The suicide of most any man will probably not make news headlines, especially if that man hailed from an impoverished community and belonged to a racial minority. With suicide comes shame, and like a hospitalized person’s medical condition, suicide is generally kept private. Also, the survival and well-being of the family members whose loved one has committed suicide do not gain much public or private attention either, even when—in the wake of the shocking, self-inflicted death—the mental health needs of these survivors are great. This is particularly true, again, in the case of poor persons of color: their mental health needs, like their overall health care needs, often go unmet. For these people, federal and state funds are significantly lacking. Public dollars simply go elsewhere. But where and for what greater public good?
Perhaps two tragic and highly emotionally charged news events of 2005 will finally force Americans to re-examine our policies about where our scarce public mental health and medical health care dollars go, and why those dollars seem so meager. The first tragic recent event—the mass slaying in Red Lake, Minnesota—resulted in no small degree from a lack of adequate mental health funding of the Native American community where the troubled teenager was born and raised, a town of about 7,500 people where a kid named Jeff Weise murdered nine people on March 22, 2005, then took his own life. Both residents in a town where the unemployment rate hovers around 40%, the adolescent gunman and his father (who killed himself about four years ago) serve as sad examples of what horrible things can happen to people (and to those around them) when their mental health issues go untreated. A dozen of the disturbed youth’s shooting victims remain injured, some apparently with significant, life-altering head injuries, and those victims’ families too, no doubt, will likely suffer emotionally from the tragedy. How could they not? One wonders who, if anyone, will nurse these impoverished victims’ psychic wounds. Or will there be no funding for this?
Then there is Terry Schiavo. As National Public Radio senior news analyst Daniel Schorr reported the day before the Red Lake massacre, Mrs. Schiavo has been kept physically alive for about fifteen years via a feeding tube, and her phenomenally expensive health care costs have been paid for, in large part, by tax-payer funded Medicaid. Unable to communicate, unable to meaningfully engage in any goal-directed behavior, and even unable to regulate her level of arousal, the vast majority of Americans—regardless of background, circumstance or political persuasion—agree that Mrs. Schiavo has no quality of life. According to recent polls, Americans from every corner of the nation agree Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube should have been removed, that it should not be re-inserted, and that Congress overstepped its role in its hasty legislation to try to have the tube re-inserted. Nearly all Americans agree too that they would not wish to be in Mrs. Schiavo's condition—even if a few disagree about whether or not she is brain dead. The liquid nutrition coursing through her feeding tube has kept her alive for many years, it's true. But to what end and for whose benefit?
And so we have a nation where, as a result of our health and mental health care policies, money that has been spent feeding Terry Schiavo, but adding zero quality to her life, could have been better spent four or more years ago on the mental health needs of the small, poor and relatively forgotten Chippewa community of Red Lake, Minnesota. Had that happened, a teenage kid named Jeff and his father might be fishing together, or throwing a football. Had that happened, a Florida woman would be dead, but ten Red Lake residents would be very, very much alive.