Time-bombs stalk U.S. streets

Press, 3 August 1983, Page 21

Time-bombs stalk U.S. streets

JOHN BARNES,

1, “Sunday Times,” reports on

the scandal of the nation’s outcasts.

Billy Ferry was everyone’s nightmare image of a loony: a vacant-eyed, evil-smelling, stringyhaired, bearded hulk, who shuffled around the port of Tampa, Florida, muttering to himself, begging and stealing. He was in and out of the city jail all the time. However, 30-year-old Ferry knew he was mad. A month ago he sprayed ominous warnings in red paint on the wall of a supermarket: “Billy can’t handle it. See. Fire. Fire.” But the message went unheeded.

So he took a bucket of petrol, poured it over customers queuing at the check-out, and tossed a match. The supermarket cashier and a young mother and her four-year-old daughter were killed. Five others, three of them teenagers, are in hospital with terrible burns. t Ferry told his u&ther on the telephone from jail: “1 was playing

chess and the king told me to do it.” The case of Billy Ferry is not an isolated one. Thousands of emotion-ally-disturbed people are walking the streets of America, uncared-

for, desperately needing help — and a danger to themselves and others. They are the victims of a good idea that went wrong. In the late 19505, mental health experts saw the development of powerful tranquillisers as an opportunity to free patients from Dickensian hospitals. They would be sent home, with prescriptions for their drugs, and would be helped by a national network of community health centres. Over the past 20 years, the hospital population has fallen from

600,000 to under 150,000, but the national network of centres has never materialised. When the patients leave hospital, most of them spend a few weeks in a halfway house. Then they are on their own. The results are painfully visible in every big city in America. Deranged people can be seen rummaging through bins, mumbling, and wandering the streets, often pushing a supermarket trolley containing a}s their worldly possessions. In Chicago, hundreds

at the Manteno state hospital were loaded on buses and simply dumped at street corners. In Texas, a former mental patient claims he has killed more than 100 women. Some of his claims have been confirmed by the authorities. A Mississippi man who had been in mental hospital two dozen times in 10 years was arrested for drunkenness and set fire to his cell, killing 29 inmates.

Horror stories like these have been surfacing all over the country. There has been a rash of lawsuits

against hospitals and psychiatrists. An Alabama court recently ordered five officials of a state hospital to pay $25 million for releasing a patient who promptly committed murder similar to the one for which he had been put in hospital four years earlier. In other states, the authorities have refused to acknowledge responsibility for former patients. After a nine-year-old boy was killed by a former inmate of a state-run hospital in Massachusetts, the boy’s father sued the state for negligence. The state responded to the lawsuit by invoking the doctrine of sovereign immunity, a legal relic from British colonial days. Thef family appealed. The state

supreme court dismissed the case after the attorney-general argued that the state psychiatrist could not be accused of negligence because “the art of psychiatry is just one step removed from black magic.” Billy Ferry is one of thousands who need help but have never been in an institution. For years before he finally exploded in the supermarket, he had been a “ticking time-bomb,” according to his sister. Ferry’s father says he sought help for his son time and again. “But no-one would help. We took him to the county mental health institution, and the psychiatrist said he was fine. He said to bring Billy back if Billy felt he was emotionally disturbed.” What happens to Ferry now? When he appeared' before a judge, manacled hand and foot, he was found incompetent to stand trial. He will be sent to an asylum.