America's Criminal Health Crisis

Much Ado Special Report (Pt. 1) on the Criminalization of Mental Health in America

Police: Teen killed mom, shot stepdad before inviting friend over

BRANDON, Miss. (Court TV) — A judge has ordered a teenage girl accused of murdering her mother and shooting her stepfather to undergo a mental health examination before her case moves forward.

Carly Gregg, 15, is charged with murder and attempted murder after allegedly killing her mother in cold blood and then lying in wait to shoot her stepfather.

In court documents reviewed by Court TV, detectives with the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office said they were initially called to the family’s home in Brandon on March 19 for a report of a shooting. When officers arrived, they found Ashley Smylie dead and her husband, Heath Smylie, with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. Heath told first responders that “when he arrived home he had found his wife on the floor in Carly’s room and when he turned around Carly was standing in the kitchen with a handgun.” Heath said Gregg fired approximately three times, hitting him once. When Heath wrestled the gun away from the teenager, she allegedly fled out of the home’s back door and jumped over a fence before she was caught approximately half a mile away.

At Gregg’s preliminary hearing, investigator Zachary Cotton testified that video from inside the home showed her moving around the house hiding her hands behind her back. Cotton said that Ashley had been shot twice in the head and that after the shooting Gregg could be seen walking through the house and playing with her dogs.

After shooting her mother, Gregg allegedly used her mother’s phone to text her stepfather to ask when he would be home and used her own phone to text a friend saying she had an emergency and needed the friend to come over. When the friend arrived, the detective testified, “Carly asked her if she’d ever seen a dead body before. She said no and proceeded to show her deceased mother. … [Gregg] told Brooke that she had three shots for her mom and then she’s got three more for her stepdad: two to the head, one to the chest.” The friend then went outside as Gregg waited for Heath to return.

The judge found probable cause for the charges to stand and ordered a psychological evaluation to be done of Gregg both to determine if she is competent to stand trial as well as to do an analysis of her mental condition at the time of the shootings.

Gregg’s attorney unsuccessfully petitioned for her $1 million bond to be reduced, saying that the teen, who turned 15 on Wednesday, was an “exceptional student” who had skipped the fourth grade and had no prior criminal history or history of violence.

The victim, Ashley Smylie, was identified as a teacher at Northwest Rankin High School, where she taught Algebra.

Courtesy of Court TV 4/24/24

I do not know where to begin. More to the point, when does it end? I wouldn’t blame you if you blamed the parents and felt a tinge of outrage and scrolled on. I get it. We are so desensitised to stories like this because shootings, mass killings and horrific events seem rather pedestrian these days. You know the feeling. As a societal problem, there must be a solution. Getting there means understanding the root cause of all of this but more questions abound. Is this because of all the spoiled children who get “participation” trophies? Gen Z? The Neoliberal agenda? Or the water in Flint and the chemtrails that leads to a guy shooting up a movie theatre? Body dysmorphia? Donald Trump??

What is it??

Unfortunately for you my friend, we don’t concern ourselves with the general “why” of mental anguish here at Much Ado. I think the internet¹ is likely the root cause, but that’s just me. No, we are really worried about the use and treatment of those who are disturbed, depressed, “demon-possesed”, anxiety ridden, etc… by an already faulty system in its own right, the American CJS. This can’t go wrong right?

Since 1950 your favorite motley crew of U.S. Federal, local and state governments have been budget slashing mental health services and sending the “insane” and the “criminally insane”² to max security prisons more and more. Americans suffering from mental illness are 10 times more likely to be put in jail than they are to be hospitalized, per a National Judicial Task Force report last fall on state courts' response to mental health.

But is it criminalization that plagues those who are insane or insanity that plagues the criminal? Said another way, criminally violent persons already live on a fringe of society anyway, and so no wonder they also have issues already with keeping it together. The definition of criminal fits the same definition of a mental disorder as things outside the purview of normal society. But that does not explain the Carly Gregg issue above, or the seemingly senseless violence from people, or children, with no former record who are considered “well to do.” One can divide these issues around criminality and mental health simply as either: (1) lack of resources for adequate care; or (2) lack of knowledge and utility in managing care. The first one has an apparent root cause in America. If you are poor, you likely have unequal access to mental health resources because insurance, time and money stop you from accessing resources. This is only identified when the person is court ordered or forced to get treatment. Impoverished persons deal with disease, violence, and mental health issues at a much higher rate than those who are well off, and are far more likely to be criminals before psychiatric patients.

We will focus on the second point because it is unclear how and why America is not serving or failing to appreciate the serious issues of those who already have access to these services. Carly from above³ was an excellent student who actually skipped the third grade. She had a family, but was apparently an only child as well. In reading through the research, it becomes abundantly clear that healthcare professionals are misdiagnosing and complicating treatment of those individuals. In some cases, these professionals are failing to listen to their patients.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

In 2022, there were close to 12,000 “mental health” facilities in the U.S. The majority of these were outpatient programs, that have no way to retain people who need to be in residential care facilities for longer than a few weeks. In comparison, there are about 6,103 prisons and jails both federally and statewide in 2019. The amount of outpatient programs actually more likely mirrors the number of jails and prisons. Previously unpublished data from 2005-2006 indicates that there were far more people (3x) with mental health conditions in jail or prisons than in mental health treatment.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

• 1955 - 1 psychiatric bed for every 300 Americans

• 2005 - 1 psychiatric bed for every 3,000 Americans

• 2023 - 1 psychiatric bed for about every 10,000 Americans (Per the Treatment Advocacy Center’s Jan 2024 Report)

The CJS is reactionary, and nearly 52% of the number of patients in 2023 psychiatric care were there because of CJS placement. It means that the three people involved in the above incident - Carly Gregg, Ashley and Heath Smylie - are now all people substantially affected and two completely removed from normally functioning society. Ashley Smylie is dead, Heath is likely scarred for life and young Carly now will face a lifetime of institutionalism in some way or another.⁴ There is no turning back the page, no Reverse Uno card. Many others have been completely nullified as well with these inane acts of violence. This act took away an educator who was named teacher of the year, snuffed out a child’s possible potential, and threatened a person’s sense of security for the rest of his life.

Arguably, we know why the poor can’t have adequate mental health services: polarization and inequality.⁵ This can probably be fixed, but is not an issue that needs more attention, just action by our motley crew above. The more distressing part is that, in a general scheme of things, wealth for adequate care should alleviate these issues. In most cases it does, but in others it seems to over complicate and exacerbate the mental illness.

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Criminally Insane With a Little Help From My Friends

Two things stand out about the Carly Gregg crime: the premediation and the supposed change of Carly’s medications a week prior. Carly apparently killed her mom, then texted her step-dad asking when he was coming home with her dead mother’s phone. Carly shot her step-dad when the friend was in their backyard. This “lying in wait” indicates premeditation when evaluating the elements of first-degree murder. Also during this time, Carly texted a friend to come over, indicating it was “an emergency.” Carly then asked if the friend wanted to see a dead body e.g, her mother when the friend arrived. This was after the friend was driven over by her father.

This seems far too casual. Why did her friend not call 911? Carly showed this friend her dead mother, then the murder weapon, and the child didn’t text her dad. She also didn’t call 911 during this time, leaving it up to Heath when he was shot later.⁶ It is unclear how long this happened before Carly shot her step-dad, but this friend would have been armed with a phone (which is how Carly invited the friend over). In some way, this reinforces the disillusionment and desensitization theory that may be at play here with our youth, especially Gen Z.

Gregg is showing this body like a trophy, or just like a gag with her friend. The trivialness Carly shows in presenting her dead mother, indicates a type of callousness from Gregg, putting distance between the ideas of herself as a daughter and that of a random observer. This could easily be the traits of a serial killer manifesting at a young age. But saying she was “born that way” is too easy of an answer.

Carly had her prescription changed to Lexapro about a week or so prior to this. Lexapro is an SSRI (serotonin reuptake inhibitor) which treats depression and anxiety. This contains the drug Escitalopram that has this warning⁷:

Escitalopram may cause some teenagers and young adults to be agitated, irritable, or display other abnormal behaviors. It may also cause some people to have suicidal thoughts and tendencies or to become more depressed. Some people may have trouble sleeping, get upset easily, have a big increase in energy, or start to act reckless. If you or your caregiver notice any of these unwanted effects, tell your doctor right away. Let the doctor know if you or anyone in your family has bipolar disorder (manic-depressive) or has tried to commit suicide.

Mayo Clinic, Escitalopram drug information

Add this with the troubling report that Carly may have had school disciplinary action in her history, allegedly bringing a knife to school prior to this.⁸ Apparently, this was a problem to which, at least assumedly, the parents resolved with antidepressants. In Carly’s case, we do not know what medication it was changed from, but the Lexapro excuse or defense is common, even in Mississippi.⁹ In Jackson MS in June 2024, a man who brutally murdered a woman and her four-year old daughter admitted he did it because “I’m on Lexapro. Sober. No drugs in my system. I did it.” Even more distressing is that the killer apparently wanted the lethal injection and admitted he deserved it.

The Manufactured Mental Ménagerie

Katinka started hallucinating wildly, thinking in very violent images, and imagined she had stabbed herself in the stomach. She took a kitchen knife and lacerated her left arm. She became convinced she had stabbed and killed her two children, Lily and Oscar, 12 and 11 years old, respectively. Nothing really mattered, and it was pure luck that she didn’t kill herself or someone else, as she had no sense of reality.

- Katinka Blackford Newman, as told by Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD (March 28, 2024) from The Pill That Steals Lives, One Woman's Terrifying Journey to Discover the Truth about Antidepressants (2016)

This is from the aforementioned book, where Katinka, a UK woman, was prescribed several different medications, including Lithium and Lexapro, over the course of a few years. Doctors felt like she had a “drug resistant depression”, whatever that means, and so they changed her drug cocktail multiple times. It was only after she ran out of private insurance, and went to public care (which is a universal safety net in the UK, the horrors!) did she stop cold turkey from her medications and fully recover.¹⁰

This, overprescribing and lack of ingenuity, is a multifaceted problem but can be boiled down to this: the game of using medications to treat mental health disorders in patients is like throwing darts. Practitioners try to get as close as they can to the “right” medications but ultimately it is anyone’s guess.

Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash

Please do not believe that people, especially practitioners, reasonably know how one of these medications will affect you. This is a problem, irrespective of your health care options, faced by all mental health and psychiatric practitioners.¹¹ A Swedish study done 2006-2009 found that there was an increase in the association between violent crimes and those taking SSRIs aged 14-24. They followed up with this study by then looking at those individuals aged 15-60, within the treatment window of about 168 days with the SSRIs. They found that there was a much increased harm ratio with those individuals aged 15-34 during their treatment and following up to 12 weeks of conclusion of treatment. Although the majority of people do not have homicidal tendencies when they take these prescription medications, we’re not worried about ultimate causation here. I mean, this is significant but I will leave that to people who have the knowledge about pharmaceuticals¹², like my acquaintance

Sasha Latypova

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No, on this publication, we are worried about how adequate the mechanisms are to deal with this mental health crisis that are present in the American CJS, and whether there adequate safeguards in place to make sure that a person’s rights are not abused by this system. We are worried about the staggering amount of victims through homicide or suicide there have been, when prescribed these drugs intent on helping people get through their darkest moments. This seems to be created malady, that afflicts those who already have issues with depression by the practitioners trying to solve their issues, even at a young age, with increased medications.

Pt. 2 Next

Next we are going to look at the legal mechanisms dealing with insanity, and exactly what the CJS is doing to deal with those who are not excused. We will take a look at jurisdictions that are doing something different, and those jurisdictions that are having success with a more nuanced or comprehensive model. Until next time.

Thanks for reading!

-JR

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