ETHAN STACEY, DIANE LINKLETTER: MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS

On 28 May, authorities finally indicted the mother and step father of Ethan Stacey for capitol murder. Outside some people carried banners calling for their deaths. One sign spelled the step father’s name with nooses where the Os should be. Ironic that so many people think it is all right for the state to take life as a punishment for taking life. It clearly sends mixed messages – and of course one can avoid the punishment if one is persuasive enough to a jury.

When I read about the outpouring of support for Ethan Stacy and his family, I wonder where were these people when the four-year-old boy really needed them?

Deseret News articles indicate many people believed both the mother and the boy friend possessed unstable if not just outright mentally ill personalities. The stepfather supposedly has multiple personalities, one of which gets violent when criticized. Apparently one of his personalities broke up a jail cell, and so the authorities will charge him with destruction of public property.

The point, though, is this: Somehow the boy wound up unsupervised with both of them.

American culture has since 1946 supported funding military adventurism abroad and atomic weapons system, which incidentally our government used only on our local downwinders. We would be better if a major chunk of that money had funded mental health hospitals, the study of mental illness, their solutions, and cures.

In Utah, mental health receives from uninterested legislators even less lip-service and mediocre funding than does our underfunded public education. Since 1946, these same legislators always managed to find maximum funding for roads.


ANOTHER VIEW OF THE SAME SUBJECT:

Art Linkletter died on 26 May , age 97. I remember his programs House Party and People are Funny which our family used to watch fairly religiously. In the 1960s he was maybe the great commercial spokesman in the days after the decline of the great commercial spokesman of the 1940 and 1950s Arthur Godfrey. The careers of Godfrey and Linkletter bore some resemblances to each other in that their folksy charm translated into advertising power, though Linkletter’s talents as an interviewer were more obvious on the TV screen than whatever Godfrey contributed to his programs. Godfrey mostly exuded folksy charm and a tendency to controversy. Linkletter interviewed and wrote books.

Linkletter’s personal life tended toward tragedy and unhappiness. 3 of his 5 children died before he did. His youngest daughter Diane Linkletter died in a hugely sensational 1969 suicide when she jumped out of her 6th floor apartment window in the presence of her boyfriend. It is now quite clear that the girl did not have drugs in her body when she leaped; the coroners made that point clear enough in the official reports. The evidence seems compelling that she suffered severe clinical depression and offed herself deliberately.

Linkletter, however, insisted practically from the first day that she had an LSD habit that contributed to her hurling herself out of a window on some sort of acid trip or acid flashback. She might have done illicit drugs, but those habits might have also been her attempt to self medicate the depression problem. Anyway, Linkletter put his considerable public relations skills into that tale and became a spokesman for tougher stricter laws against the illicit drugs used recreationally. He can take some credit for convincing President Nixon to declare war on drugs in 1971, but that achievement remains something of a dubious achievement considering how little the war on drugs has actually worked to reduce illicit drug use in the USA. Americans have hypocritical attitudes about drug use then and now.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Linkletter had been honest about his daughter’s death and used his public relations power to be a spokesman for better mental health treatment and more funding for mental illness treatments and cures. Instead he went into denial about her illness and her suicide, and the war on drugs got a major boost from a faked premise. Anyway it is yet another example of a family that refused to discuss publicly the issue of mental health problems in their family when the discussion might have helped others with mental health crises in their families move in more positive directions.


THE CALL TO ACTION

People in our culture talk a good talk about protecting children. That protection is mostly just words. Ethan Stacey is only the latest victim

Our legislators should have framed photos of Ethan on their desks. During the next session, he will remind them what happens when we ignore mental health.

Congress should always do more to fund mental health research, treatments, and cures.