My daughter sleeps in jail tonight, not because she is a criminal, but because the voices told her to do something that was. Instinctively, I stop at her bedroom door and look in at the stuffed animals left untouched on her pillowed bedspread, and I try to accept the fact that tonight, my precious baby girl will rest her head on a cold and dirty mattress in a jail.
You see, the world sounds much different to Trina than it does to you and me. When she hears a person's voice, she can't always tell if the person is really there or not. If you ask her, Trina will tell you she's not sick and doesn't need psych meds. God has chosen her to hear voices no one else can hear (often calling it "telepathy"), and if you had any faith, you'd see it that way, too.
Today it was God himself speaking, telling Trina it would be okay to pick up the salesman's keys and drive off the Toyota lot in a new Camry. So drive away she did, and that's why my daughter sleeps in jail tonight.
I wrote those words almost three years ago, and still they bring tears to my eyes. Even today I shudder at the terrible shock Trina must have felt when the handcuffs clicked behind her back, believing--no, knowing--that she had done nothing wrong and that her God had surely abandoned her.
Trina is now 23, and in the coming weeks we'll go to court to ask a judge to take away her right to make her own decisions. Why it has taken three years is one of the many great tragedies of how we treat the sick youth of America.
If you choose to read past the break, I'll tell you a father's story of a child trapped in a crisis she did not choose. Part I tells of of the early days through her inevitable incarceration; it runs from California to the White House and back again, with cameos by Pawn Stars and the Secret Service. Part II will tell of Trina's experience with the criminal courts, and a competency hearing process and involuntary commitment to a California Psychiatric Hospital. Part III will describe a go at probation that was doomed from the start and our decision to take away her rights and get a conservatorship in California. It will offer some final thoughts on policy change from the point of view of parents--one a criminal defense lawyer, the other a public health nurse--who despite their respective professional expertise could not manage to get their own daughter treated for an imminently treatable condition.
Of course, this is really Trina's story, but it is also an everygirl story: of mental illness in a sick world; of scarce resources in a land of plenty; of ignorance, apathy and an incomprehensibly uncoordinated system of mental health services; and finally, of a legal system that turns out to be wholly inadequate to protect our beautiful sons and daughters.
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