Aurora: My Thoughts After Two Weeks. Mental Health Education and Screening Has Been Missing at Universities

So Friday when my cell rang, my mind was steeped in what was on my television and computer along with millions and perhaps billions of people in the world: the latest 'shocking story' coming out of Colorado; a dozen lives 'gone', dozens others physically AND mentally injuried; hundreds with first-hand experience traumatized ('injured' in mind/spirit and also body if you look at the connection as we do at Lumigrate), and then the effects on the millions or billions of people who would view it on television and computer, read about it, hear about it, talk about it.   

This time the attention on Colorado wasn't about wildfires as earlier this summer and spring, but once again, having to do with a mass shooting in the Denver-metro area; Columbine in 1999 is to the SW of Denver, Aurora to the east.  I was born in Denver -- what has happened to 'my state'? It's just increasingly disturbing that a beautiful state like Colorado, settled since the 1800s mostly by people whose families are elsewhere in the United States, has had this 'trend'.  The large fire outside of Colorado Springs recently was a 'criminal act'; 19 other fires were set all around the area, including near the military base, at the time that one took off into a huge deal.  

A decade ago the Hayman fire down that way was set by a heartbroken U.S.Forest Service worker who wanted to get attention as being a hero for putting out a fire so she set a fire she couldn't, ultimately, get out.  That fire went miles and miles to the area where I grew up outside of Denvver and burned the homes of people I knew personally and I heard the stories of evacuation from other friends who were trying to get 'in' to get their pets 'out'.  ALL THESE THINGS are saturating all of our minds, if we let them, and to me, when I heard the interviews of people who witnessed the shooting, most said 'I thought it was part of the theater's promotion of the event at first, until a bomb of chemical was set off ... and he started shooting people".  

At the time of the Hayman fire in Colorado Springs, I attended my ONLY late-night 'grand opening' of a new movie of my entire life; my 'significant other' was a fan of Lord of the Rings. I had just badly sprained/broken my ankle and had to keep working as I was hired to cover a young OTR who injured her back lifting a patient and was having surgery/recovery time off.  BUT, on a Friday night we went with a bunch of other people who 'had a hobby' of following late night openings or that particular story/fantasy.  We were 40 and 50 years old and quite old compared to the majority.  So we are now at least ten years into this 'era' of increased incidents of people doing big, dramatic things to get attention. And how are we doing addressing it?  

The young man from the Applied Human Sciences Department on the phone Friday did a very nice job of cojoling me out of the gear I was in at the time, which was that I'd already made my charitable donation for the summer (to help people more directly than lofty 'education', I pay taxes to fund education so I don't tend to 'boost' my State's education funds with so many other basic human needs going unmet in the United States, Colorado, Grand Junction, and world-wide).  

Despite my initial 'not now, thanks', he was sincerely interested in what I had to say about life after graduating in 1996 with a degree in occupational therapy; he stated apprehension about taking upper level classes after this summer, and so I inquired as to where he went to high school, which, it turns out was in an affluent part of Denver near the middle-class Aurora on the news that day and since.  He was basically the same age as 'the shooter', and he was expressing such need to 'hear from an elder' in his field. When I worked for Colorado State University's Health Education Department, I got a broad education about the psychological and physical needs of the students, and there was a new focus on 'non-traditional aged students'.  

I was one, intending to be accepted into the OT program in my mid 30s.  I therefore needed to do a lot of volunteering to get good letters of recommendation from people who would set me apart from the other five people vying for the slot I was vying for.  So I was the volunteer advisor for ALL non-traditional students coming into the Applied Human Sciences. Ironically, the deparment head had as much dysfunction in his life as any college student I have ever known and it played out right in front of my eyes because it involved an "inappropriate relationship" with a woman who I had advised when she put in an application when coming to the University after being accepted -- uprooting herself and her family from hours away from Fort Collins.

This was only preparing me for the situation I encountered when I quit working at the Health Center to begin the OT program -- clearly the high-level volunteering I did put me over the cusp from 'no' because my grades were, I believe, the worst of anyone in the class; I had a 3.49 on my most recent 40 credits they used and my learning-disabled study partner had a 3.46 and good volutneer work recommedations and she did NOT get in.  What a sad moment when I arrived at class the day after 'letters' arrived in the mail to us saying our lives would go as hoped the next year or we had to go to plan B.   

We had a student who, like me, had documented learning disabilities and also had the benefit of the Americans with Disabilities Act to help support our special needs for studying and testing.  As such, we had to check in with the grand pooh bah advisor and none of the underlings.  That is the only reason I knew this classmate. Within a month she came to class with a totally black and blue face, and being a certified 'peer health advisor', I approached her afterwards to be sure she knew of the University Counseling Center.  "The cops want my boyfriend to use his own counselors" was the response.  Good, I don't need to get involved the cops already are. I didn't 'know' any of my classmates except one older gal who had come to me through the non-traditional club's routing of her as an Applied Human Sciences applicant.  

All the students had been clustered in the preliminary classes and so they knew each other, I'd taken ten years to do those classes so I was 'the odd woman out'; not a good position when you have to do group projects!  The first group I was in had our only class dropout that semester and it was while we were in our group -- her religious beliefs wouldn't allow her to accept other people's spiritual beleifs and so they basically flushed her out.  So at some levels, within the boundaries of a State educational institution, they were addressing 'spiritual' stress and seeing the need for holistic therapists working with the whole of a person's mind/body/spirit.  VERY tricky -- they flushed her out by having the first WEEK be about genetics of human and nonhuman primates. 

NOT flushed out was the woman whose beatings, allegedly by a boyfriend who moved with her from out of state she had told me on check-in day waiting together, turned to someone beating her when she took out her trash -- a random man.  This was after a few of my classmates and I and my boyfriend and his friend with a truck and muscles, who was in Search and Rescue and a 'good guy', helped her move to a 'safe location' away from the alleged boyfriend.  

However, I showed her to drive a route and pull over to see if she was being followed and when she took the next group of students helping her from her old to her new/'safe' location, she didn't pull over or have any concern about being followed.  For whatever reason, my classmates hadn't thought that was strange that she had not concern about their parade of vehicles with stuff in it being followed.  So my 'radar' was OFF about this young woman.  

What happened next should make us think about how someone THIS MENTALLY ILL was admitted to have one of the coveted 60 slots that year in my occupational therapy class where we were literally expected to be supporting each other in our groups so that the teachers only had to grade 1/4 as many things.  They had found it difficult to figure out what admission requirements to impose. They found that 'average'/C students could not pass with a D the neuroanatomy class that premed students also took, but they found that the high "academic" achievers would get to internships and have problems.  So they were trying to tease out ALL these problems with us in the curriculum.  

And guess what?  WE were the FIRST BATCH of a totally redisigned curriculum.  You know how you never want to buy a model of car the first year it is produced or you don't want to join a new business the first year it is open?  Well, you don't want to be in the first year of new occupational therapy program.  Another older student and I fortunately ran into each other drinking on a Friday night (and having dinner, the yuppity spot was and is a now-famous margarita/Mexican place called 'The Rio" -- posted limit of 3 in neon over the bar turned into their logo!)  

So while this dramady was unfolding with our fellow student who was clearly not mentally well, which I initially opted to help when nobody else would because she 'needed' to move right before a big test and they were very focused on their grades and not PEOPLE around them/'family of classmates', I also helped get a 'pow wow' at 7 am one day with the students and the faculty to have them hear our concerns about what we were missing in our education.  

They literally pulled out materials from the old (and good) curriculum and gave us one day's lecture and lab on it.  Hand therapy. Wheelchair positioning.  ONE DAY on each one?  You needs a month on each one of those things in my estimation, now that I have worked in skilled nursing with the average elderly population you get there.  BUT if I ever need to feed a child who has C.P., I did get a week about that.  OR teach them with cues on the body how to roll over and go through the developmental patterns of the first year to standing.  So basically, all the patients we encountered in the early part of our careers had to suffer through our having much of our education time / energy / money taken up to give us things that we 'didn't learn in kindergarden'.  And in my opinion, a mental health screening of some sort might have been a good thing to include too, as well as a medical screening.  It was flushed out in the program that I have sensory integration problems and such incoordination with my body that I really am not able to learn splinting and other things -- THAT would have been nice to have known 'going in'... fortunately I am very adept with psychology and education and have the life experince of my family and myself have many illnesses and pain, etc., so I was able to navigate a career path which works for me.  

Those principles taught to me related to children with CP DO also apply to anyone older with neurological deficits but it was really a shame what we 'missed' in class becasue the PEOPLE that were coming to class were not well-prepared as PEOPLE, so they were trying to strain that out and correct it.  We had weeks and weeks about discrimination and finding out what our own biases are and rectifying them.  

My biases were cowboys and rich people.  Ironically, I went to the Rio to meet my boyfriend that day for a drink and snack before working out at the health club and he had one of his friends there who was also in the building trades and he asked me what I did in school that day.  So I told him and what my biases were.  I didn't know the friend was a wealthy developer so they disclosed that while they pointed to the floor and were both wearing cowboy boots that day!  I laughed and said 'clearly I am not THAT averse to cowboys OR people with money, eh?  Thank you again Colorado State Univeristy for wasting a day of my life and another day of my tuition where I am not making income".  

BUT I was not the typical student.  Neither was the woman who was being beaten -- it turns out, by HER. Last I heard someone had called me who lived in Fort Collins and knew my 'frustration and disbelief' about this going on amidst my trying to become an occupational therapist and with my own medical problems that were appearing to be MS at the time miring my time, energy and money resources -- to say that she was in the paper for her amazing story of triumphing over all this -- she turned her dramady to allegedly have cancer, becoming unable to walk, speak louder than a whisper, losing her hair and eyelashes and eyebrows over a weekend when she flew in a helicopter courtesy of a doctor there AND BACK after two days of double the maximum dose of chemo and radiation over a four day weekend.  And our professors and department head didn't recognize that this was delusional and psychiatric and NOT REAL, as they TWICE gave the center stage of our class time -- unbenownst to us ahead of time so we would show up expecting to learn what was on the syllabus that day, to be the 'fodder' for this woman's need to talk about her 'alleged' situation.  

For me, and anyone connected to the community to ask around what was going on, this whole 'thing' got flushed out LONG before I had to sit through the classes where we got to say our 'goodbyes to her' as she was terminal she had told the teacher who believed her or acted to believe her in order to have some kind of experiment with our class -- or maybe they were unsure and erred on the side of doing what was 'normal' if it were reality.  But THIS is why I don't give much money to my alma mater, WHY SUPPORT programs or businesses which maybe are not right anymore for being in existence?  Perhaps support other things that are created to fill the gaps of these archaic systems as they crumble and become part of history?  So the young man on the phone suggested a program in HIS program, and it meant a GREAT DEAL TO HIM, that I made a small donation.  It made me feel good to have made his day, and I hope he remembers and takes it seriously that I told him to contact me through Lumigrate if he ever wishes to.  

The mentally unwell classmate who was being presented by the leaders I looked up to less and less as they proved their incompetence about my classmate, made the mistake of being seen by a homeless man (the heir to a huge fortune from 'old money' who happened to have schizophrenia and moved to Fort Collins) going into a church to attend an AlAnon meeting.  The attendees included, coincidentally, the former study buddy of mine who did not get into the OT program because she was not 'qualified' enough to make the cut based upon their criteria.  Which did NOT include a mental health screening I might add.  So imagine my frustration that someone who would have been an AMAZING OT did not make it despite her extra toiling with learning disabilities, when this one with the mental health problems of frightening significance in my opinion -- also ALLEGEDLY with learning disabilities, remember -- did!  

Allegedly she came into the meeting having been stabbed in the parking lot by a man .. and there was a significant knife wound in her rib area.  By then the cops were very suspicious of her and it turns out that somehow she had needed to borrow the car that day of a classmate -- I think she maybe was trying to 'involve' the classmates in what she had presumed and hoped/wanted to be an 'investigation' of her stabbing by what she was going to tell everyone was a man in the parking lot.  By the way, this was in the afternoon on a weekday.  

I was never clear with the pieces I heard where he was and if she had perhaps seen him or not, I just recall that she had not accused him, but the police had somehow interviewed him and he reported she got out of the borrowed vehicle she had that day, borrowed from a classmate who was aware there was something not quite right about this gal but feeling guilty that she was not helping her move and other things that required time; naturally in retrospect we could say 'ah, this way someone from our class is involved in this situation to get her more of her 'payoff' -- the attention for all these things happening to her.

All of us "townies" (I had lived in Fort Collins since 1978 and this was in 1994) knew of the homeless man and his story, and we had been saddened in 1993 by the news one day that another of our schizophrenic residents had been hit and killed by a car just hours after I had bought him dinner.  He actually had ordered the fast chips and queso and not a dinner, though I had offered.  People with schizophrenia don't 'stick' long around any people because it is difficult for them with what is also going on in their heads. That is what I learned LATER, on my OT internship in the psyche unit at the Denver VA hospital.  

Other people at The Rio offered to buy the man drinks, and he had accepted two I believe it was and so I rushed to suggest I buy him food; you can't stop other people from doing wrong sometimes but you can try to offset it!  He kissed my hand when he left and said "goodbye, Gracias Senorita Mardy'.  I have been so blessed to have lived in such marvelous communities in my formative years where I learned to look out for your neighbors and to only help and 'butt in' when it was needed.  I am from the mountains of Colorado and you don't call and ask to borrow a cup of sugar or tools or ANYTHING 'usual', but if there is a flood or a fire or a big snowstorm, or a death, you seek out the community outside your normal social circle.  

And I was so fortunate to have these experiences with people in Fort Collins both in and off of the University boundaries.  That particular man carried a boom box around  and every day and make a loop to all the campus and downtown trash cans where aluminum was thrown away, and he'd sing like he was the best Mexican music singer in the whole world. And he kept to a pretty regular schedule, the post office would have been proud of his regularity in bad weather as well.  His family member 'in charge of him' was a University figurehead  and so people talked among themselves, the University workers such as myself at the Health Center as a worker or the Applied Human Sciences college as a volunteer and then as a student to my classmates, and the community 'watched out for' these people.  

In the years prior to my divorce in 1992, which was 'over' my returning to complete my college education because it was not something he ultimately wanted for me -- I had a good job working right there with him every day and was home with him every day and every weekend, which is what HE wanted, but the job was not 'my career passion', occupational therapy was, or was the educational passion that I was completely drawn to and set my sights on despite it was the most difficult program at Colorado State to be accepted to.  My husband was really a good guy but he was increasingly doing passive aggressive things which were undermining my success as a person -- telling people I had a crisis about turning 30 so to pretend to forget my birthday for instance, which happened to coincide the semester I took my first night class after getting my health back on track after chronic fatigue syndrome in my late 20s.  

It's kind of a funny story now, to see how I knew deep down that I needed to get away from this 'vampire' in my life, but I wasn't identifying the REAL things that were an insult to my soul because, quite frankly, I had from day 1 had so many insults to my soul from the 'first man in my life', my father. I was in the process of sorting all that out and doing a lot of journaling, talking to wise friends, and reading books like 'Codependency No More' when it came out, which changed my life, obviously.  But a 'flaw' I saw of my husband was he didn't donate to any nonprofits, yet he was spending a great deal of money on his hobbies every month. So he pointed out that one time he paid for the medication of an old woman who was at the pharmacy and couldn't afford her prescription she had said, tearfully.  He said that he bought the homeless man who frequented the McDonalds he did on his way to work every morning, where his routine was to smoke and drink coffee and read the paper, as at our house the smoke was irritating my health issues and causing friction between us.   

So one morning instead of going straight to the office from home, I stopped by McDonalds to commend his philanthropic generosity, since I had clearly been short-sighted about something about my husband, and saw which 'homeless' man it was and my husband went when I said 'that's Mr ________,  the heir to the ______ fortunate' (I am not disclosing his name but it is as well known in the US as 'Rockefeller, Gates, Kennedy' I will say that.)  I have since been closely involved in my life for years with a man who had two brothers and a wealthy mother, and the son/brother with schizophrenia had a very nice apartment, food if he needed it, always -- but that was not what 'made him comfortable' and he was so supported and known by the police and community of Wichita, Kansas that after the mother's death and no family living in that town, he remained there with family coming to visit him and check on things, including those enTRUSTed to manage the money, etc.    

In internships, I was blessed with a teacher/patient with schizophrenia who had responded so well to one of the recently released medications that he had been able to complete college and an advanced degree. Unfortunately, that medication had a side effect that could cause physical problems with the blood/body in a life-threatening way and regular bloodwork revealed that had begun to occur, so he had to come in for an inpatient stay at the psychiatic unit and, as he said "know I am going to 'go crazy' again" as he came off that medication and get titrated up and ajusted on the new medication which was at that time in trials at the VA.  He was hopeful and frightened as to if the outcome would be good, and unfortunately, that medication did not work for him.  

Mr. O, I call him to protect his identity -- helped me TODAY understand what I am seeing on the news.  And I felt that it was NOT right for the press to treat the shooter the way they did, allowing the victims in a traumatized state to dictate how they were going to report the news! Who was 'judging' the obviously NOT well man who did such a horrendous deed?  To have it repeated over and over on CNN, a family member calling him a villain, mind you, a family member who was VOLUNTEERING immediately to say his family member was killed, before the authorities even released a list of victims -- getting a 'jump' on the media coverage.  I was astounded to see that a business that named themselves long ago Cable Network News had stooped to such levels.  Who is running THEIR show and how much training do THEY HAVE in things which people who are feeding us news should have?  For pity's sakes, WHAT has the world come to when I am more shocked by the corporations I 'pay' through my subscription to inform me of news?  I wasn't the least bit surprised that someone who was mentally unstable plotted out to kill a bunch of people at the premier showing of a Batman movie -- have you ever talked to people who spend more than a little bit of time playing 'Dungeons and Dragons'?  I had one 'date' in that first year after my divorce literally light up mid dinner talking about the character he was going to create for me to play the game with him -- that was 1992 and the people would get together at each others houses and play not online. I made it very clear at my car that I did not intend to have anything to do with him in the future and yet the next workday his roommate came to my office with flowers from him; yes this was a man who worked on a University student services office at Colorado State Univeristy.  

Did we have any kind of mental health screenings as employees of the University when we were hired?  No, we did not. I had been 'concerningly visited in person or by phone" from 1984 until the end of 1993 -- NINE YEARS -- by a highly 'decorated' professor at the University, who actually left to another Colorado public University in the Denver area.  He would sometimes go two years without calling me and he even tracked me to my new job at the Health Center; my former staff at my old office knew of the situation so would not have given my number and I put a note over my forwarding information in the Rolodex instructing them to take messages and please call me if anyone contacted them.  I was on a committee with the chief of police for the campus and that is how I got my education at that time in what to do from a safety standpoint.   

A few years later, the interesting thing was, I felt completely safe working in the VA psyche  unit BECAUSE EVERYONE THERE WAS TRAINED ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and what to do if someone went 'awry'; how many of you know how to do a 5 point take-down?  Who don't we just get that education in school or have classes required of us like First Aid and CPR?  The amazing, articulate, intelligent man who met with me for an hour at the start of his drug holiday at the VA, disclosing what a gift of life it was to him to have that modern medication come along and the VA support and be able to complete college and have PRIDE in that, and of having a job -- in mental health counseling by the way.   

So to have him start taking the aluminum foil from his baked potato and fashion it into antennas on his glasses to bring in the signal better to what he heard in his head, and to start thinking I was his wife and not the OT intern when he would come wandering into the OT room, sitting sometimes with the patients he knew well -- there was a group of Vietnam veterans who came in three times a week, even on holidays if they wanted, to talk -- that was just what 'went on' MWF at noon with the loving direction of the matriarch occupational therapist who was like a mom to them.  The other OT, who was my supervisor was about their age and also was wonderful -- but they needed a mothering influence, and she wasn't just 'nurturing them', she was keeping them 'present' and rooted in the REALITY of TODAY and not letting them stay stuck in the Vietnam trauma and drama, though that would be discussed appropriately just like any other stress they were encountering.  THEY WERE SOME OF MY GREATEST TEACHERS OF MY LIFE, and I wish that CNN would have had someone in control of their production recently who had that psychological experience.  

We need to have compassion about those who are ill.  We need to have education to people about what that looks like.  And CERTAINLY when someone who has mental illness and the BIG RED FLAG of a separation from the University program they are living in a strange city away from family to 'matriculate at', the PEOPLE running the world in big and small ways would really benefit from some awareness and education.  This is NOT about gun control in my opinion, though there is an issue of what types of products are available to what people, clearly.  This is about MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION AND AWARENESS, and about each of us stepping back and saying 'how mentall well are we?'  If you're at a movie and someone comes in dressed up like that, are you mentally well to have your first thought be 'that's part of the marketing for the movie premier tonight"?  Perhaps those people have been a bit too immersed in the images and NON reality of stories we can sit and be entertained by INSTEAD OF knowing the first thing about mental health and recognizing that this was an ill person.  Who did not deserve the kind of treatment our country overall gave him initially, in my opinion.  It is similar to the treatment the Vietnam veterans generally received when they came home from serving our country.  

So if you've read this, it means you are invested in this thought process to some extent.  Let's not beat ourselves up looking at the problem, if you look at the pothole and not the solution to not hitting it, you'll just hit the pothole -- what are YOU going to do right now, this week, to do differently?  We are all in this together and with a lot of effort -- our BEST EFFORTS -- we can get out of this together, but it means we have to work harder than we have ever worked in our collective lives.  

I hope that I do my part every day to provide thoughtful, progressive education which is rooted in validity and soundness, and market it in a way which makes it enjoyable as well and educational.  Sometimes it means I take off my boxing gloves and shoot from the hip, as I have today with my writing.  Other days it means I write about the magnificance of what we saw in the Olympic athletes and opening ceremony.