“Wow,” I thought, as I read the Messenger piece about Roger Stockham, who is accused of plotting to blow-up a Michigan mosque.  “This guy used to live in my neighborhood.”  He might have been any one of the angry eccentrics who wander muttering but unmolested through small towns and big cities on any given day in America; but apparently he was one of our own.

Now a California resident, Stockham resided on Congress St. in St. Albans in 2002 when he was charged with making threats against the president and against veterans’ facilities at Fort Ethan Allen.  Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and personality disorder, he appears to have led a life of violent delusion ever since returning as a veteran from Viet Nam.  Despite repeated scrapes with the law for his erratic and threatening behavior, Stockham seems to have been sort of  a catch-and-release project, his dangerous profile never engaging the system long enough in any one place to defuse the ticking time-bomb in his mind.

I’ll admit it was the local connection that caught my attention and caused me to think a little deeper about the system’s persistent failure to effectively deal with Mr. Stockham’s disease.  His is just one particularly sensational story among who knows how many tens-of-thousands of troubled individuals who have fallen through the cracks of a seriously under-valued and under-funded public mental health system.  And the incidence of “Roger Stockhams” in this country’s future is likely to grow exponentially over the coming decades.

It has been estimated that one in eight  soldiers suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; and I remember reading anecdotally that perhaps as many as one in five returning veterans from the Middle East wars will manifest some form of mental trauma in the years following their return home.  As those wars and “engagements” drag on, year after year, the potential grows for a true mental health crisis in the coming years.

Add to the ranks of mentally battered soldiers the vast number of adults beaten down and ravaged by our disabled economy, and the children who inevitably suffer abuse and neglect under the pressures of that same broken economy.  We are facing a future in which mental illness could very well become the number one health issue in this country; and because the existing infrastructure for serving public mental health needs is primarily reactive rather than proactive, we cannot even trust the statistical evidence to predict how great our future need may be.

The survival of our democracy depends as much on our ability to keep its citizens mentally fit as it does on defense of the Bill of Rights, to which we devote so much high-minded rhetoric.  When will we finally give mental healthcare the public priority it so urgently demands?  

Good for Governor Shumlin: for recognizing that warehousing substance-abusers and the mentally ill in prisons does not serve the best interests of the state, both from economic and social standpoints. Good for him for championing universal healthcare and for promising a new state hospital to serve Vermont’s mental health needs.  But a word of caution goes out to the well-intentioned new governor:  don’t underestimate what those needs may be.  We’re going to have to do a whole lot better than just treading water on mental health if we truly want to provide a better future for the next generation of Vermonters.