I’m the retired editorial page editor and columnist for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, a former minister, high school and college instructor and activist.  I’m the author of Mental Illness and Your Town and Monday I’ll Save the World. My expertise lies in such fields as mental health and mental illness, juvenile justice,  education, racial justice and poverty.   As a rule, I’ll use current news items to launch my comments.

“I just can’t get my head around it.”

Dave was talking about the trillion dollar deficit.

He blames Obama.

Well, he wasn’t happy with Bush, either.

He was against invading Iraq. Yes, he was even against invading Afghanistan, although – he grants – the Taliban had been harboring Islamic terrorists. He knows that was all Bush’s doing.

For the moment, though, Dave is chiefly upset with Obama and all the money that’s been spent bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry.

In Dave’s defense, I should point out that he spent his career as a social worker. He remains a great champion of kids and has no patience with those who want to take kids who commit crimes, lock ‘em up and throw away the key. He’s not indifferent to people who are suffering in this recession.

Besides, he’s an old friend from high school. We share the same birthday.

But his anger over the deficit echoes the Tea Party movement. I guess if there’s one issue that unites folk who identify with that group it’s the deficit spending. To be sure, they don’t like the health care reform law, either.

I recall that for most of the years I wrote editorials for The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne – nearly 30 – the federal government ran a deficit. During the Johnson years, the deficit financed the Great Society programs and the Vietnam War. Nixon ran up deficits. So did Ford. And Carter. Yes, Reagan and Bush I. It wasn’t until Clinton that the feds gave us a surplus. The second Bush quickly spent that, thanks in part to large tax cuts for higher income citizens.

Everybody hates deficit spending.

How often do you hear these days, “Why if I ran my household the way the president – you name him – runs the federal government, I’d be in the poorhouse”?

The truth is that most Americans, at one time or another, do run up deficits. Granted, not on the scale of the federal government. Car payments, credit card interest and mortgages – these aren’t tiddly-winks. Those represent deficit spending.

We go into debt to buy what we think we need and, under the normal rules of the game, we can show our creditors that we’ll be able to pay off the debt.

In the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the government would be incredibly irresponsible not to run up the deficit. Indeed, the huge amount of spending that Dave – and I suppose most of us – can’t get our heads around has helped prevent an even deeper recession. In fact, we seem to be emerging from the economic crisis. In some parts of the country, unemployment seems to be inching back down. Other signs show improvement.

According to the Treasure Department, the deficit in June 2010 dropped to $68.4 billion. That’s down from $94.3 billion last June.

That’s impressive. But it’s pretty simple math.

As more people go back to work, they start paying taxes again. So the government collects more money and the deficit falls. Obviously, you want to see those big numbers whittled much further. That’s the challenge once we’re really out of the recession. For now, there’s plenty to debate about how federal dollars should be spent to prop up the economy. But the reality is, deficit spending probably has been our country’s salvation.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.

When a child kills, in Kosciusko County

I can only guess at the anger and the hurt a mother or father must feel when a son or daughter  takes the life of another person.   And what about the crime where the victim has been a family member?

We read the news accounts and can only shake our heads in disbelief.

“Most of the kids locked up here have just  made some adult really mad,” the Oklahoma City juvenile detention director told me.

“But sometimes, it’s a different story,” he added.   What an understatement.

That conversation took place back when I was writing editorials for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and urging the county to tear down a deteriorating Wood Youth Center and replace it with a  modern and humane facility.   So I interviewed directors of other centers around the country.

Of course,  in the recent Kosciusko County murder of Phillip Danner,  the young boys charged with this crime have done much more than upset adults.  They couldn’t have imagined what sorrows they would have wrought.  This is a huge tragedy.  It  touches family members, neighbors, the boys’ teachers,  indeed the community.

They’re all left to huddle together like cattle in the storm.   And to wonder at this fantasy world in which the boys could head for Arizona to sell T-shirts.

There’s nothing here a county judge or prosecutor can fix.   At best they can only render a crude approximation of justice.

There did appear an unseemly rush to transfer 15-year-old Colt Lundy and 12-year-old Paul Gingerich.    Judge Duane Huffer found state law didn’t permit the second 12-year-old to be waived.  That boy was only an accomplice.  He’ll still be locked up for a long time.

For the boys accused of doing the shooting, there was no time to waste, the prosecutor said.  “It demands expediency,” he was quoted saying.   That was just days after the boys were picked up in Illinois.  No time for psychiatric evaluations?  No time to interview teachers and school counselors?   No time to investigate family life?  No time to visit the adult prison where the older boy surely would be housed?

This plan itself, a late spring lark really, speaks volumes of the immaturity of the boys.   At a minimum it means they likely will be about as competent in any court proceeding as an adult with a profound mental illness.  But apparently the rush to transfer these baby-face accused shooters to the adult court didn’t give the prosecutor time to research this point.

I was reminded of another case, in Huntington in the 1990s.  There, a 14-year-old girl had set fire to the family home killing her mother and sister.  Then, the police allowed the father to approve of the girl answering questions and waiving her  constitutional right to silence.  Problem at that time, it was possible the father was complicit in the crime.  Even the detective told me he thought so. That waiver wouldn’t have stood a court test.

But it never was challenged.

What about these boys?  Did a parent or legal guardian consent to a waiver of constitutional rights?   I believe Indiana law still requires it.

A more critical parallel:  In the Huntington case, once the late Judge Mark McIntosh heard the full story of the girl’s family life, he “sincerely” recommended that she be held in a juvenile treatment center until she would turn 18.   Her original sentence was for 25 years.  There the judge made his recommendation under a fairly new state law.  Until an appeals court ruling, a couple of years later,  the Department of Correction refused to move the girl to a juvenile center.

If we assume the boys are found guilty of killing Phillip Danner, Judge Huffer can make such a recommendation.

I must concede that since the 1990s and the Huntington case, the department has provided for a more sensible place to house juveniles waived to the adult criminal court.  The kids are housed separately from adults – “sight and sound separation.” That’s today’s standard.

Mike Dempsey is the executive director of the Division of Youth Services for the DOC. He told me that Colt Lundy, the 15-year-old, would be housed at the Miami Valley Correctional Facility.  There, he’ll get high school classes and counseling.

For the 12-year-old, Paul Gingerich, the department probably would place him in a secure unit at one of the state’s juvenile centers.

Still, I have to believe that the boys and the public safety would be better off if the judge had declined to transfer either one to the adult criminal court.   It was his call.

Under the waiver now, it’s only a few years before they’re placed in the general population with hardened adult offenders to finish their sentences.  With good behavior, they’re likely to still be in their 20s upon release.    Then, as much research suggests, they are more apt than those originally sentenced as juveniles to commit new offenses.

“How do you propose to diminish crime or to reform offenders by this system of sending children of the state to this school of v ice and infamy, where they cannot fail by means of the associations into which you thrust them, to be irretrievably ruined?”

That’s was Mr. Bryant of Warren during the 1850 debate over the Indiana Constitution.

For Phillip Danner’s family and all members of the boys’ families, I doubt if there ever will be closure.   Such cases have a very long shelf life.    For some, the second-guessing of their own if incidental role won’t end.  The judge and the court officials will try to clean up the mess as best they can.

It’s hard to believe any good can  come of a murder of a step-father in Kosciusko County.

I was delighted to see it:

The psychiatrist is on to something.

Oh, I’ve been there before.  In various ways, in various formats, I’ve made the argument that it usually takes a lot more than drugs to help somebody who is suffering from anxiety, depression or wild mood swings.

And if you’ve battled mental illness yourself, you know that Dr. Daniel Carlat didn’t discover the cure for schizophrenia or any other serious mental illness.

But there it was, all laid on in a briskly written narrative by a respected expert. And published in The New York Times Sunday magazine no less.

Treating a patient he calls “J.J.,” Carlat realized that he was merely asking the patient about his symptoms.  So the goal was to match the symptoms to a medication.

Think about it.  This is exactly what your pharmacist does.  No search for causes, for context, for an understanding of the person.   Since the psychiatrists threw out Freud and psychoanalysis,  they’ve been reduced to pushing pills.

Often, patients get better.   Or seem to.  And the doctor might refer the patient to a counselor for talk therapy.

What Carlat is forced to acknowledge, though, is that in the formal tests of the psychotropic drugs, the placebo can be just about as effective as the medication being tested.

This is fascinating stuff.  Somehow, the brain changes itself when you think you’re getting an active medication.  In reality, you’ve been duped.  It’s a dummy pill.

Of course, the changes still are brain chemistry.   But a person’s thoughts and feelings have an impact that now can be seen in a PET scan.   Indeed, when you get angry or jealous or afraid,  your brain chemistry changes.

Exercise, too, gets the brain chemistry going.

And when you introduce talk therapy, you can find even greater brain chemistry changes.   Not always maybe.  But often.

As a practical matter, we probably won’t see psychiatrists moving out of their role as highly trained pharmacists,  mainly matching symptoms to meds.   These doctors’ time with each patient usually is quite limited.  Too little to go deep.  And there are too few psychiatrists to go around.

In his Times article, Dr. Carlat says he got into psychiatry for personal reasons, much of that harking back to his mother’s suicide.  He didn’t know what medications if any she had been on at the time of her death.  But he is right to wonder.   What if she’d had the right kind of therapy?  What if she had the kind that allows a person to transcend their fears and sense of hopelessness?  Just maybe her life could have been spared.

Very often,  the right prescription for mental illness doesn’t come in a bottle.

You’re Churchill.

The Lufwaffe has been raining down bombs on London for days. For most Londoners, a stiff upper lip is no match for such terror.

But you’re the Prime Minister. You stand before the House of Commons, shake your fist, and proclaim, “Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.”

No, you’re not Churchill. You don’t stand, either. You can’t.

You’ve been bound to a wheelchair since you were six and your dad hit a patch of ice on I-69.

And you don’t give up. Somedays, though, you can use a hand.

We’re all in this together, whether we have disabilities or not. That’s why it’s a great idea for any group that organizes a workshop or an exhibition to connect persons with disabilities with resources and inspiring stories.

April 10, my city, Fort Wayne, will host just such an event at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum. It’s sponsored by Turnstone, which gives all manner of folk with a disability and their families a helping hand. The event will be a first here.

The brochure promises workshops and has more than 60 exhibitors signed up to hawk their wares or tell the story of their business or their agency.

To be sure, the primary audience will be those with physical disabilities. But agencies that serve persons with other kinds of disabilities, such as mental illness, are expected to be on hand.

That makes a lot of sense. Those who are blind, wheelchair-bound, hearing impaired and developmentally disabled often suffer from depression or other forms of mental illness.

I know the Carriage House, a rehabilitation center for those with mental illness, will have people at the expo to explain that highly effective program. NAMI, a family support group, should be there, too.

Indeed, such an event can help people make connections with all kinds of services in a community, services they may never have heard of.

You forget. You forget how many others or their families are in the same boat. Turnstone’s expo reminds you that you’re not alone. You don’t have to even think about giving up. Not when somebody offers to give you a hand.

Of course, I’m referring to America’s original sin, slavery.   Nothing more poignantly defines our history.

That’s what I preached about last Sunday, honoring black history.   Civil rights has been a passion of mine all my adult life.   But in this sermon, I didn’t merely want to remind the congregation of the past, of the exquisite and unrelenting brutalizing reality.  I didn’t want to dwell much on the sit-ins, the marches and court rulings.

I wanted to remind folks of the unfinished task of redeeming America’s soul.

Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, offered the battle deaths as an atonement for the cruelties, unimaginable, visited upon this entire population imported to our shores against their will and sold as property.    Matchless eloquences.

But in whatever form, white  penance wouldn’t school those who had been whipped and beaten just for attempting to learn to read.  White guilt wouldn’t buy decent jobs or a life without fear of lynchings or other terrors.

I mentioned that the abuse meted out to blacks was unique.   There was no fugitive slave law invoked against Irish immigrants.  There was no Jim Crow that forced Italian immigrants to sit in the back of the bus.   Swedes weren’t told to drink from a separate water fountain and to use a separate restroom.   You have to understand this unique treatment of an entire people to fully grasp the plight of so many blacks today.

Reconstruction couldn’t fix Jim Crow.  Never tried.   Even when the civil rights movement crushed legal segregation.  That  couldn’t lift the millions out of the oppressive heat of the ghettos.  Funny, today you don’t hear anything about the ghettos.  Drive expressways through any large city, you’ll see them.  They haven’t disappeared.  Nor has the poverty of the ghettos disappeared.

Police can’t break up the gangs.  The preachers and the social workers can’t stop the murders of kids peddling dope.    Very few schools have found a way to get more than half of the African-American kids to graduate.   Our prisons pack ‘em in, so often on drug charges, which hasn’t solved the country’s drug problem.

We don’t need more white guilt.  We don’t need nice speeches.   We don’t need only one month a year to talk about what blacks have been through and what, despite that, many have achieved.

We need white advocacy.  We need to press educators to teach.  We need to challenge writers to write.  We need to tell employers to hire.  We need to demand political leaders open the doors for the descendants of slaves.

I want to say to America, my fellow citizens, celebrating the Martin Luther King Jr. anniversary, reading about black history all of February,  ”Hey, you forgot something.”

We’ve left a bunch of fellow citizens still standing at the station.    Isn’t it about time we helped them climb onboard?

I don’t know who got the Haiti earthquake more wrong.

Pat Robertson or Jeffrey Johnson Sr.

The Rev. Johnson is the senior pastor at the megachurch Eastern Star in Indianapolis.    The Rev. Robertson is, well, every atheist’s religious  crackpot.

Johnson was the by-God spellbinder who had the amen corner at Plymouth Church in downtown Fort Wayne hooting and hollering loud enough to raise  Dr. King from the grave.    Our favorite college freshman Tanya said, “That was sure interesting.”

Johnson’s text was from Romans, chapter eight, about how everything works for good for those who love God.

He didn’t mention Robertson by name but he made it clear he thought anyone suggesting that the devastating earthquake was God’s punishment for practicing Voodoo.  (Never mind that the vast majority of eight million Haitians practice Roman Catholicism.)

Johnson did point out that Haiti happens to be situated over a fault prone to geologic shifts, the natural cause of earthquakes.

Nevertheless, the preacher, citing his text from Romans, which he did frequently in the sermon, wasn’t content to let earth science account for the Haiti tragedy.   He was persuaded that it would work for good.   After all, that’s what St. Paul promised the Romans.

“Nothing happens that God doesn’t allow or cause,” the preacher reminded us.

He even had an answer to anyone who failed to see how good could come out of the Haitian earthquake.   The answer, he suggested, had come to him as a kind of revelation.

“All things haven’t worked together for good – yet,” he said.

I don’t know what the preacher had in mind as this inevitable payoff for the many thousands of  victims of the earthquake.   But a prime spot of acreage in heaven was about I could conjure.    Which is to say that you can forget about anything necessarily working for good in this life.

If I’ve got that right, then this promise in Romans chapter eight  merely states in different words Jesus’ promise of eternal life to all his followers.

Trouble is,  in Romans chapter eight St. Paul is reassuring Christians in Rome  who suffer persecution that they have God’s spirit in this life.   The focus is on suffering as a Christian in this life, not the happiness in the next.

Once again, one sees that believers really have no good answer to human suffering, not in the book of Job, whose poetic story explicitly takes up the issue of theodicy, and not in this generic promise in Romans.

Haiti’s many friends in this country, including Bill Clinton, have offered the hope that this cataclysmic and horrifying event will be the catalyst for renewal and rebuilding, whose early signs were beginning to show before the earthquake.

“God has not made us interpreters of Divine Providence,”  Professor Elliott used to remind us theology students back in my seminar days.

Such an obvious and biblically sound observation hasn’t kept a multitude of preachers from raining blessings and judgments upon countless events during the course of human history.

As aid workers in the most backward of countries have learned, science is no match for voodoo.

I wouldn’t say never.

If family therapy hasn’t helped the child settle down, if the psychotherapy for him or her hasn’t turned things around, if vigorous exercise hasn’t lifted the depression – then I might say go ahead and try an antipsychotic drug for the child.

But when you consider that over 300,000 kids in this country are on some kind of psychotropic medication, I suspect things have run amok.

I’m not alone.  Indeed, there’s a group of public health officials from 16 states who’ve formed a group looking at the problem.  They’ve named this effort, “Too Many, Too Much, Too Young.”

These officials are on to something.  For one thing, their worry is legitimate given results of the new study comparing the use of drugs for poor kids and those given to kids whose families have private insurance.

Here’s this storyl.  Researchers from Rutgers and Columbia found that poor kids are four times more likely to get the drugs than other kids.

What accounts for the disparity?   The researchers speculate that it comes down to money.   Private insurance reimburses more dollars for therapy and does Medicaid. That’s the health insurance most poor children are on.

There’s probably more to it than that.

Primary care doctors do most of the prescribing of psychotropic drugs.   Poor families are less likely to seek out therapists or psychiatrist than other families. And middle-class families likely are more apt to seek counseling or other services from mental health professionals.

For my part, I have several objections to drugging any kids with anti-psychotics willy-nilly.

The drugs have powerful side effects.  They  can cause weight gain.  Lots of it.  They can cause agitation – or lethargy.   If they help at all – often they don’t – many must be taken for a year or more to avoid relapse.   Recent evidence shows the drugs raise the risk of suicide in young people.

In addition,  the drugs often serve as a substitute for therapy and other activities than offer a more permanent answer.

Finally, when you hand a child or teen-ager a drug, you also hand them a diagnosis.   For many kids, that diagnosis becomes a label, even a lifelong label.   That person then naturally internalizes the label.  It’s his or her identity, a handicap than can limit one’s ambitions, talents and dreams.

“Depressed,” “bipolar,” “schizophrenic” becomes “I’m disabled,” “I’m not up to it,” “I won’t try,” “I can’t.”

That’s my quarrel with automatically  treating behavior and mood problems in kids with antipsychotics.