2006
photo taken right after I filed
to run for county commission
in the Florida Keys
For two days I dreamed of something very important involving a lot of love in Key West, and then came a email from a dear friend down there, and I responded twice, and he responded, and I responded again. This US Army Special Forces combat veteran amigo belongs to the Republican Party and voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
On Sunday, May 5, 2024 at 11:26:09 AM CDT, German, Todd <xxxxxxxxx@xxxxx> wrote:
Article today in WSJ. Here is link,
A Lawyer’s Slide Into Psychosis Was Captured in a WSJ Profile. He Tells Us His Story
Julie Wernau | Photographs by Philip Cheung for The Wall Street Journal
Rob Dart has spent a year on the streets believing people are trying to control him via hypnosis.
LOS ANGELES—Rob Dart isn’t the successful lawyer and father who left the people who love him two years ago to follow his delusions. That Rob lives in the memory of friends and in family photos.
This Rob, who arrives on time for our interview, is standing by the roadside under the blazing California sun, his eyes and hair competing in wildness, his grin difficult not to match.
In the past year, this Rob has been hospitalized, shot, housed, unhoused, a winner and a loser in court battles. Ultimately, he has shed every scrap of evidence of his life before illness: his connections to his son, family and most friends. He wanders the streets of greater Los Angeles, begging for change and lying down to sleep when he is tired. He believes people are controlling him via hypnosis, activated by a headlock.
Rob, 44, doesn’t believe he is sick. He has refused treatment repeatedly. During a hospitalization last year, he argued remotely before a judge from his hospital bed that he shouldn’t be committed. The judge agreed.
“I did want to leave the hospital, and I did not want to take the medications,” Rob said.
Rob’s situation isn’t that uncommon. Doctors said his behavior is consistent with anosognosia, a neurological condition in patients unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric state. More than half of patients with schizophrenia and 40% of patients with bipolar disorder demonstrate anosognosia or severe lack of insight, studies show.
They present a conundrum for society: how to balance individual rights with people’s basic health? Solving the nation’s mental-health crisis requires the participation of some people who don’t think they need help.
Hundreds of people responded to a Wall Street Journal profile of Rob with stories of their own fights to help people lost in their own delusions. Some of their loved ones found stability after years of chaos. But many family members said they have spent decades living in the grief of losing someone in plain sight.
“Is it a biochemical disorder? Is it neurodiversity? Is it eccentricity? And who gets to decide?” said Elyn Saks, a professor of law, psychology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Southern California, who has schizophrenia.
Each person experiences delusions in their own way, Saks said, and medication doesn’t always erase them. Some people have delusions that last years. Others only experience delusions under severe stress. “Psychosis is not like an on/off switch, but a dimmer,” Saks said.
Rob draws no distinction between his current and former life. While friends and family say mental illness has taken everything from him, Rob says going off his medications has added context and texture to his experience of life.
“You realize you’re kind of the same person,” he said. “You just know more about yourself.”
Many states are trying to figure out how to help people like Rob. Nearly every state has laws allowing for court-ordered outpatient treatment.
Some states are building hospitals, or moving people from encampments to shelters. California is creating courts for mental health to move people who need help off the streets and into treatment. California and Washington are among states that have expanded laws allowing civil commitment for reasons other than violence.
States including Colorado and Florida recently gave people with mental illness extra tools to challenge commitments.
Civil commitments have risen nationwide. But evidence that commitment helps people recover is lacking. There isn’t enough public data to track commitments and draw conclusions about efficacy, said David Cohen, professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He said doctors are too quick to force medication to subdue patients.
“We try to deactivate people with antipsychotic drugs. We’ve lost the art of trying to figure out how to tackle this with the person in front of us,” Cohen said.
Most patients who have been hospitalized involuntarily say they felt they were left out of their own treatment decisions, studies show. When patients participate in decisions about their care, outcomes are better, said Schroeder Stribling, chief executive of Mental Health America, a mental-health advocacy network.
There aren’t enough practitioners to do that painstaking work. The U.S. has a shortage of more than 8,000 psychiatrists, leaving just a quarter of need met, according to KFF, the health policy research organization. The gap is even wider for people with psychotic disorders, who are treated by specialists in even shorter supply, mental-health professionals said. California needs 51 inpatient psychiatric beds per 100,000 adults, a 2021 Rand study found. The state has 15.
Patients are often asked to choose between their delusions and taking medications that leave them with tremors, sedation and sexual dysfunction. Rob said his medications made him gain weight. “It made me more afraid, less assertive, less confident,” he said. “Who wants to feel like that?”
He weaned himself off the drugs.
Rob slips lightly from cogency to delusion and back again. Over lunch at a diner, Rob talked about books and movies. About the pandemic, and working from home, and how inconsistent Starbucks employees are about free water and bathroom access. He’s funny. He asked enough probing questions to nearly derail the interview.
After nearly two hours, Rob looked up with a flash of self-consciousness. “Has the interview gone on too long?” he asked.
When he talked about the people working to destroy him, his grin vanished. He said he wants to get back to being a lawyer and believes people have taken his intellectual property.
He has refused to see his mother and sister. He believes they are among the people colluding to erase his memories. But he said he sometimes thinks about reconnecting with loved ones. “I’m not sure exactly how,” he said.
Write to Julie Wernau at julie.wernau@wsj.com
From:sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
To:German, Todd,julie.wernau@wsj.com
Mon, May 6 at 5:03 AM
Hi, Todd-
Thanks for sending me this very interesting article. The most interesting part to this former lawyer who became homeless is the former lawyer in the article who became homeless persuaded a judge to release him from a psych ward, because he didn’t want to be there taking psych meds, with which I once was all too familiar.
For 16 months, starting early 1997, my pills were prescribed for me by psychiatrists who had never taken the pills themselves and thus they had no clue what the pills did to the people who took them. Speaking only for myself, the pills I was given, different kinds of antipsychotics and the antidepressant Zoloft, really messed up my body and my emotions and my mind. The side effects were horrendous. I felt half my mind had died.
When I twice tried to quit cold turkey, after about 4 days I went into horrible withdrawal, which the 3rd psychiatrist said was not possible, as the pills were not addictive. I was put on the pills even though I was not acting out, I was not threatening anyone or myself. I was put on the pills simply because I said I had many experiences with angels known in the Bible. I weaned off the pills in 1998 by cutting the dosage 25 percent per week, and I felt angels also were helping me wean. After I started weaning, I started dreaming again. White hot sores in my throat went away. The night terrors stopped. I stopped feeling as if half my brain had died. I lost the 40 pounds I had gained after I started taking the pills. My quite elevated blood pressure and pulse rate significantly decreased.
I lived in your home maybe 4 months total in 2015 and 2016-17, when I was homeless for the second time. You didn’t seem to think I was crazy. You had watched me perform at many candidate forums as a candidate, and you were the forum moderator, and you didn’t seem to think I was crazy.
The last time I ran was for mayor of Key West, 2018, the six times I ran for that office, you introduced me at a meet the candidates event, and there were chuckles and groans from the audience. I said everyone here knows Key West is an open air insane asylum, and the audience laughed, and I said I am the head lunatic, and the audience laughed, and I said, so why not make it official? Sloan for mayor! There were no laughs. They looked like deer caught in headlights, after taking the bait and swallowing it hook line and sinker, and I set the hook. I did not tell them that the idea to say that to them had come to me out of the blue while I rode my bicycle to the event. Told to me by an angel.
At the candidate forum you later moderated, you introduced me as the lunatic party candidate, and I started to speak and said I was getting a phone call and I pulled out my flip phone, and there was laughter in the audience, and I said hello, and I said, Who?, God? and there was more laughter, and then I said You want to know why the City Commission stopped funding three really important programs for kids, and what were they thinking?, and the audience was stone quiet, as were the other mayor candidates.
When a woman new to the Key West sitting on the panel that ask candidates questions asked me why I was running, I said she was rather new to the city and so she probably didn’t know that very time I had run for mayor, and three times for county commission and once for school board, I was told by God in my sleep to run if I knew what was good for me, and that was my story and I was ticking to it, and she did not seem very happy with my answer, and the audience was really quiet.
I did not say that the idea for the phone call from God had come to me from out of the blue while I was riding my bicycle to the event, and the idea had come from an angel. The definition of insanity is being out of touch with reality, and I was the only person in that packed event who knew for a fact that God, angels and demons and even ETs exist, because I'd had many personal dealings with them.
A couple of days later, someone from Sean Hannity’s FOX show called and invited me to come to FOX’s studio and be on the air with Hannity, but one other mayor candidate would have to come to provide balance. I tried to persuade several of the other maybe candidates to join me, but they refused, saying they didn’t want to have anything to do with Hannity. They were far more worried about their sentiments, than what a great thing they could have done for Key West’s economy to join me on Hannity’s show and attract all manner of new weirdos to Key Weird with their money. I thought they had lost their ever-loving minds.
You told me last year that you would vote for me for president, after I said that my first official act would be to declassify and make public all of the American government's ET files.
When I look at America today, I see a giant cuckoo’s nest that the one flew over movie starring Jack Nicholson could not have begun to imagine. But I could, because in early 1997, I had met a real life sho nuff Nurse Rached and a psychiatrist just like the one in that movie, and then I met a second psychiatrist just like them, and they thought they were so fucking smart and knew everything, and they were so very wrong that it was fucking scary as hell that they were allowed to pretend to be doctors. By the grace of God I finally was helped to escape their clutches, and then the psychiatrist who took me on after he helped me escape them put me on the pills that nearly killed me.
So, I have to side with the homeless lawyer in the article, even if he is insane, because Jesus was homeless and many people said he was insane, and psychiatry has no clue what causes what they call insanity, which makes them totally out of touch with reality on that count, too.
If someone is truly dangerous to other people, that person needs to be confined. I would start with locking up Donald Trump and Joe Biden. If that does not happen, then nobody should be locked up, because those two are dangerous to every living human being. I told two of my grandchildren last night to keep their passports up to date, and to improve their Spanish, so they can easily move to a Spanish speaking country if America goes totally into the shitter.
You told me after the January 20, 2020 attempt to take over the national government that the rioters all should have been shot dead. I thought the same should happen to their leader. If I say that on Facebook, my account will be suspended. But so far, Facebook has not suspended my account for me saying America has gone batshit crazy. Nor for me saying, Bible salesman Donald Trump’s pecker is on trial in New York. Nor for me saying devout Catholic Joe Biden backing Israel in Gaza never knew Jesus.
Maybe someday the Wall Street Journal will wake up and put God first, for a change. But since that’s not going to happen, maybe the Journal will promote stopping the invasion from Mexico by stopping US dollars from going to Mexico until Mexico stops the invasion, and the Journal urges America to abandon Israel, and urges America to turn inward and start taking the many beams out of its own eyes, as the crazy man Jesus strongly recommended in the Gospels. For in God’s eyes, we are all homeless, and the many years I spent homeless and not homeless in Key West, dealing with the city government over how it treated its homeless people, convinced me that the city government had no clue how to fix its homeless problem, because there was no way to fix it, and it was insane to even try to fix it.
Sloan
sloan bashinsky
From:sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
To:German, Todd, julie.wernau@wsj.com
Mon, May 6 at 10:03 AM
You saw me many times at my worst, Todd, and at my best, and there is no way I can repay you for your many kindnesses to me, while many people wondered why you had anything to do with me, and you didn’t let that affect your and my relationship. I’m am sure that you played a large part behind the scenes with my daughters deciding to resume their relationships with me, and thus their husbands and their children’s relationships with me, which turn around began when I was still living in Key West, and it blossomed wonderfully after I moved back to Alabama in 2018, which enabled me to be with them in real time versus on the internet and telephone.
Because of very rough things that happened in my family, in which I was in the very middle, the one who spoke to it, I became the family outcast, which is more descriptive than the family black sheep. It did not help that psychiatry had nearly destroyed me and left even me for a while thinking I had gone completely insane and I was suicidal every day for 16 months, only to learn as I was about to come out of it, that it was part of something much bigger than I could have imagined while I was in the grip of it, which had been foretold in many ways in dreams, visions and quirky life experiences when I lived in Colorado from 1987 through 1995.
Also in play, which I was told in my sleep in 2002, in Key West, I had an unknown adversary, and it took me a couple of days to understand it was my father’s younger brother, who was born with the cord around his neck and his mind and body were damaged, and he became a huge embarrassment to my father and his older brother, and they never brought their friends to their home because of their younger brother, whom I had come to represent in my fathers eyes, and perhaps in the eyes of other family members.
There was nothing I could do about that, nor about the estrangement from my father and my daughters. I knew I had to keep getting up in the morning and dealing with what was in front of me, and that’s what I did, and some days I did better that other days, but never once during that time did I remotely consider taking my own life, because I knew something was with me, nudging, informing, spanking me, encouraging me, redirecting me, and I knew I was not alone, and it’s that way even until now.
Every day and night, during the often revolting winding down of my father’s estate during the covid shutdown, which you witnessed, when I very much wanted to kill some lawyers, I was steered mostly in dreams by angels. I needed to be in Birmingham to deal with that, and it made it much easier for me to visit my children and their families, than if I still lived in Key West.
The homeless lawyer in the Wall Street Journal article seems to me to be doing a whole lot better than most of the homeless people I got to know in Key West and other places, especially the homeless people whose main preoccupation was drinking or wondering when they would have money for their next drink. As you know, I was banned from Key West’s homeless shelter for life for writing at my blog that I thought those homeless people would be better off dead than to continue living in that way.
I fell in love with one of them, which was a really intense and interesting adventure that enriched my life and broke my heart at the same time, because she would not stop drinking, and there was no way it would work out for us. Finally, using money my father’s estate was loaning me against a future inheritance, I got off the homeless rolls, and got her to her mother’s home, where he lived until she died suddenly of a massive seizure, and after her mother called me to report what had happened, my heart unhinged and I had myself a really good cry. Then, I wrote her eulogy at my blog.
I told a lot about her in a podcast, which ended up with over 500,000 complete watches world wide. It broke my heart to take down her eulogy, and all of the podcasts at YouTube, after MAGAs threatened me and my tech friend who created the podcasts, and our families. Already, we had been threatened on Rumble by MAGAS, who had republished clips from our podcasts, which were about Donald Trump and MAGAS, and Rumble took down those threats on its own. MAGAS tried to kill my tech friend, because of his political activism where he lived, which went further than my political activism in Key West, in that he got local government officials investigated and some were prosecuted by law enforcement, and he had to go into a safe house and he nearly died from the injuries MAGA hitmen left him for dead with.
I think from time to time that I should quit shooting off my mouth, because my children and their families might be injured or killed by MAGAs to get back at me. I poke President Biden and the Democrats plenty, but so far no threats from their side. If I had my dream come true, it would be to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning, and I am somewhere else trying to adjust to that. But I woke up this morning in my younger daughter’s home, feeling really lousy, but I’m still here, so I take that to mean God wants me to be here even if I don’t want to be here.
Sloan
German, Todd
From:todd.german@xxxx
To:sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
Cc:julie.wernau@wsj.com
Mon, May 6 at 11:12 AM
Afternoon Sloan,
I figured the WSJ article would stir some thoughts.
As you know, I value your friendship and mentorship greatly. You gave me unique perspectives on religion, homelessness, mental challenges and I suppose, just looking at the world in general.
While I seldom challenge your memory, it seems like you stayed here a bit longer than 4 months total. One reason I say that is that we watched the better part of a full season of Daredevil together and that was in the days when shows only came out one show a week. To that note, I understand there is a brand new “Daredevil Reborn” series ready to drop on Disney. I look forward to watching and comparing notes with you on it. Watching those Hell’s Kitchen stories with you is a very fond memory.
As to assisting in bringing you and your family back together. I consider that one of my proudest and most significant accomplishments ever. I am so happy for it and smile every time I read about you and the little one. I am particularly fond of “Grandfossil.” I believe I’v mentioned, I am “GT,” Grandpa Todd, to my granddaughter Liv.
Well, back to work.
Have a great day my friend,
sloan bashinsky
From:sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
To:German, Todd
Cc:julie.wernau@wsj.com
Mon, May 6 at 5:12 PM
Hmmm, my recollection is the Daredevil series had been out a while, and we sometimes watched two episodes a night. Interesting metaphor, daredevil, as it seems I lived several personal seasons of it over the years :-).
My tech friend made Grandfossils' Tales to His Grandchildren into a book, which can be read for free at the internet library, archive.org, even as Grandfossil keeps roaming ever just out of reach of the persistent trackers the Smithsonian sent out to find him after they let him out to roam a bit with a tracker on his right hind foot, and he gnawed off the foot and the tracker and grew a new foot and is on the lam ever since :-)
Ciaosky, Amigo
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
