My mother took her own life in 2016. After her death, I didn't know where to put my anger—with her, with myself, with my father, with my sister...it was a disaster of a situation.
But I penned this letter and sent it to the Colorado State Governor at the time, praying we might see some change and regulation in the way mental illness is treated and addressed in my home state.
If you give it a read all the way through, you are a brave soul. I just didn't want to die without anyone else ever seeing this letter.
Names have been changed to protect the privacy of my family members, but this is it. My plea letter.
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Governor John Hickenlooper
Office of the Governor 136 State Capitol Bldg Denver, CO 80203
June 4, 2016
Dear Governor Hickenlooper,
My name is Dr. Margo Sloan, an audiologist currently living in California, and I am writing you today to address the dire need of legislative change in regards to mental health care in Colorado. I am a Colorado native, as are the other members of my family: my father, [name redacted]; my sister, [name redacted]; and my mother, Kathy Ann [redacted], who recently committed suicide.
In light of this, I found it imperative to alert you to the situation surrounding my mother’s passing, in the hopes that it can influence positive change in how Colorado views and regulates mental health care, so that other families can avoid the same fate and despair that my family has.
In November of 2014, my mother started to act very strange. While she had a long history of mental illness, and self-regulated her troubles through Prozac and recreational marijuana, her family and friends noticed a drastic shift in her behavior. She became obsessed with the notion that my father, by then her ex-husband, was a dangerous criminal who was stalking her. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she could not be persuaded otherwise. It would be difficult to describe her condition as anything other than a personality change: a common symptom of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
I had recently moved to California to pursue a career in Audiology, as such opportunities for employment were less available in my home state. When I first moved, I spoke on the phone with my mother nearly every day. But in November, when her condition began to deteriorate, I stopped receiving phone calls and started receiving emails. They increased in number until I was seeing over 100 messages daily; many, if not all of which, were speckled with nasty comments, accusations toward my father and her sister, and even name-calling. It was highly unlike my mother to use this type of language, and especially out of character for her to be so irrational as to write such a high volume of messages to all sorts of people on her contact list. She claimed to be looking for help, but I must be specific in saying that she was never obviously suicidal or threatening to either herself or someone else; Kathy was merely attacking all of us she was sending messages to.
By the following March, she had started emailing the local police department in Englewood, a fact I only learned by seeing a lone email address among a long list of CC’s in one of my mother’s messages. Officer Mike Fast was very helpful at assisting me in my quest to get my mother help; he claimed to believe something was very wrong with her, that she seemed manic and obsessed with the idea that my father was dangerous, even going so far as to continue repeating a claim that she had been told he was a suspect in a murder case by an officer in Adams county. I remember laughing at his complaint that he was getting a whole fifteen emails daily; I responded that fifteen would have been considered a “very light day” on my end of the spectrum. Less than a week after I spoke with Officer Fast, my mother was taken to Porter Adventist Hospital, after he ordered a welfare check in response to an email that seemed vaguely suicidal.
When I called Porter Adventist Hospital to find out where my mother was, they refused to give me any information other than confirm that she was in their confidential wing; a side effect of HIPAA regulations that I am very familiar with as I work in the medical field. However, I was the point of contact for the physicians working with her, and was contacted by her “evaluator” a few hours after her admission. They asked me about her prescription drug use, of which I knew little, and I repeated the same concerns to them that I did to the officer earlier that week: I believed my mother to be very ill, that she was suffering from delusions, and needed help. The evaluator agreed that she was manic and possibly bipolar, a diagnosis I did not agree with but decided it was better to trust the assessment to the physician at her end, and my mother was admitted for seventy-two hours. What happened during that time, I will likely never know, as I heard nothing until she was released three days later, back to her home in Englewood, where she lived alone.
As the months went by, I received some messages that suggested the physicians at Porter had diagnosed my mother with psychosis and prescribed medication specifically for that condition, but she refused to take that medication. She then accused me of altering her medical record—another delusion. All the while, she occasionally claimed to have a counselor who corroborated that I was a terrible person, and that I had abandoned my mother on purpose, and was abusing her from a distance. At this point, I was seeking help from all avenues, from family and friends, to colleagues, to counselors, even contacting the police department to see if they had received any more emails from her. I was desperate to find her help, as I couldn’t do much of anything from my location in California, and she lived alone.
The answer was clear: Colorado law stated that I could not get my mother admitted to a hospital for mental health care involuntarily unless she was an immediate threat to herself or someone else. I couldn’t say she was a threat to herself because she never openly threatened suicide, and I couldn’t say she was a threat to someone else because she lived alone. I could get her institutionalized by court order only if she had more than one seventy-two hour admittance to a hospital within a three year time frame (Colorado Revised Statute, Article 10, Title 27: Care and Treatment of Mentally Ill, 102.8.5, Gravely Disabled, Header B).
I became familiar with these laws in December of 2015 after my mother called a welfare check on her sister, who lives in Chicago, in the hopes that she would be accosted by police officers in her area and taken to a hospital as a result. However, as my aunt is not a threat to herself or someone else by any means, that did not occur. She was visited by police, was asked a few questions, and they left. My mother was now using law enforcement to harass her family members. At this time my aunt called the Englewood police department to report the problem and seek help. Nothing came of it, despite my mother’s history with them, and Officer Fast’s history of setting up a case file with Arapahoe County Mental Health services. Because she posed no physical threat, nothing could be done based on Colorado law, despite the growing evidence of her illness.
In February of 2016, I received a message from my mother that crossed many lines in terms of her abusive words, and I again sought to get her help. I contacted Arapahoe County Mental Health Services and requested a case worker be sent out to evaluate her on the basis that she might be a victim of “elder self-neglect,” an assertion I felt had validity since several of her messages claimed that she was emaciated and losing weight. My mother, a master typist and organized businesswoman, was sending emails that were heavily misspelled and disorganized, as if she had been banging on the keyboard in rage. Their response was that I could call the police department for a welfare check if I felt she was a danger to herself, and that they would decide based on my complaints if she warranted an evaluation. I never heard back from them.
By March, I hadn’t been able to have a conversation with my mother in almost eighteen months. She frequently hung up on my calls, left bizarre voicemails on my phone, and the emails got progressively stranger. My mother claimed that my father was behind a robbery at a downtown pizza parlor and obsessed over the online video of the crime, despite the fact that the obviously very young, mustachioed man looked nothing like my sixty-year-old mutton-chopped father. When confronted with recent pictures, she would claim it was “not the face, but the body” that identified him. It was becoming increasingly clear that her condition, whatever it was, was deteriorating.
But in late March/early April, something even more strange happened: she got better. She spoke with me on the phone for a whole forty-five minutes before I said the wrong thing and she hung up on me. We talked more regularly, and the mean emails tapered, then stopped. She was selling her home and moving to the Springs. She wanted to know when I wanted her to come out and visit the baby; I was due on April 20th. But she didn’t understand why I had not previously invited her out; it was as if she was completely unaware of the things she had said in rage-full typed words for months on end. Until, one day, she apologized for what she typed. She said she was, “horrified by her behavior,” but didn’t say what prompted the apology. I decided to see it as a blessing; maybe she was really getting better.
On April 30th, ten days after my labor due date, my daughter was born. My mother was the first person I called; I was happy that I had not “cut her off” as so many people had suggested I do when her words became painful to read and to hear. I was glad I did not give up on her; that somewhere in her poisoned mind my mother still existed.
When I brought my baby home on Sunday, May 1st, my mother called and told me she thought she needed to be institutionalized. She wasn’t sure she could be trusted to make decisions, and wanted to give me power of attorney. On Monday, May 2nd, my mother called me less than two miles from her home, crying and helpless because her car broke down. After I called a tow truck, she then claimed she needed an ambulance; an assertion she dropped when the tow truck arrived and she got home. Tuesday, May 3rd, she initially called me several times looking for a way to re-home her pets, only to call back and say she was feeling better. I kept asking her to give me more time to organize the people I knew in Colorado to help her. I begged her to not worry, that we would get her the help she needed.
It was then that she started sounding vaguely suicidal, something that I had never heard from my mother before. She was not specific enough to warrant a welfare check; in fact, she said she had a doctor’s appointment that coming Thursday, and would discuss any concerns she had about her mental status at that appointment. I trusted that she would do so, convinced that she was not capable of harming herself, and certainly not when she was on the phone with me, hearing my newborn coo in the background. On Wednesday, May 4th, she called and spoke with me about concerns she had. We talked about whether or not it was wise for her to move to Colorado Springs, and if she should take her house off the market. I talked with her about how my new baby had the prettiest eyes and looked just like her. I told her I loved her. She said her realtor was on the other line, that she would call me back later.
On Thursday, May 5th, I received a package in the mail from my mother—it was filled with my old baby things, some photo albums, and rather inexplicably, some of my mother’s clothing. I called, and got no answer; I was not terribly concerned, as she said she had her doctor’s appointment that day, and my sister was in town visiting. Since I’d spoken with her every day that week, I comforted myself with the thought that she would call.
Little did I know, my mother let her dogs out in the front yard alone, and left her door propped open. Her car, still in the shop from the tow truck on Monday, could not take her to the doctor’s appointment she had assured me she was going to. On Friday, May 6th, her neighbor discovered her deceased in the basement of her home, after checking to see why the dogs were still outside. I was notified by my local police, and I cried on my sister’s shoulder, who was just as thankful as I was that we were together. At sixty-three years old, my mother had committed suicide. Less than a week after my baby was born, and eighteen months into the saga of her diminishing mental state that I had tried desperately to get her help for—only to be told that her indirect threats were not enough to get her the help I knew she needed.
Do you know when you call organizations for a welfare check on a family member that they ask you if the person in question has a method of which to hurt themselves? Are you aware that Colorado treats mental illness as something that can only be taken seriously when suicide is directly threatened, and not when the conditions that often precede suicidal ideation or behavior present themselves? If you look up psychosis online, the symptoms are fairly specific: difficulty concentrating, depressed mood, sleeping too much or not enough, anxiety, suspiciousness, withdrawal from family and friends, delusions, disorganized speech, depression, and suicidal thoughts or actions. My mother obviously exhibited all of these symptoms except for the very last one. Should it not have been evident to any medical care team that it was an inevitable symptom that they may not have been seeing?
My mother was not a violent person. She was not a gun owner. She was not a heavy drug user; her vices were cigarettes and marijuana. Yet in the last few weeks of her life, she spent time on the internet researching ways to commit suicide at home, how to overdose on Prozac and household chemicals. When one of her methods was unsuccessful, she went back to the search bar and typed in, “now what?” before settling on her fate. No one, not her friends nor her family, could believe my mother was capable of such a thing; as my sister says, that is why they call it “the unthinkable.” She was determined to end her life; she left no breadcrumbs to be found, none but the obvious signs that she had quickly and frighteningly gone from zero to sixty in less than a week. But, was it really just a week, if I had been asking people to help her for almost two years?
Through all of this, I had been limited by the blind spots that were present because of my distance. Since she passed, I have learned even more information: that my mother was under the care of several doctors, who echoed my concern. She saw a counselor relatively regularly, who noticed that she was manic and erratic, but couldn’t put her in an institution because she didn’t come in with evident marks, scars, or self-inflicted wounds. They wanted her to take anti-psychotic medication, but she refused, and often threatened to leave if doctors challenged her reality. These people knew she lived alone, and yet they continued to let her leave. They watched her lose weight but believed her when she said she was eating. They saw my requests for help; how could they not? Myself, my sister, her sister, the police department; her name was mentioned in several places due to the complaints we raised, and yet, my mother was allowed to deteriorate.
So my quandary is this: if I could not help her because I was far away, and my only evidence were the words typed out in front of me, that would be an understandable reason why she could get worse. But after being committed for a seventy-two hour hold at the hospital, why was there no follow up directly aimed at the possibility of suicide? If she had a case worker through Arapahoe County, what happened in terms of follow up for the appointment she missed on the day she took her own life? If her counselor could see that she was not well, and needed to continue returning for treatment, why do we insist on not allowing the caretakers of folks like this—family, friends, and medical personnel alike—to make the call that they need help despite their lack of outright suicidal ideation?
In mental health care in Colorado, why is only evident and imminent suicide deemed the only worthy cause for care?
Governor Hickenlooper, I implore you to examine the history of why Colorado law is the way it is, and understand that mental illness takes many forms. Long before my mother committed suicide, she exhibited several obvious and dangerous symptoms that could have warranted her institutionalization in other states. Colorado’s “Imminent Threat” laws prevent people like my mother from receiving help because it prevents family members, friends, and caregivers like me from seeking help for their loved ones. Remember the old adage, “crazy people don’t know they’re crazy?” It is absolutely true; the ones who most desperately need help often do not recognize it until it is too late.
My mother never acknowledged that she was ill until less than a week before she took her own life. I will be racked with guilt and nightmares of her death for the rest of my life, and all I have to show for my actions are thousands of emails and a log of phone calls, peppered with my cries for help that went unanswered.
Thank you for your time –
Margo Sloan
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