While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Wake-Up Call for Mental Health Care in America

by Eli Sanders

“When your world explodes,” Norbert said, “and nothing makes sense, and reality is not real, you do begin to feel like the world is spinning and you’re going to be flung off it.

The way her heart seemed “a little homeless” before she met Jennifer, and how, after she met Jennifer, “everything was different, Teresa was different . . . I heard in her a hard-won sense of finally being worthy of receiving love.”

“I promise to live,” she said, and people stood, cried, cheered. “I promise to love. I promise to give. I promise to laugh. I promise to sing. I promise to dream. And I promise to forgive.

“modern science has proven there are only two ways to help neuronal regeneration. Your brain will produce new neurons if you learn new things, and if you do aerobic exercise.” She does both, in large quantities.

In 1955, more than half a million Americans were housed in mental hospitals. Many of them were there for no particular reason, other than that someone with a certain amount of power found them strange, or inconvenient, or of the wrong skin color.

It was the shameful confinement of psychologically disturbed Americans to prisons that, after being exposed in the 1840s by a woman named Dorothea Dix, led to the creation of mental hospitals and institutions in the first place. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, which has highlighted this irony, the mentally ill population of America’s jails and prisons now far outnumbers the population of its surviving mental hospitals.

“When the family turned to the system, the system had the same dynamic as the family.” The system was under financial stress. It was under time pressures. It had dysfunctions and limitations.

Isaiah’s tendency to turn things around, and to blame the women who were sheltering him, was still present.

The true cost of Isaiah’s crimes is not calculable, of course, but the grand total set to land on the public bill: well over $3 million.

Weathered signs at the marinas along the riverbank say it: “No Wake.” An impossibility to one already in the water. Also, a necessary reminder. Without trying, we are all witnesses to a crime in progress.