But none of the rest of it has gone away, not the cruelty, the filth, the bad food or the brutality. It’s true that the hospitals have mostly disappeared: between 19 the number of people with serious mental illness living in psychiatric institutions dropped from almost half a million people to about 50,000. Yet if we think that the hellish world Kesey captured belongs to another era, we are deluded. More than 50 years after Kesey’s novel, state psychiatric hospitals of the sort he described are, like lobotomies, long gone. (One wonders how Florida’s department of corrections was not notified of the extent of his illness before he arrived.) After a few months of occasional run-ins with prison staff, he was moved to a unit for prisoners with mental illness.Ībout a year ago, his condition deteriorated to such an extent that he was moved to the Lake Correctional Institution, a prison north-west of Orlando that is equipped with an inpatient psychiatric unit.Įven so, his mother says, her son remains severely psychotic, an assessment apparently shared by the Florida department of corrections, which regularly denies Pena visits on the basis that Rodriguez is too sick to see her. His first few months there, he lived in general population. Nevertheless, after he accepted a plea bargain, Rodriguez was transferred to prison. His mother said the second psychiatric hospitalization was the last time she saw him lucid. He spent five years in jail before he took the plea bargain people with mental illness often spend far longer in jail waiting for their cases to be resolved.ĭuring his time in jail, he was sick enough that he had to be hospitalized three separate times – twice for psychiatric crises and once because he was so psychotic that he mutilated his genitals. Rodriguez is currently serving a 10-year sentence in a Florida state prison for trying to rob somebody at gunpoint when he was 22.
The next few years were a blur of doctors appointments, drug use, homelessness, arrests and voluntary and involuntary hospitalizations. It was the first of perhaps a dozen times that she had him “Baker Acted”, as it is known in Florida – after the 1971 law governing involuntary hospitalizations. But when he continued to act strangely, saying he was hearing voices, Pena called the police and had him hospitalized against his will. His mother, Gemma Pena, had come home from work one night to find that he had disconnected the hot water heater, convinced that the CIA was using it to spy on him.Īt first she thought his behavior was simply evidence of grief over his grandmother’s death a few months earlier Rodriguez had been especially close to her. A tall, strapping boy whose friends called him Dino, as in “dinosaur”, Rodriguez was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was around 14.
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