Symptoms: Akathisia, Brain zaps, Emotional blunting, Sexual dysfunction, Cognitive impairment, Insomnia, Depersonalization/Derealization, Tinnitus, Severe anxiety/panic, Muscle/joint pain, Anhedonia, Dyskinesia, GI disturbances, Other
This story is shared by a younger brother.
My brother Jeff Welton experienced the entire gamut of the broken mental health system for 34 years, mostly force-medicated after we realized the medication wasn't helping him in the mid 1990s, and our mother, his constant warrior champion, resigned from the state board of NAMI after 6 years, after previously telling Jeff to stay on the medication.
Jeff was struggling his first weeks in college, and went to the university hospital. They admitted him (January 1989). He was given the antipsychotic Navane and started banging his head against the wall, the drug hurt so badly. The psychiatrist refused to speak with our mother.
This was the beginning of Jeff's traumatic life. He was never the same after that. The great Robert Whitaker of Mad In America asked me about this inciting incident when we met in person at the Inner Compass Initiative conference last December. Jeff's first dose of Navane damaged him. We learned almost 30 years later with pharmacogenomics DNA testing that his body cannot metabolize Navane, and many other psych drugs. Today, he would be in the category with 20-60% of others, as "treatment resistant".
Jeff was force-medicated by mental health and criminalization courts from 1990 until 2023, when he suddenly and unexpectedly died while out on a walk, after being discharged from state psychiatric inpatient custody in Oklahoma for 3 1/2 years. Two days after discharge, he was dead. The autopsy defaulted to hyperthermia and Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome. Many laws were broken, but that's a longer story and not the focus here, though it plays a huge role in this story and for many other citizens. The final 8 weeks MAR showed out of the 23 Rx he was administered, 19 of them were contraindicated according to the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR). Polypharmacy high-dose psych meds, willy nilly changed with ZERO proper titration withdrawal protocol, though we, his family legal advocates, told all psychiatric professionals charged with his "treatment" that these are dependent drugs and they must titrate. THEY NEVER DID, and the MAR shows constant changing of Rx, each time he would go into crisis and they would hold him down with another injection. They caused the crisis then traumatized him more every single time. This happened for decades. NEVER was there a time when any informed consent was offered, even though state law requires it. We have all Jeff's records and recorded calls. It's a gold mine of bombshells.
For 34 years, Jeff was homeless half his life, never owned a car, a cell phone, a home. He was in at least eight government subsidized housing apartments, under court-ordered "treatment" that made him worse, so he always got kicked out, until they said they could no longer offer him any housing or any kind of assistance. Jeff was in at least a dozen jails and prisons. We have a roomful of records that tell the tragic tale.
Jeff was the opposite of a criminal, but the fixed delusions caused by brain injury and lack of titration caused him to believe we were not his real family (Capgras Syndrome), which then caused him to think we did something with his real family, then came anger and aggression, and trouble. Mom was hurt, but she never gave up on her beloved son. We honor her for that. Jeff was a kind and giving human. We loved him dearly.
In 2020, the nonprofit our family cofounded, named after Jeff, the WJW Mental Health Legal Fund, was approved. As you can imagine (during COVID) we got no funding and still don't because our mantra is "treatment must be redefined" which goes against the medical model and is disruptive.
You may know of Dr. Peter Gotzsche, who was a featured expert in MEDICATING NORMAL documentary (that WJWMHLF was an original sponsor of). I met with him at his home in Copenhagen fall of 2021, he read our 30-page mission narrative based on all Jeff's experiences over three decades, and Dr. Gotzsche told me, "The world has been waiting for you for a long time." Validating.
Jeff was inpatient in over fifty psychiatric facilities. We have a timeline database. Some of those fifty he was in multiple times. Like, Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH) under Oklahoma's Dept of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS). He was in TCBH crisis center more than twenty times, alone. In 2018, TCBH administered two loading dose intramuscular injections of Invega Sustenna only 2 1/2 days apart. TOO CLOSE. The Janssen Rx info on this IM drug says 7 days apart for loading doses. This caused Jeff to lose his ability to urinate (enuresis) and have an emergency catheter on top of everything else. Horrendous.
Jeff was abused on the street, and by psychiatric teams and police, he was slandered by the news, raped in jail, vilified by public defenders and social worker documents, maligned, and suffered medical malpractice at every turn. We were told in 2013 that he was one of Oklahoma's "most chronic" mentally ill. We have his government fiscal records showing the state wasted over $2M on his treatment. This should be a lesson on how to save taxpayer dollars. I have blog entries about all this, too.
Since age 20, Jeff has been on Social Security Disability Income of about $750/month. That's how he survived. The government recognized his disability, but then they punish him for it. No one should be punished for their disability. American tragedy that is happening to millions of others right now.
Jeff had metabolic dysfunction. We always said it was "sugar" issues. His toes would turn black. He was obsessed with Mountain Dew, due to his lack of energy. This is all well documented by our mom, and with official records we got every step of the way. Mom informed the DA, the jail medical teams, the psychiatric teams, the mental health courts, of these medical issues, but no one listened.
The year Jeff died (summer 2023), I was in a Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy program with Nicole Laurent of mentalhealthketo.com. She was one of the original MetabolicMind.org (Baszucki Group) $100K awardees. I was learning KMT mostly to help Jeff when he was released (but it also stopped my lifelong severe poison ivy and persistent tooth tartar issues, plus solving insulin resistance, of course). We at WJWMHLF also sponsored a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) in Oct 2023 to teach lawyers about metabolic dysfunction for SMI cases. Harvard's Dr. Chris Palmer came to Tulsa and was our keynote speaker. It's still listed on our website. A proud moment with the amazing Dr. Palmer, author of BRAIN ENERGY.
Jeff craved sugar. And the inpatient psych facilities let him eat sugar. It made everything worse. His normal is 6-foot, 190 pounds. While on psych Rx drugs he got up to 400 pounds. The medications never solved his psychiatric symptoms, quite the contrary. Those drugs made everything worse, and we were not idle nor quiet about informing every entity this was the situation. We were ignored and mocked. It's going to make a great film, one day.
The recordings of Jeff's multiple phone calls to family every day while inpatient in psych wards are an inside look into how things really are. What a nightmare. Thousands of recordings. Some scary times and a lot of psychosis the mental system created by piling on more Rx and more Rx over and over expecting a different result. Such madness inflicted upon my brother.
Jeff suffered more than anyone I've ever known or read about. None of this was his choice. He did NOT take street drugs, and every facility tested him, always clean. He was harmed over and over and over again. His list of psych Rx drugs is incomplete and it's over 50 legal pages long.
So many laws broken. The reason we formed a legal mental health nonprofit is because the only time we were able to save Jeff was when our family pulled together and hired a legal team costing $100K. We saved him from life in prison due to being a repeat "offender" (they caused). But they never stopped forcing the Rx "medication" drugs on him, so the damage never ended. I was looking forward to helping him learn KMT (keto) and we had the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines with OUTRA (Dr. Mark Horowitz) and the Metabolic Mind resources to save him. He just didn't get to live to see recovery happen. Heartbreaking.
Our mom has suffered along with Jeff. Many harrowing, sorrowful moments in these stories. We are thankful Bobby Kennedy, MAHA, and HHS are on the right road with these issues. We have a meeting pending with HHS, per RFK Jr.'s scheduler. We await another reply.
It's a compelling odyssey over three decades. Too many mistakes by the system caused all this. We tried to fix it every step of the way. Especially our mom.
For all the Jeffs.
Thank you for your great work. We are praying for your father.