Cesar Chumil

I don’t know when if ever I will be able to write about the man I saw in a film on Friday, the man held for years and years in solitary confinement at a so called “hospital” by a so called “physician” less than 2 hours from my home.  I feel stained and touched by evil after that hearing and being in the same room with this man’s jailer while watching this human being talk and even smile while talking to his lawyer through a translator and watching our state’s human rights committee, the one that is supposed to oversee all local human rights committees in our state, let the jailer off for being late with his appeal but holding the man in the cell’s attorneys to a much stricter scrutiny all the while getting their legal advice (and none of them seemed to be lawyers themselves as in the past) from an attorney with the state Attorney General’s Office which also is responsible for representing the hospital that holds this man.  And her interpretation of the regulations and what the committee could do was never on the man in the cell’s side in the public portion of the hearing.  In the closed hearing on the variance I saw her speak often while the man’s attorney was kept out of the room.  This is our State Human Rights Committee?  This is out state’s human rights system at work?  The man got more from them than before, I’m supposed to be happy, but I am saddened and appalled and sickened.  The Committee chose to wait until the end of all their decision making to watch the film of the man.  I guess they did not want to have their decisions influenced by seeing there was a real human being at the center of their deliberations.  Or maybe they hoped the few members of the public there would grow tired and leave before the end.  I can not know their motivation of course. 

I can only know that I came away knowing that no one in Virginia’s state mental hospitals has any real protection of his or her human rights at all, only the pretense that they do.  I came away knowing it could be any of us with labels stuck in that room based on a decision by one so called physician who has never been held accountable for his actions and instead is asked to speak at a “Trauma-Informed” conference in Northern Virginia last year?  And asked to serve on the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform? And asked to speak elsewhere and everyone too polite to mention the man locked in his attic in his hospital.  I wanted to exorcise the room and I’m not even Catholic.  How can the presence of this jailer and the pervasive defense of his actions throughout the state mental health system not contaminate everyone in it? 

My friend who has more distance and more sense than I has written a cogent summary of the situation with suggestions for action.  Please read it here:  http://lunarrose.wordpress.com/2008/08/02/fifteen-years-in-the-hole/