RUTHFULLY YOURS

To say I didn’t know my great-uncle, Wolfe Levine, would understate things. Though my grandfather and I were close, for years I didn’t know he had a brother. In retrospect, it’s clear Wolfe was simply unmentionable. We’d write it off today as the stigma of mental illness.

Wolfe’s story is tragic, dating from an era of large public asylums that America has sought to forget. His journey to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Lima, Ohio, began in 1910 with a criminal conviction: one to five years in a reformatory for pickpocketing. Six years before, Wolfe had immigrated to America at age 14. Theft was not a shocking charge for a young man in Cleveland, living on a block of ramshackle frame houses with his widowed mother and her three other children. Once convicted Wolfe would never again be a free man.

After less than two years in the reformatory—later made famous as the setting for “The Shawshank Redemption”—he exhibited “persecutory delusions” and “auditory hallucinations.” That’s how he wound up in Lima, where the conditions were so bad that by 1974 a federal judge chastised Ohio for failing to ensure “dignity, privacy and humane care.”

My great-uncle was still there. He died in custody in 1982, at 92, and was buried near Toledo, the costs covered by a fund for indigents supported by a local Jewish federation. Wolfe had spent 72 years in institutions. In the language of reformers, he had been “warehoused” for his entire adult life. His aspiration to be a playwright, the occupation he listed when admitted to the reformatory, would prove a dark irony for someone formally diagnosed with dementia praecox—schizophrenia, as it later came to be called.

Yet the story is not so straightforwardly bleak as it seems, and it casts light on how far America has come—and not come. Are we treating the severely mentally ill better today than we did a century ago?

Wolfe did not do well at the reformatory. In a year’s time, more than 300 days were added to his sentence for misbehavior. This almost certainly reflected an onset and worsening of his mental illness. The family may have been involved in the decision to transfer him to the hospital. My great-aunt, now nearly 100, recalls my grandparents discussing what to do with Wolfe. “Dave and Ethel were just starting their own family,” she says. “They just couldn’t take care of him.” Nor was his extended family well-off. My grandmother’s immigrant father was still making deliveries on Cleveland’s East Side with a horse-drawn wagon well into the 1920s.

Thus did Wolfe arrive at Lima in 1915. Little information exists on daily life there, but census records portray an institutionalized American melting pot. My great-uncle was listed as a “Russian Jew”; his neighbors—all of whose occupations were listed as “patient”—included natives of Alabama, Indiana, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, England and Italy. The hospital was enormous, with 17 wings for 1,400 patients. It was considered the largest poured-concrete structure in the world until the Pentagon.

The nationwide hospital system was the product of a 19th-century reform movement, led by Dorothea Dix and Horace Mann, outraged by the imprisonment of so many of the mentally ill. By 1940, America had institutionalized 450,000 patients. Though the care given was far from perfect, it aspired to be therapeutic.

A little-known book provides a remarkable window into the era. In 1931, a 52-year-old journalist named Marle Woodson checked himself into Eastern Oklahoma Hospital in an attempt to kick his alcohol problem. As he dried out, he wrote “Behind the Door of Delusion,” which did not describe a quiet warehouse: “About me the daytime activities of the hospital hummed. All the work was done by the patients. There was little detailed supervision by the attendants, although they were here, there, and everywhere all the time.” A “floor gang” polished and shined, and a crew for making up beds did its work “with a neatness which would shame many of the maids in good hotels.” Patients worked in the “art department, bakery, the store, or other departments of the institution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Nice column by an erudite senator who is a GOP star…..but Diana West wrote a splendid book on this issue back in 2008
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization by by Diana West Sep 16, 2008

We all know the noun adult. But I was perplexed last year to hear the new verb to adult. In social media, especially on Twitter and Instagram, it birthed a new hashtag: #adulting. As in: “Just paid this month’s bills on time #adulting,” or “Decided I couldn’t watch Netflix 8 hours straight and went to the grocery store instead #adulting.” It even got a nomination from the American Dialect Society for the most creative word of 2015.

“Adulting” is an ironic way to describe engaging in adult behaviors, like paying taxes or doing chores—the sort of mundane tasks that responsibility demands. To a growing number of Americans, acting like a grown-up seems like a kind of role-playing, a mode of behavior requiring humorous detachment.

Let me be clear: This isn’t an old man’s harrumph about “kids these days.” I still remember Doc Anderson standing in the street in 1988, yelling at me to slow down as I drove through his neighborhood in our small Nebraska town. I was 16 and couldn’t stand that guy. Years later, when I had children of my own, I returned to thank him. Maturation.

What’s new today is the drift toward perpetual adolescence. What’s new is seeing so much less difference now between 10-year-olds and young adults in their late teens and early 20s.

As many parents can attest, independent adulthood is no longer the norm for this generation. Data from the Pew Research Center show that we crossed a historic threshold last year: “For the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.” Fully one-quarter of Americans between 25 and 29 live with a parent—compared with only 18% just over a decade ago.

A great many factors have contributed to this shift toward perpetual adolescence. The economy has something to do with it, of course—but social and cultural developments do too. The list of culprits includes our incredible wealth and the creature comforts to which our children are accustomed; our reluctance to expose young people to the demands of real work; and the hostage-taking hold that computers and mobile devices have on adolescent attention.

Our nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis. Too many of our children simply don’t know what an adult is anymore—or how to become one. Perhaps more problematic, older generations have forgotten that we need to teach them. It’s our fault more than it’s theirs.

My wife, Melissa, and I have three children, ages 6 to 15. We don’t have any magic bullets to help them make the transition from dependence to self-sustaining adulthood—because there aren’t any. And we have zero desire to set our own family up as a model. We stumble and fall every day. CONTINUE AT SITE

More than 100 veterans died while waiting for care at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Los Angeles, Calif., over a nine-month span ending in August 2015, according to a new government report.

The VA Office of Inspector General found in a recent healthcare inspection that 225 veterans at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System facility died with open or pending consults between Oct. 1, 2015 and Aug. 9, 2015. Nearly half—117—of those patients died while experiencing delays in receiving care.

The inspector general reported that 43 percent of the 371 consults scheduled for patients who ended up dying were not timely because of a failure by VA employees to follow proper procedure. The report was unable to substantiate claims that patients died as a result of the delayed consults.

Concerned Veterans for America, a D.C.-based nonprofit, cited the OIG findings as evidence that problems persist at the Department of Veterans Affairs despite a series of legislative reforms implemented after the 2014 wait time scandal in Phoenix, Ariz.

“VA negligence can be a matter of life or death,” CVA policy director Dan Caldwell said in a statement Thursday. “While the VA wait scandal received the most attention a few years ago, the reality is that Congress hasn’t done anything to change the toxic culture at the VA and we can’t be sure that veterans still aren’t dying waiting for care.”

Caldwell told the Washington Free Beacon that it’s important to recognize the OIG investigation covers a period that occurred two years ago, suggesting that changes have since been implemented. He said the report reinforces findings that wait list manipulation took place at VA facilities nationwide and was not isolated to a handful of hospitals, as initially suspected.

The VA did not return a request for comment.