Matthew Parsons: This is the start of this oral history on mental health in Appalachia.

Im Matt Parsons,
and Im here with my father Will Parsons who has some personal experience with the matter. Im gonna
refer to you as dad, cause Id feel awkward otherwise.
Will Parsons: I would too, so I would prefer you refer to me as dad, same as you always have, since you
were a small child. Pretty much your whole life.
MP: Not too small. It took me a long time to learn to speak at all.
Will Parsons: Thats true.
MP: So, I want you to start by telling me the story of your experience with the mental healthcare system
in Appalachia, and then maybe we can talk some more in depth about specific facets of that.
Will Parsons: Certainly. I am Will Parsons, one of four siblings. My mother is Carol Mash Parsons, and
my father is Fred Parsons. I have an older sister, and an older brother, and a younger brother. My brother
who is two years older than me is mentally retarded. He is classified as mildly mentally retarded. Dont let
the term mildly confuse you. It means that he cannot function on his own, he has to have assistance all the
time. He will never be able to drive a vehicle or live by himself. He always has to have someone take care
of him. But, he can speak relatively well, he can get around, he can ride the ride-on lawn mower and mow
the grass, that sort of thingso hes not completely helpless. About five years ago six years ago now
he rode his bicycle approximately ten miles from his home where he resided with our mother to his
nephew, Josh Kinsers house. While there, Josh asked him to take his [Joshs] two-year-old daughter to
the bathroom. She was being potty-trained, the mother had left the house, and the father was occupied
with something on the computer. So he asked Michael to take the child to the bathroom, which was a
terrible decision on his part since Michael isnt really capable of that level of responsibility. He was gone
longer than the father anticipated that he should have been, so the father did eventually get up and go
check on the situation. What he discovered when he got to the bathroom was that the child had no clothes
on, nor did Michael have any clothes on. They were both totally naked. He then proceeded to beat
Michael up pretty good and call the police, who immediately came and arrested Michael. As it turns out,
the father I dont mean to cast him in too negative a light. He has pretty severe mental illness of his
own. But, the police came and arrested Michael. He was released on a $100,000.00 bond, to my mother.
She put her house up for the bond. When he did eventually go to court, he had a court appointed lawyer.
The judge immediately, without reviewing any evidence, really, to amount to anything at all By the
way, I should say that actually, nothing occurred. It looks as if, in reality, no laws were ever broken. So he
did something he shouldnt have done, but he didnt break any laws in the process. The child had not been
violated at all. The child was taken to the hospital to check that out and it was concluded that she had not
been. Of course Michael, who functions on an eight to ten-year-old level at most things, and a little less
than that at something, and actually a little higher at some things he didnt know what he was doing. He
had absolutely no sexual experience at all; still hasnt had, so it was pretty apparent to everybody
involved who cared to look, anyone who cared to see the reality for what it was, that this was just two
children discovering. Not the best of circumstances since one of those children was, in reality, a 40-yearold male with a 40-year-old male sex drive. Its not the sort of thing that anybody would condone, but
thats the reality of the situation. So the judge sentenced him well, you cant use the word sentenced
because he was never tried. He was found incompetent to stand trial by virtue of his mental retardation,
which one would think would mean he would be sent home and that would be the end of it, which is what
should have happened. But, what it did do was allow the judge to remand him to a forensic mental health
hospital, which he did, for a period of twenty-five years. The state law in West Virginia says that if a
person is found incompetent to stand trial, they can be placed under the jurisdiction of the court for the

maximum period of time that they would have been sentenced had they been found guilty. So that statute,
right off the bat, opens the door to lots of possibility for improper action on the part of the court, because
he was not afforded a trial, has never been afforded a trial, and was basically sentenced to twenty-five
years in prison, (i.e. the mental health facility. It is very much like a prison, and I will get to that in a few
minutes) without a trial. This was all done without a trial, and its legal in the state of West Virginia. It is
highly questionable as to whether its constitutional or not, but in fact he was detained for, as it turns out,
almost six years without a trial. When it first happened we were all just in disbelief. We couldnt believe
this was actually happening and we assumed that surely something would happen and maybe hed be
gone for He actually was sent to the hospital for a thirty day evaluation initially. Of course the
hospitals evaluation was that he was dangerous. The family hired a psychologist outside of the court
system to go an evaluate him and he did, and his findings were, according to the standardized test that he
used, that Michael was not a danger at all, and very unlikely to be a repeat offender. Im the one who
hired him and I asked him very specifically and made sure he understood that he was not being paid to tell
us what we wanted to hear. I really was interested in knowing: is this person dangerous? Because, if he is
then I need to rethink my position on whats the best way to care for him and encourage the family that
direction. The psychologist said that, most definitely, his findings were unbiased and he testified in court
that Michael was not a danger to himself or others and likelihood of repeat offense as extremely low. The
state psychologist who did the dangerousness assessment, who happened to be just out of forensic
psychology school in West Virginia, found him to be a danger to himself and others. And, amongst the
things that she cited as indicators that he was dangerous were that he was poor, that he was a male, that he
didnt have a job a poor white male who didnt have a job pretty much that sums it up. She actually
had no he didnt display schizophrenia, wasnt delusional, didnt hear voices. She had a list of things
that he could be found dangerous because of, and none of the things that you would think were actually
dangerous did he fall into the category of. But, he did fall into those few categories that they could place
him in and they claimed that he was dangerous because of it. Poor, white male with limited mental facility
is what it basically boiled down to, which in my opinion would include 75% of the male population of the
state of West Virginia, unfortunately. Theres a lot of poor people. The thirty day evaluation then turned
into a 25 year jurisdiction, which we immediately hired lawyers and doctors to start fighting, because we
didnt feel it was at all fair or accurate. Well, as we started digging around and finding out what was
going on- First of all, the facility he was being warehoused in, along with about a hundred other forensic
patients, we started noticing that the staff actively engaged in behavior toward the patients that seemed
designed to keep them upset rather than calm. When he first got there he was allowed to have a Walkman
CD-player. After about thirty days, that was taken away from him. Also, I should mention, he is a
musician. He wasnt, while in the facility, allowed to listen to any music. He wasnt allowed to play any
music, which is probably the single most important activity in his life up to this point. Hes quite a good
musician actually, especially considering his limited mental facility. So we started questioning some of
that behavior, and several times we were told one thing and the reality would become something else. For
example, someone from the family would go to visit him a couple times during the week when he was
first placed in the hospital. This particular hospital was about two and a half hours away from my
mothers house so it was quite a drive for her, but she still went at least twice a week. What they first
started doing was, once she got there for the visitation hours, they would come up with an excuse as to
why she couldnt visit, despite the fact that she had just driven two and a half hours to do it. After a
couple of times of not being able to visit, she started calling ahead, saying, Im coming, is this gonna be a
problem? and they would say, No, its not gonna be a problem until she got there and they might say,
you can visit, but you cant visit for another hour, youll have to go somewhere and come back or they
might say, no, you cant visit. One particular time when I was visiting along with my mother we got
there and were told on that day that we werent going to be allowed to visit. For me, it was about a seven

hour drive. They have a visitation room. Theres no logical reason why visitation shouldnt be allowed.
The other patients very rarely got visitors, which is another issue. I had the facility to justbarge my way
into the administration area and say whats going on? Do these nurses really have the authority to tell us
that we cant visit? and Georgette Bradstreet, whose office I ended up in, made the necessary
arrangements for us to be allowed to visit that day and I was very appreciative of it. That was before I
learned that she was really who was behind a lot of the misbehavior. Anyway, it quickly became apparent
that Michael was not capable of obeying the rules that they established in this facility. He couldnt obey
them nobody could obey them, especially not a mentally retarded person. One health service worker
would instruct them to do one thing and another health service worker would punish them for doing it. To
begin with I thought it was a lack of communication between them, but eventually I learned that it was
not a lack of communication, it was the opposite. It was actually communication. They set those patients
up to fail over and over and over, and most of those patients actually as far as I know, he was the only
person who was there that was actually classified as mentally retarded. The rest of them were mentally ill.
Thats an important distinction. Michael is not mentally ill. He didnt have a diagnosis of mental illness.
It took us a while to figure out that he wasnt supposed to be there because he wasnt mentally ill, but we
eventually did. The next time we went to court we said, Hey, youre holding someone in a facility for
mental illness who is not mentally ill. So, at that point, the judge dismissed what we had to say, or what
our lawyer had to say, but at that point, they reevaluated him again and gave him a diagnosis of
pedophilia. He had been in the hospital facility for about two years at this point, before they gave him that
pedophilia diagnosis. They also had moved him from one hospital to another hospital, which was quite a
bit closer for us, about 45 minutes from my mother which helped tremendously. She and my sister would
go and visit Michel then at that facility sometimes four times a week, three or four times a week, about
every other day. But, the treatment that he received at that hospital, if anything, was even worse than what
he had received at the first hospital. And mostly, there were two or three health service workers whose
names always showed up. He would always complain that this particular health service worker had
treated him this way or that way. One of them was in charge of the area where they went for recreation,
which was still inside the building. They really werent allowed to go outside at all. They werent allowed
to leave their unit, which means that they had a commons area that they could come to and their own
room, which they shared with at least one other person, sometimes as many as three other people
between two and four people per room. Other than that, they are restricted completely to that facility. For
an hour a day they can go to another recreation area, and it was in this recreation area that a lot of the
abuse started to occur. They started accusing Michael of trying to sneak things back from the recreation
area. At about the same time, they made us stop visiting in the visiting room on his unit, and instead
insisted that we visit in the foyer of the entire building. Now, whats really remarkable about that is that
this is a facility that is very restricted and the entrance and egress is very controlled. His unit was locked
at all times. There was a not a door that he could get out of. So it was kind of bizarre to have us start
meeting in the foyer where he could have easily walked out the front door any time he wanted to. One of
the health service workers who was in charge of supervising our visit, because we had to have supervised
visits, eventually made the statement to my mother that the reason they were having us meeting in the
foyer, was because they wanted him to try to escape. They wanted him to try to leave the building.
MP: She said that, specifically?
WP: She said that, specifically.
Now, thered never be any proof that she said that, because she would deny it of course but that doesnt
change the fact that it happened. Well, I wrote tons of letters and made a lot of noise and eventually they
stopped forcing the visitation to be in the foyer because it was just too dangerous. Not that I thought he
was going to try to make an escape from the foyer, but I was afraid he was gonna get accused of it or he
was gonna get accused of acting inappropriately with some other visitor. You know, children could come

and go through the foyer, and they were very adamant that he was to have absolutely no contact with
children at all. He couldnt talk to them on the phone, couldnt have any pictures of any relatives that
were children. He could absolutely have nothing to do at all with anybody under the age of eighteen,
except when they put him in the foyer to visit, in which case, there were a lot of underage people that he
might have been able to come into contact with. In fact, my mother and the rest of the family members
were very cautious. Wouldnt even allow him to say Hello, to a child. We knew at that point that
anything he did is likely to get him in a lot of trouble, no matter how innocent it was. His mental health,
by this point, had really started to deteriorate, as one might imagine someones mental health would.
Which I think no, I dont think, I know was by design. If theyre gonna keep people housed, they need
to justify keeping them housed, especially with a patient like Michael who didnt have mental illness. He
was mentally retarded. There was a definite, concerted effort, to damage him mentally. Everything that
they did to him, everything that they said to him for example, for a couple of years, he wasnt allowed
to eat his meals with any other people. He had to sit by himself, facing away from the rest of the room
during meal time. He wasnt allowed to engage in any social activity during meal time. And I think most
psychologists/psychiatrists will agree that, for humans, social interaction at meal time is a very, very
important part of our lives. So they took that away from him. They took his music away from him. They
started accusing him of a lot of sexual deviant behavior, which he had never engaged in. He had a
roommate at one point, who he quite liked, who was and older gentleman, who didnt have very good
mental function either and also didnt have good control of his bowels, and he had a hard time getting
around in general. He often would urinate in the bed, or worse. So Michael was good to help him get out
of bed. At one point he got accused of engaging in some sort of sexual behavior with this patient when the
nurses saw him helping the other patient out of bed. The health service workers now this is documented.
Ive got the paperwork on what Im about to say. Health service workers, on multiple occasions, accused
my dad of having sexual relationships with Michael while in the visitation room at the hospital, which is a
glass room by the way, and they also accused my mother of it on several occasions. So, Michael
supposedly is having sex with his incontinent roommate, and also having sex with my dad in the
visitation room, and hes having sex with my mother in the visitation room. These were things that were
really said. Theres documentation to prove it. I think if he werent mentally retarded, it would have
driven him crazy. I dont think he would have been able to have stood it for that period of time. These are
acts perpetrated by people in the mental health field, so its hard to imagine that they could use the excuse
of ignorance. I dont think they were ignorant about what they were doing. I think, quite to the contrary, I
think they knew what they were doing. They were doing it, not to help him get over mental illness, but to
create mental illness.
A lot of people who would hear a story like that, of them trying to make him misbehave, would say, what
good would that do? What purpose would that serve? Arent these patients a drain on the system?
Thats a great question and the answer is: theres about 150 forensic mental health patients in these two
state-run hospitals. Well, technically they arent state run. It hard to describe their state affiliation because
it depend on what legal aspect of it youre looking at it from as to whether they consider themselves state
run or not. They are state funded though, and, for each patient in these two facilities, the hospitals receive
between 1500 and 2000 dollars per day, per person. After we had investigated for quite some time and
talked to a lot of people, specifically in the mental health system of West Virginia, we were finally given
that information. I wont say any names as to who gave it, but the person who gave us that figure, was
very, very high up in the state program. That wasnt the only person. When we heard the information
from this particular person I said we can believe that. We had found out various times previous to this that
there was a lot of money involved. We knew that there was at least 1500 dollars per day involved, and
this person said that actually it was closer to 2000.

MP: How much would you say is the amount of money you would need to take care of a patient on one of
these units, or even Michael specifically?
WP: The state of West Virginia says it costs 600 dollars a month to take care of Michael, 600 dollars
month for him to be taken care of at home. If he were living on his own, with no expected income at all,
600 dollars a month would be what he was expected to live on. Now, out of that 600 dollars a month, its
assumed that hes gonna provide his own food and shelter. One would think, in a building that houses 100
people, the cost of food and lodging would be considerably less than one person, individually -considerably less per person. So if you can take care of one person, by himself, for 600 dollars a month,
then you should be able to take care of 100 people for, we should saywhat? What does it come to?
60,000 dollars per month? At the outside? Am I doing my math correctly? 600 dollars per month, times
one hundredthats 60,000 per month, to house one hundred people. I think thats a little on the high
side, but thats a reasonable figure. Because youre not only buying food, and the building to house them
in. You have to have people hired to take care of them. Psychologists hired to interview them. In the case
of Michael and those patients at the hospital, he saw a psychologist once per week for approximately
thirty minutes, and Im sure that the psychologist or psychiatrist got paid a lot of money for doing
nothing. But thats irrelevant, its neither here nor there. So 60,000 dollars per month I think would be a
pretty good estimate. Now, I understand that there are costs I might not readily comprehend, such as
insurance or other things that Im not capable of foreseeing. Im sure that the administrative people over
at the hospital get paid a handsome salary too, but lets do the math. At 2000 dollars per day, for one
hundred people. 2000 dollars per day? Thats 200,000 dollars, per day. 200 times thirty. The numbers are
gonna start getting really big, really quick. Where is that money going? I dont know, but I do know one
thing. That sure does come up with a pretty plausible explanation for why they would want to house and
keep housed as many forensic mental health patients as possible.
MP: Whats the difference between a mental health patient and a forensic mental health patient
specifically, and how does that relate to Michael?
WP: Well, a forensic mental health patient is a patient that is in the facility because they have violated the
law and have been placed there by the court. Just a mental health patient, the hospital is not gonna receive
anything remotely close to that much money for, if any. I mean, most mental health patients in hospitals,
they are either expected to pay for it or their family is expected to pay for it, or theyre too poor to pay for
it in which case the state pays for it, but they arent gonna pay 2000 dollars a day for that. So, Im
convinced that he was sent to the mental health facility by a judge who wanted him to go there because, in
some way shape or form, hes benefiting. As a matter of fact I should point out that the judge who sent
him to this mental health facility sent a mentally retarded person to the hospital, who not only had it not
been proven that hed committed a crime, the evidence showed that it was very likely that he had not
committed a crime. But that was never questioned really because he was never tried and the family was
informed that he couldnt be tried because he was incompetent to stand trial. Now what Ive learned since
then is that we actually could have pushed for it and he could have had a trial, but that never happened.
So, I feel confident the judge had him where he wanted him. Now, in addition to sending Michael to these
mental health facilities, these two hospitals were in the newspaper quite a lot, and still are on a regular
basis because theyre overcrowded. They keep more people there than they were designed to hold, which
tells you something about the facilities. They werent fancy, they werent spending the 2000 dollars a day
on a new building. But, the West Virginia Supreme Court had placed this particular judge over these
hospitals. He was the overseer, because supposedly the overcrowding and the abuse there was a long list
of offences. There has been for the past decade at least. They did studies and determined that the heath
service workers really were mistreating the patients and that the facilities were inadequate and that the

patients were not getting better and in fact getting worse. Theres reports, official reports that will attest to
that. So, this particular judge was placed as overseer of these hospitals and the very judge whose
overseeing the hospitals whose in the newspapers on a regular basis saying, something has to be done
about this overcrowding problem insisted on sending Michael to that same, overcrowded hospital. Same
one. Hes saying its overcrowded, but still he sent Michael to the hospital. Michael who should not have
been there. It was illegal for him to be there. Who, there was ample evidence to show, was not a danger,
was not mentally ill, is not mentally ill. I dont believe that the judge was at all honest. I have no hard
evidence that proves conclusively that he was engaging in illegal activity, but thats what I believe. There
were a lot of things that were said during meetings by the psychiatrist in charge, or by some of the
lawyers in charge, that sort of, I felt like, were designed to let us know that we were powerless in this
particular situation, because what was legal didnt matter. The judge was gonna do whatever he wanted to
do regardless of the law, and there was nothing we could do about it. An attempt was made most
definitely to make us back off and leave the situation alone, which Im sure worked on almost every other
patient there, if not every other patient there, because most of the patients there had committed some
pretty horrendous atrocities. And of course, I feel pretty confident it was the result of their mental illness.
One patient set his mothers house on fire with her in it. Some of them had killed people. There were a lot
of serious offenses. I understand the need for a facility like that, but I dont understand why theyre in the
condition that theyre in in the state of West Virginia. And actually Im sure its not limited to that, Im
sure its throughout Appalachia. Eventually, in an attempt to discourage the family from visiting Michael
at all they started to do a strip search of him after each visit. The informed us that if we wanted to come
and visit, that we need to be aware that it was gonna cause him to have to go through a strip search. He
had never, absolutely never, tried to sneak anything in to that hospital or out of it, never. Hes never had a
history of drug us, drug abuse, no cigarettes, no alcohol, nothing. They knew all this. Hed been there for
years at this point. They knew this. They didnt think he was trying to sneak anything in. Hes mentally
retarded. He wouldnt have even known how toto insert something into his anus so that he could sneak
it in to the facility, but that didnt keep him from, after every visit, having to strip completely and bend
over. It was designed to tear him down mentally. The mental health facility was actively trying to destroy
his mental health and it wasnt just limited to his. They were abusing other patients the same way. He was
getting it a little worse than most of them because he had family that was there watching and paying
attention and they were trying to scare us away or drive us away. Also, those other people didnt have any
family. We visited a lot and so we knew who got visits and who didnt. Most of them never got a visit,
ever, for any reason. A few of them sometimes would get a visit on their birthday or at Christmas time.
And there were maybe a couple others that, you know, maybe a wife would come to visit every two
weeks, but that was about the extent of it. I dont feel terribly negative toward the families of those people
for not coming to visit because most of them are so incredibly poor they couldnt have come to visit if
they had wanted to. Its just an example of the poor of this nation being used as an excuse to push money
around amongst the rich.
MP: How is this different in Appalachia compared to other places and how did we get here? What are
your experiences with that?
WP: Most of the states in the union have at one time had a law that was similar to the one that West
Virginia still has, which is that if a person is found incompetent to stand trial that they can be placed
under the jurisdiction of the court. Most of them have had that law, most of them do not have it now.
Most states have also abolished their forensic mental health facilities nearly altogether. Most states had a
mental health system similar to what West Virginia has now all the way around, and most states have also
abolished them. Now, the state that still do have it are the states you would expect- the poorest states in
the union: West Virginia, Mississippi Tennessee does not have a terrible mental health facility as far as

I can tell. There are a few other states theres only a handful of four or five states that still had a similar
system, and, with the exception of Mississippi, they were all in Appalachia. We had a specialist that flew
in from Montana that worked in mental health facilities similar to West Virginias and had successfully
gotten it changed in a few other places, and she eventually gave up on West Virginia. She thought she
was gonna be able to come out and make a change, and we certainly hoped that she was going to, but she
didnt. It scared up the judge a little bit, for a little while, but not for very long.
MP: So she gave up.
WP: She gave up. Well she was in very poor health as well.
MP: So, would you say that thats typical? Over the years, there have been a lot of government
organizations that have come and tried to interfere with the way that Appalachia has functioned for the
past several years, the past several decades. Would you say that its typical for people to come in and then
leave saying, theres nothing I can do?
WP: Yes, absolutely. I think the people who are born in Appalachia tend to do the same thing. Its really
difficult to fight it. Its a whole lot easier to throw up your hands and move to some place thats a little
more forward thinkin..but thats not gonna help Appalachia any. Im optimistic. I think that the
situation will resolve itself, eventually. I dont think its a system that can last, but there sure are gonna be
a lot of very poor people suffering extremely in the interim, just like they are right now.
MP: You keep bringing up poor people, specifically. By that I assume you mean financially speaking.
WP: I mean, specifically, financially speaking. I mean poor, in its most common [form].
MP: And because you keep using that term, I cant help but think that youre trying to imply that there is
a definite connection between mental health and the financial state of citizens of Appalachia.
WP: Im very confident that no studies would show anything to the contrary, other than that. And that is
to say, rather, that there is definitely a correlation between mental health and financial situations. Yeah,
poor people are definitely suffering a lack of mental health treatment. And, you know, if we were gonna
look at it from an evolutionary point of view, most evolutionary biologists would also agree that the
members of any society that are at the bottom of the society, the bottom of the social ladder, have poor
health in general physical and mental health, live shorter lives. If youve got a situation where
everybody has access to adequate nutrition (like we actually do have in Appalachia not that everybody
takes advantage of it, but nutrition is available - Its not promoted like it should be, but its there) and
people die early anyway, its almost certainly gonna be due to mental stress.
MP: Which leads me into what I really want to get around to. I want you to speak a little bit about the rest
of the family and how this mental health in Appalachia impacts them, but really I want to know why.
Why is it this? Why are we, as Appalachians, poor, and therefore severely disabled mentally in so many
ways and so frequently?
WP: Okay I will answer the question in a minute because I dont want to lose my train of thought about
Michael and his situation. I want to also describe something that happened in the hospital while he was
there. It happened several times, at the hands of the same health service workers over and over. There was
a 23-year-old white male who was healthy physically, but suffered from pretty serious mental issues. He
was killed in the hospital. He was on Michaels unit. Actually, his room was right next door to Michaels.
One evening, in the name of subduing him, three health service workers held him down. One of them
choked him, and he died. Now, I dont think it ever went to court. One of the lawyers I hired actually

handled that case eventually, and my understanding is they settled out of court. I met with that family,
talked to them several times and, just like I suspect is very common among most, if not all, of those
patients, the family that he had had serious mental deficiency. They dis well to take care of themselves.
His mother was mentally retarded. She wasnt mentally ill that I knew of, but she was mentally retarded,
and so there was an uncle that sort of oversaw things, but he struggled as well. But, they settled out of
court for what, to those people, would have seemed like and extravagantly large amount of money but to
the hospital, to the mental health facility in West Virginia, was not a drop in the bucket, and the lawyer
got a third of that anyway. So, a million dollars doesnt go very far. Ask me your question again.
MP: I wanted to direct the topic away from Michael a little bit to talk about the family in general. This
isnt, to my understanding, your only experience with mental health and I want to touch on a little bit of
what you think is the source for all of this. I mean, its not just by chance that Appalachia has ended up
being the butt of the joke in so many ways.
WP: No, certainly not. I mean, if you go back far enough then it was populated early on by scotch-irish
who were the poor oppressed people of Europe and the reason they came to this country is because they
were poor and oppressed there, so they came here with the same mental facilities that they had when they
were in Scotland or Ireland. These mountains were populated by people who may have had the genetic
propensity for mental illness to being with. Not that we dont all have the propensity for mental illness,
we do, but certainly its conceivable, at least, that [some of the things] we still suffer from were brought
here by those scotch-irish people. They were poor oppressed people and they came here and were still
poor and oppressed, and are still poor and oppressed. So I would feel fairly confident in saying that I
think that mental health issues amongst this particular group of people started all the way back with those
early settlers. If you keep people downtrodden for extended periods of time then they have to suffer
mentally from the abuse. They have to. And if they have a genetic predisposition to it, then those triggers
are gonna cause the same results, time after time. People are poor, they donthave enough to eat, they
dont have the right things to eat, they never get to climb the social ladder. I think thats probably the
most important thing, especially among the male half of the population. I think being able to climb the
social ladder is an important part of the human experience, evolutionarily peaking especially. If males
cant climb the ladder then things are gonna go haywire. If their brains are not experiencing the right
chemical reactions form proper activity, then theyre gonna be experiencing chemical reactions form
improper activity, and those improper chemical reactions then are gonna cause mental problems. So I
think that probably a small percentage is genetic propensity, but overwhelmingly, its situational. I dont
think that rich people intend to do what theyre doing sometimes. I thinks sometimes they do, but I think
most of the time they dont. They just dont understand what theyre doing. We humans are always
competing with each other. Unfortunately, we havent found a way to allow everybody to climb the social
ladder. People at the top think they have to keep people at the bottom stomped down to make sure that
they stay at the top, and maybe theyre right. But, Appalachian males thats been precluded from them
as a possibility. Theyre too poor and they dont have any opportunities. Probably an even easier place to
see that sort of behavior would be among [the] African American population. Young, black men dont
have the same opportunities that most of the rest of the males have and, as a result they often engage in
behavior that is less than desirable. And even when theyre not engaging in it, theyre getting accused of
it. Thats also true for Appalachians. Michael would be a good example. He actually didnt engage in any
illegal behavior, but there was an opportunity to push him down and use him. But not just him, push him
and his entire family down and use them as a stepping stone to meet their own financial desires to make
money. Somebody is making a lot of money off of it, and its not those poor people, certainly wasnt us.

MP: And now to, well, this has flowed quite well. Youve explained what it is that you think causes this
sort of mental health climate in an area. How else could that be evident? I mean, you have a family that
lives and has always lived, since they first migrated here has always lived in Appalachia. So, surely its
not only evident in Michael.
WP: Youre talking about my family specifically and, yeah, theres definitely mental health issues, quite a
lot of them. And, interestingly enough, theyre almost always in the male half of the family. Studies, Im
sure, will show that males typically get in trouble for mental health issues more than females do. Those
two forensic mental health facilities in West Virginia that I was just talking about I am sure it was at
least 50 to 1, male to female. Not to say females dont have mental health issues, they do, they just
probably dont have as many violent tendencies to go along with it as males do. So, in my family: my dad
has been diagnosed as bipolar and the probably a little milder diagnosis than he needs. My younger
brother has been diagnosed as bipolar as well and, again, he probably has more serious mental health
problems than that. My dad has only been diagnosed as bipolar years ago. I dont know, probably twenty
years ago, maybe, and he underwent that voluntarily. My younger brothers been diagnosed as bipolar, he
didnt have any choice about it. He was evaluated and diagnosed on several occasions due to being in and
out of jail or prison. Another thing that I think plays a huge role in mental health in Appalachia is drug
abuse. If youre gonna pump your brain full of chemicals to make it respond the way you want it to
respond, theres guarantee that theres not gonna be some long-term negative consequences, and Im sure
that it does. Most of the forensic patients in those hospitals had a history of drug abuse. Im not capable of
saying the drug abuse caused their mental illness, it probably didnt. It probably exacerbated it though.
And when you have a population thats depressed, youre gonna have a drug problem. Especially if
youve got a pharmaceutical company thats making money off their drug problem, and thats the case in
Appalachia. Right now, the biggest drug abuse problem there is is prescription pills. Somebodies
manufacturing those pills and making a lot of money off of Appalachians getting hooked on it. And here
in Appalachia, one out of five people probably have a problem. A huge percentage of the population has a
problem with prescription pain medication. I teach on the college level and I frequently have students
come to me to talk to me about their parents having drug problems right now. They never had them when
they were younger, or at least they didnt know about it, and now they do. Almost always, somebody got
hurt and went to the doctor and was prescribed pain medication and then was hooked on it. And now, they
just do whatever they can to keep their supply flowing. Theyre gonna have mental health problems if
they continue to do that. Its not possible to avoid it. For one thing, the human brains not going to be able
to stand that much guilt, cause everybody who does it knows that theyre doing something they shouldnt
be doin, so they feel terribly about it. So even if the drugs are not causing, directly, the mental health
problems, the feelings of guilt and such, their own consciences associated with it are going to cause them.
And, whats the answer to all of this? I dont know. Actually, I think I do. I think if there were some way
to educate people that upward mobility does not require money, then maybe we could salvage mental
health in Appalachia. If you didnt have to make a certain amount of money, if you didnt have to have a
big screen tv, and a new car. If you didnt have to have all of these status symbols that require money,
then maybe you could figure out that having a big garden was a status symbol. I think that eventually we
will learn that. If there were a way to accelerate the pace of learning, it would be nice, but that is the
answer to the mental health crisis. Its education, but what kind of education? Specifically, its the
education as to what the proper way to live is. Were animals and if you subject any animal to
circumstances that theyre not designed to handle, theyre going to have mental health problems. If you
keep a dog chained up, hes gonna get mean. A dog that might have been perfectly fine otherwise is
gonna have mental health issues. And thats whats happened to the Appalachian people. Weve gotten
chained to a dog house.

MP: I think weve covered what we set out to talk about.

WP: Would you like for me to list any more of the atrocities that Michael endured while he was in the
hospital?
MP: Sure. I want to think more about those things that and Im aware he suffered some physical abuses
but I want to talk about more of the psychological warfare that it seemed like is so rampant.
WP: Well, its hard to make a distinction between the physical abuse and the mental abuse. The physical
abuse was mental abuse at the same time. I mean, for example, the health service workers that killed the
23 year old boy one of those health service workers was one of the people that I eluded to earlier when I
said thered be a few names that showed up over and over. On more than one occasion, one particular
health service worker choked Michael. I was on the phone one time with him while he was being choked,
which was pretty traumatic for me. I heard the phone clatter when he dropped it, and him screaming for
help until he couldnt speak anymore, because he was being choked. Well, that particular person that did
that choking was one of the others that killed the other patient. And you would think that would be a good
reason to fire somebody like that, but he was never fired, not even after the hospital had to settle for the
wrongful death suit. The health service worker, as far as I know, is still employed there. He never got
fired for any of it. He choked Michael badly enough on one occasion that Michael couldnt eat. He
couldnt swallow. I called state police actually, that particular occasion, and they said they couldnt do
anything about it, they had no jurisdiction in the hospital. I called everybody that I could think of to call.
Nobody would do anything about it. There just was nothing that could be done. You could not do
anything. There was no organization to turn to. I tried everyone that I could possibly find. Here, he had
been choked badly enough that he couldnt eat. In two weeks, he lost twenty pounds. Eventually, after
thirty days, after he got to where he could eat again, they sent him out of the forensic hospital to a medical
hospital to have him examined. Of course, by that point, the examination showed that he was okay. There
were no marks on the outside and he could swallow again. I think it was the barium swallow test or
something. I dont remember the name of it. Anyway, thats the test they performed and it came back
fine. But of course it did, it was thirty days after the event. Its hard to think that they were genuinely
concerned about his welfare if they waited that long. They werent. What they did was they waited until
they knew he was good enough that they could have him examined so they could say, hes okay, he
wasnt hurt but he was. He lost twenty pounds, in two weeks. And it was the same person who, not very
long after that killed somebody.
MP: Hearing these stories, its hard not to think: Whats going on in the minds of these workers? I cant
imagine that every one of these workers is getting a kick-back.
WP: Youre exactly right, Im glad you brought that up. I dont think that the health service workers that
are doing the abusing are getting any kick back at all. I dont even figure theyre getting paid as a matter
of fact, I know they arent getting paid very much. So what are they getting out of it? What theyre getting
out of it is the chance to abuse somebody else in retribution for the abuse that they have received most of
their lives, or their entire lives. So if youre smart about who youre hiring and you want to choose people
who will abuse the patients, its not hard to do in a place like West Virginia, because there are plenty of
people who have spent their life being stepped on who are anxious to find somebody else they can step
on. Thats just human nature. Its not even just human nature, its animal nature. Thats what we animals
do. If youre at the bottom of the pecking order, youre gonna get abused by the person whos on the rung
just above you. It happens over and over. Theres too much evidence that displays that thats just the way
things are. So, what do you do if youre running a mental health facility and you want the patients to be
abused? You hire people who have mental health problems themselves, and thats exactly what they do.

What you have to have in order to get a job at those mental health facilities, taking care of those mental
health patients is you have to have a high school education. Thats it. If youve graduated from high
school, you can have the job, and along with the job comes unlimited access to all of the abuse you want
to heap on those poor people. And so youve got somebody thats not very mentally stable taking care of
someone like Michael, and theyre convinced hes a pedophile because the court sent him there. In their
minds, a pedophile is the lowest form of life. Theyre going to do everything they can to abuse them. You
cant blame those health service workers. Theyre suffering mental abuse and ill mental health
themselves. Theyre just retaliating. If they werent working there, where would they be working?
McDonalds? Or not at all.
MP: Which would, according to the evaluation you talked about earlier, put them in exactly the category
to make them a danger to society.
WP: They are a danger to society, they are. But you cant say theyre a danger to society because theyre
poor. Being poor, or being angry, or having a gun those things all put you in a position to be dangerous,
they dont mean you are dangerous. The reason I think that it is unfair to have listed low socioeconomic
status as a dangerousness factor for Michael is that its too broad. Everybody in West Virginia fits that
category, so it just doesnt work. You cant lock everybody up. You got to have an underpaid work force
of some kind.
MP: The last thing that Id like you to talk about: Its hard to talk about Appalachia without talking about
the major issues, and youve talked about a lot of them-familial issues and socioeconomic status, as well
as drug abuse and other related issues. The big issue that hasnt been discussed that I think you would
agree is related is the environment and the state of the environment.
WP: There are actually two topics that I think we should discuss. The environment is one of them and the
other is religion. The state of the environment for one thing, its critical. The clean water for much of
the rest of the world, or at least much of the rest of the country, [comes from] these Appalachian
Mountains. And unfortunately, mountaintop removal has caused some serious damage to our water
supply. Most of the people in Appalachia now drink water that I think anybody would question what its
health benefits are. It has too many other things in it, too much chlorine and fluoride and whatever other
chemicals theyre using to clean up the water, which makes no sense. There was a time when the most
pristine water in the world was right here. Its gonna be awfully difficult to maintain health of any kind
without adequate clean water. Not only do we not have access to clean drinking water like we once did,
much of our natural beauty is gone, which is very important for mental health, in my opinion. I think the
coal mining industry is the big culprit, Everybody would agree with that. Its not just that the water
supply is damaged, its nearly destroyed and theres far too many incidences of large numbers of people
not being able to drink their water because of mining activity. It was only last year that 20,000 How
many people was it? Do you remember? In the Charleston area that couldnt drink water for months.
MP: The number of people affected by that was over 100,000.
WP: Yeah, it was a lot more than twenty thousand, but thats irrelevant anyway. There were several
counties. Entire counties could not drink form their municipal water supply because of chemicals that
were leaked into the water supply by coal industry. Even in Kentucky where I have spring water and well
water. And about 50 years ago, come of the property was strip mined. And now I have ahigher level of
acid in the water than is ideal. You cant do any mining on a large scale that doesnt have a serious effect
on the water supply. Religion. In Appalachia, religion is very important. And, in my opinion, its one of
the most effective tools humans have ever come up with to use to repress their fellow human beings.
Thats not an original idea, for sure. But religion, for poor people, is like a drug. Its also like a drug that

they tend to abuse. So, when you have nothing else, its pretty natural to turn to the hope of a better life
sometime in the future. We are extremely repressed and poor here but some day were gonna get to
heaven where were all gonna get to be rich people, right? That idea is just too attractive to poor
Appalachians to poor people everywhere, but to Appalachians, specifically, thats what were talking
about today. But along with that comes lots of justification for abuse. My dad was mentally ill engaged
in quite a lot of abuse of his children, and he got to justify it with his religion. He beat us on a regular
basis and we also heard him say, on a regular basis, spare the rod and spoil the child. Beat the child and
he shall not die , and several other quotes from the bible that he had found that justified. Not only was it
okay for him to beat us, it was his job to beat us. He was being godly by doing it. Theres plenty of
repression of females that gets justified by Christianity in Appalachia. I think, probably, religion has been
the single most destructive tool thats been used on the Appalachian people. Whatever constructive it
offers is far, far outweighed by the destructive. Well I grew up in a very religious household and felt very
religious for much of my childhood. I didnt really start to see . I mean, I knew he was using it to justify
bad activity to a large extent but when I got older I figured out that he was beating my mother up. I hated
that, and it happened a lot. He was beating my mother up and justifying it with Christianity. That sort of
made me stop and say, hey maybe I need to stop and reexamine what this Christianity thing is. But I
was a studious child. I didnt just go to church because I had to, I went to church and listened. I was
studying it. Im very well educated in, at least Appalachian, Christianity. It was an important part of my
childhood not been an important part of my adulthood. Or maybe it has been, but its definitely been
from a different angle. I think that the example that Henry David Thoreau sets in his experiences at
Walden Pond and his philosophies at least open the door to being headed the right direction in terms of
how t combat mental health issues in Appalachia. We have to learn to live in the earth were living on, not
just on it. If we dont recognize that we are a part of this system, the ecosystem, if we dont realize that
were here to function much the same way that grass and the trees and other animals and such are here to
function, if we somehow insist on thinking that were somehow apart from that, and superior to that, then
were never gonna make any progress toward addressing mental health issues. If we learned to live in
harmony with and in nature, I think that the vast majority of mental health issues wouldjust disappear.
They wouldnt be there. If we didnt have to deal with money, if somehow we could abolish the use of
money, that would take away almost all the stress that most people live with, because poor Appalachians
arent poor because they dont have enough to eat or a place to sleep thats not what makes them poor.
Most of them have a relatively new car and a big screen TV in their trailer, but-. They have adequate
housing, they have access to food. What they dont have is adequate access to upward mobility. Thats
what makes them poor. Theyre not poor because they dont have enough to survive, theyre poor because
they have so little compared to the rich. If we could figure outaway to stop placing so much value in
money, thenpeople would have a shot at competing with their peers. I think thats really what it boils
down to. You have to have a society where people can feel good about themselves in relation to their
peers. Smaller social units and more equitable distribution of wealth. But, I dont think were going to
have an equitable distribution of wealth as long as were functioning on a monetary basis. I dont think
thats possible. If a man has one cow, he has one cow. And if he has fifty cows and he only needs one
then thats forty-nine useless cows. He doesnt want forty-nine useless cows. If a man has one dollar and
thats all he needs, then he has all he needs. But if hes got fifty dollars, he doesnt want rid of the fortynine useless dollars. He wants more of them. Money doesnt really work. We all have been taught for
generations now that its the answer to everything. Its the medium of exchange that enables us to ship
goods from China to here. Well, for one thing, we probably shouldnt be shipping goods from China to
here. We really dont need to be doing that. Thats not such a wonderful thing. But, we can do it so much
cheaper. Why would you pay some body $200.00 to do something at home that you can get from China
for $10.00? Well, the answer is: because youre contributing to the mental health illnesses of people in

China when you do that, because theyre being stomped on there justthe same as they are here, if not
worse, and its all being done in the name of money.
MP: I want to wrap up with where you see yourself in the coming years in relation to Appalachia and in
relation to mental health.
WP: Where do I see myself? I see myself on the 144! I see myself on the 144 drinking the spring water
thats a little too acidic hopefully not too damaging health-wise. Im sure that it wont be. I can see that
Im, for the rest of my life, going to have a lot of mental health issues to deal with within my family. Im
currently raising three boys that would be being raised by my brother if he were capable of raising them.
If he werent suffering mental illness, he could take care of them, but he cant and so I have to. So Ill be
dealing with that for a while. Ill be dealing with that until Im gone, Im sure. Im sure Ill be the primary
care-taker of Michael, whos mentally retarded. Ill have to, for a long time, deal with mental health
issues that my dad deals with. The nephew that sent Michael to the bathroom with the two-year-old girl
has made at least a half-a-dozen serious suicide attempts, and youd think if a person was being really
serious about it they would have accomplished it by then. At one point he took a kitchen knife and, in
front of his younger sister and his mother and dad, stabbed himself in the stomach multiple times. He
wanted them to see it. It didnt kill him. He ended up in the hospital for a long time. You cant describe
that as anything but mental illness. Thats mental illness, in close family members. But, I really do intend
to do whatever I can to live as environmentally friendly as I can, as sustainably as I can, and as
independently, most of all, as independently as I can on that piece of property that Ive bought. I intend to
do that for the foreseeable futureat least.
MP: Alright, I think that about wraps it up.
WP: Yeah I think so.
MP: Thank you for taking the time to rant and rave and all those wonderful things that you seem to be
doing here on the Group W bench.
WP: Well, thank you for the opportunity.
Length: 1:22:40