law was trying to take the baby.

“Not being familiar with mental illness, my mind didn’t go to that first,” Gentry said. “My mind went to ‘Grandma is doing too much. The baby’s crying and instead of letting mom take care of, she picks it up.’ But in actuality, my daughter genuinely thought that her mother-in-law was trying to take her baby away.”

Her daughter’s diagnosis is schizophrenia with extreme paranoia. Gentry said, “The psychiatrist says that there are individuals with schizophrenia who are aware that they’re ill. Unfortunately, my daughter is not one of those. She believes all this is real and we’re the crazy ones because we don’t believe it also.”

She’s watched her daughter’s illness progress over the years. “It started out with a little paranoia, like ‘someone is listening to my phone calls,’ that type of thing,” explained Gentry. “Then it became full-scale ‘people are following me, trying to break into my home.’”

For about five years after her daughter gave birth, Gentry and the rest of the family noticed little signs that something wasn’t right, but her daughter had yet to see a doctor. Eventually, Gentry’s daughter said that someone had put a device in her ear and she wanted a doctor to take it out. When the doctor saw the signs of mental illness, he called in a psychiatrist, and Gentry’s daughter was finally diagnosed.

Gentry remembers her daughter saying early on, “Mother, it’s like you and I are having a conversation, but there’s someone else, there’s another voice over here. It’s different from my thoughts. It’s a literal voice talking to me.”

Gentry’s daughter has had many hospital stays over the last several decades. Over time, she became convinced that doctors are trying to poison her, so she now refuses all medication. Gentry said that when her daughter is on medication, “She’s reasonable and more realistic. She might say some odd things or be impulsive, but it was manageable.”

Her daughter would avoid taking medication in pill form, so doctors then tried injections that lasted for 30 days. “That was a godsend because very often she wouldn’t take her medicine,” said Gentry, but it’s now been about four years since her daughter has been on any sort of medication.

The problem that Gentry continually runs into is that her daughter is an adult and therefore must consent to medication unless prescribed medication by a psychiatrist. “You’ll hear this from every police officer, every mental health official: She is an adult, and she can do as she chooses. In the state of Georgia, it’s against the law to force someone to take medication unless they’re harming themselves or others.” (See the Official Code of Georgia 37-3-163.)

When it comes to psychiatrists, Gentry has been less than impressed. “As far as I’ve seen, in the state of Georgia, there is no help because she won’t accept any help.”

Gentry thinks her daughter has visual hallucinations along with auditory hallucinations because, “She’ll buy massive amounts of things, but you’ll find it in the garbage can not even opened. She sees dirt and trash on things and won’t eat it.” When Gentry asks what’s wrong with the food, her daughter responds, “Can’t you see that?” pointing to invisible blemishes.

However, in Gentry’s experience, psychiatrists haven’t seen this starvation as harm to oneself. When her daughter has seen psychiatrists, they have often failed to find a need for medication. Gentry reported that in one telehealth call that only lasted three minutes, the psychiatrist saw nothing at all the matter.

In one incident this fall, her daughter turned violent, so Gentry called the crisis center which committed her daughter. During this stay, “The young psychiatrist told me, ‘Ma’am, I did not notice any signs of psychosis.’ I told her I do not believe that because my daughter cannot sit one minute of any day without talking to the voices she’s hearing.”

Gentry remembered another time that a nurse told her that if she moderated her tone, then her daughter would be perfectly compliant. “I said, ‘Of course she’s compliant with you; she doesn’t want to be where she’s at. It’s when she gets out that you have to deal with the problem.’ Why would they think she’s down there against her will? Because she’s compliant?”

As anyone can imagine, this is extremely frustrating for Gentry because she knows that medication would greatly help the situation, and yet that’s one thing she can’t get for her daughter.

Gentry was most impressed by Highland Rivers Behavioral Health in Dalton. Here, a psychiatrist spent quite a while with Gentry’s daughter. “She told my daughter, ‘You’ve been ill for 20-something years, and you are obviously in psychosis. You will either take your medicine, or I will put you in the hospital.’ I was so relieved. Here was somebody who recognized that she was psychotic and used their power to help her.”

Highland Rivers is where her daughter received the 30-day injection, but unfortunately, the facility doesn’t always have beds available.

Gentry explained that her daughter has traveler schizophrenia, meaning she often takes off to other cities and states because of hallucinations. “She’s gotten up in the middle of the night and taken off to Texas to see whatever military police are down there so they can do something about what she’s hearing in her head.”

Once, she went to Washington D.C., presumably to address the powers that be. Gentry said, “We got a call from the capitol police that she was sitting out on the steps. The officer said that they deal with that a lot.”

Other times, law enforcement has had to get involved at the request of the public. Gentry explained, “She’ll go into stores, but if her EBT card is empty, instead of realizing she doesn’t have money, she’s immediately on the attack against the poor clerk standing there. She’s accused them of stealing her money or something like that, and it turns into an incident, so naturally, the police are called.”

Recently, a situation like this resulted in a trespassing charge in Walker County. When Gentry’s daughter was released from jail, she started walking toward Lookout Mountain on busy roads. An officer called Gentry, but when she arrived, her daughter refused to get into the car.

Gentry looked to the officer for help, but, “He said, ‘Ma’am, it’s not against the law to be crazy.’ That is what you run up against always, every time. She is an adult, and she can do what she wants to do. If she wants to starve herself to death, she can. If she wants to walk on a very busy highway, she can, and keep in mind she’s distracted by whatever voices are in her head, so to her, a tractor trailer coming down the highway is not even an issue. She is endangering herself and possibly others, but the mental health people don’t view it that way.”

When Gentry’s husband died, her daughter inherited $28,000 and used it to pay rent for an apartment for a full year and spent the rest on extravagant furnishings. Within about two weeks, all the money was gone. Eventually, she had to be removed from the apartment and ended up on the streets in Trenton. When Gentry was able to pick her up, she weighed only 83 pounds due to starving herself and drug use.

She receives a disability check, but the money makes her a target for drug dealers and addicts. As Gentry said, “They befriend her. Because she’s not in her right mind, she’s passing out $100 bills.”

Gentry reported that her daughter doesn’t seek out drugs, but she has tried them because the people who surround her offer it to her. “For instance, she’ll get someone to take her somewhere and hand them $100 (when she’s got money) and they’ll say, ‘Here. This will help.’ She won’t take medication because it’s ‘poison,’ but she’ll take drugs.”

Currently, Gentry’s daughter lives with Gentry, but not every family is able or willing to deal with family members in incredibly difficult situations like this. Gentry knows that people like her daughter who don’t have family or whose family is unable to help are often left to the streets.

Gentry has heard people wonder harshly how anyone could get themselves into a situation where they’re homeless, but she has insight now that she didn’t have 30 years ago. “If I were not housing my daughter, she would be one of those people. Mentally, she’s not able to be hired. I’m sure I’ve been judgmental too. I’m sure I saw homeless people and wondered why they didn’t get a job. Well, now I know why they don’t get a job.”

She believes that people with severe cases like her daughter’s should be housed in institutions in some way because the care needs are so great. She’s found that addiction treatment programs and homeless shelters aren’t an option because they cannot administer antipsychotic medication.

“This last stay, the crisis worker gave me a list of places to call because she felt like my daughter shouldn’t come back to our home. Most of them were homeless shelters which give you a place to sleep at night, but during the day, you are supposed to be looking for a job. Someone like my daughter needs so much more help than just a bed.”

At one time, Gentry called Adult Protective Services (APS), but this was also a dead end. “They told me they couldn’t help because she’s not in a wheelchair. So, if she’s physically disabled, we’ve got all kinds of help in Georgia, but because she has a mental disability, they can’t get involved.”

Gentry’s stories drive home just how heartbreaking mental illness is—for the people with illnesses and the families impacted. “They’re terrified. People with hallucinations truly are terrified of what’s happening to them,” she said. “These are not bad people, but they are very sick people. I think it’s that sickness that the public does not understand. Until you have experienced it personally or have somebody in your family, you don’t realize that it is very real to them.”

Earlier this year, her daughter entered a phase where she won’t shower because she believes something is wrong with the water. “This is a day-in, day-out thing. There’s constantly something you’re trying to deal with, and then you’re dealing with your own emotions, wishing it were different, wondering if you had a part in creating it. You deal with embarrassment. That seems like such a petty thing, but I have this child, a woman now, who I look at and don’t even know who she is.”

Gentry’s powerful love for her daughter is evidenced by the lengths she’s gone to attempting to keep her daughter safe and get her help. She admitted that at times, she wishes she could harden her heart toward her daughter, but that’s impossible.

“There are times that I wish I could say, ‘Forget it, let her go. Let her go walk on the highway and get run over or sleep under a bridge,’ but it’s just not in me. I don’t care what she looks like—and she looks rough—she’s my daughter,” Gentry said emotionally. “I could not lay down in bed at night knowing she’s sleeping out in the weather. I could not eat another meal thinking that she was hungry.”

Gentry summarized her frustrations with the overall system, saying, “I feel like I’m still going, ‘Hey, help us over here!’ If someone is compliant, they’re going to benefit from some of the laws. If they are not—and those are the cases the police are dealing with—it’s closed doors everywhere you go unless you get a psychiatrist who is aware that they have power to do things that may change this person’s life, somebody who’s willing to look a little deeper than the surface. But you don’t get that level of care in hardly anything.”