Editor:
Thank you for drawing community attention to the mental health climate in Humboldt (“Heartbreaking,” Feb. 21).
I’ve lost dear friends in our therapeutic desert up here. Dawn Mulderig, Anthony Sanger: each possessing a special genius, and many more wandering the midnight streets trailing their baggage.
The changes over the years have not been good. County services are ever more like a drug vending machine. The buffering effect on mental crises of human contact is disappearing: more cars than faces, people in check-out lines with ear buds and eyes locked to their phones.
No refuge. No bathrooms. Separators on benches. A yard owner forced by the county to cut the trees along his stream and man on daily patrol so that homeless people cannot hide.
Our society provides less and less in the way of moral guidance, and my own equilibrium would be disrupted if I were living outdoors in weather like this week’s. Your articles hinted at long-term hospitalization for the mentally ill but, remember, these institutions were called “snake pits” back when Gov. Reagan opened their doors.
Thank you for appealing to our own vestigial impulses of brotherly/sisterly love. As the sociologist Emil Durkheim remarked, “Individuals are too closely involved in the life of a society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Ellen Taylor, Petrolia
This article appears in Wild 2019.
I was slammed with the name Anthony Sanger when I started to read this letter. I knew, or suspected, that something had happened to Anthony because it has been so long since I’ve seen him or heard from him. I now know that the worst that I had feared is what has happened. I’ve known Anthony for many years. It was a joy to go to the Jam when Anthony was on keyboard. He truly was a genius. I’ve never heard anyone play that piano like he could. It was a small upright and often he would get so out there that someone would have to grab the piano because it was about to flip over and hit the floor. I spent many, many hours with him when he went into a manic phase because he had decided he didn’t need the Bipolar meds anymore. He lost everything as a result of the manic phases, his little house, his wife, his son, everything. I can’t do justice to how tragic it was and what it was like when he came down and was hit by all he’d lost. This mad, brilliant piano player who had a life of loses and struggle that is beyond heartbreaking. Beyond his pills there was no help for him. He ended up in scuzzy living situations in Eureka and sometimes with no roof over his head. I’d run into him pulling his piano behind him and I would try to find a way to help but rarely could do much. Thank you, Ellen, for at least giving me an ending, though not the one I would have wished for. I’d love to know more if you’d ever care to share.