MaryAnne’s Reviews > The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice > Status Update

The most important things Vince wanted the book to say:

Prison is torture
Sexual abuse changes you forever
We are all at the mercy of our brains
Listening is healing

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. A full 25% of the world's incarcerated population is within our prison walls. And over of third (37%) of that population has a history of mental illness.

What did "reverence for life" mean for people like this? True reverence extended compassion to the hopeless, the destitute, the scorned. It included the sick and the healthy, the poor and the rich, the free and the imprisoned. It included addicts and thieves, murderers and the men they killed. Reverence for life is unconditional. (Albert Schweitzer)

I remembered all the men Vince had told me about, there in prison with him. The boy in his twenties who heard voices at night. The middle aged man who spoke about his imaginary friend like he was a real person. The man in his sixties whose dementia was so bad he didn't remember, day to day, that he was in prison.

It became all too obvious to me that there were tens of thousands of people inside Virginia's prisons who needed psychiatric help. A 2014 report ...found that the number of mentally ill people in jail and prison in Virginia had risen 30% since 2008, and that the state jails held three times as many mentally ill people as its hospitals.

Vince and his illness cannot be treated in the prison system because our prisons have failed.

For decades they have treated the mentally ill as statistics. We have to treat them as patients. That means that first, we have to do them no harm.

Meanwhile Vince Gilmer had spent almost ten years in a maximum security prison, alone, exhibiting symptoms that nobody believed were real. He'd been locked in a cell by himself, denied even the most basic of psychiatric meds. He'd been languishing for years with a terminal diagnosis, given little more than ibuprofen to help him through it. All because he had no one advocating for him.

Powerful comparison:

The author's father needed bypass surgery asap. The author was advocating for him as both a doctor and a son. It was clear that wasn't necessary. His dad had excellent insurance and access to the best hospital in the state.

Compare to Vince Gilmer who had spent almost ten years in a maximum security prison, alone, exhibiting symptoms that nobody believed were real. (Continued)