Cesar Chumil’s Years of Seclusion: If I Were Locked In a Room With No One To Talk To, I’d Hit People Too

I don’t have a history of violence, but I know darn well that if I spent even a month in a room with a locked door and no one speaking to me in English, my native tongue and food shoved in a slot in the door my only interaction with the outside world and every staff person in the place having been told by other staff or by institutional history or myth or memory that I was a dangerous, scary person not to be trusted or treated even as well as other state hospital patients, I would be hitting folks whenever I left the room myself.  The frustration and anger and despair of being so isolated, alone and hated would lead a pacifist to violence. 

I wanted to title this “We are all Cesar Chumil” but I knew few would agree with me.  There are so many ways we can point to differences between ourselves and Cesar Chumil and say “that could never happen to me” or “he is a special case” or “there must be more to it, our mental health system would not really treat someone like that unless there were more to it” or whatever emotional defense we can come up with to distance ourselves from the nightmare that is Mr. Chumil’s life in our local state hospital, Western State Hospital.  It is too hard for most to think that this could be them, that they are as powerless and as helpless and as unprotected by our state and federal government as he is.  But if Mr. Chumil’s human rights are not enforced, none of us have human rights in Virginia’s mental health system.  We can’t have a human rights system with “exceptions”.  It doesn’t work that way.  Once you can make exceptions for one patient that grossly violate all kinds of protections that are supposed to be in place, you are going to and you do have more exceptions and more requests for exceptions and less respect for the laws and regulations that are supposed to protect all of us.  One state hospital operating outside the law in one case leads to more operation outside the law in that state hospital and more operation outside the law in the rest of the public mental health system.  Allowing this violation to continue says to every other mental health provider the bar is set so low in Virginia that you can keep your license as long as you don’t kill a patient on videotape and even then, if you have a “good reason” or explanation, you will probably keep your license and just have to pay a fine and if you are a state hospital we can’t close you down anyway and the federal government’s Department of Justice just does not care if the state of Virginia violates terms of their letter of consent at the close of their last investigation, so do what you want, no one is watching and no one cares.

We are all Cesar Chumil.  If he has no enforceable human rights in Virginia’s public mental health system than neither do we.  G-d help us if Commissioner Reinhard chooses to override the decisions of the State Human Rights Committee.  We will all be at the mercy of those who think we are not human beings deserving of dignity and the rule of law.