RALEIGH — After years of denying his role in the 2006 beating of a mental patient at Cherry Hospital, a former staff member of the Goldsboro mental facility admitted guilt today.
Billy Gerald Wynn Jr. pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault on a handicapped person. A Wayne County judge then sentenced Wynn, who is suffering from medical problems related to kidney failure, to a suspended sentence of 75 days in jail and 24 months of supervised probation.
Fuller, who now works as a practicing psychiatrist, is a living example of the message he preaches: Many can recover.
Suffering from bipolar depression, Michael Fuller spent most of his high school years in an old-fashioned mental hospital.
He’d undergone shock therapy dozens of times, to little avail. He was just shy of his 18th birthday in 1972 when a doctor told his mother he would spend much of his life in psychiatric hospitals.
I saw a sure sign of spring the other day in downtown Asheville.
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A young couple sprawled in the sunshine on the sidewalk on Haywood Street, knees poking through their blue jeans, colorful tattoos along their arms. They had a neatly lettered cardboard sign:
Poor, Smelly
And Stupid, Fresh!
Fresh on the street, the pair seemed more cheeky than desperate, so I didn’t stop to contribute anything. They lived up to their billing as unbathed, but even with the truth in advertising, I couldn’t see they were getting much in the way of donations.
Cleon Currie has heard many times the complaints providers and clients have about the changes the mental health system in North Carolina has experienced — and continues to experience — as part of an ongoing overhaul.
“Everybody seems to be upset,” Currie said. However, he added, there doesn’t seem to be any local effort to make those concerns heard by those who can do something about it.
He and his colleagues at A Pathway Community Support Services LLC in Burlington want to change that. The agency, which Currie presides over and which provides community support teams to adults in crisis situations as well as outpatient therapy, is organizing a mental health town hall meeting Tuesday.
Kenny Chapman was cutting his tethers, and the ones he didn’t cut were coming loose.
He took his family and moved from West Virginia to Charlotte. He gave up on Alcoholics Anonymous. He fought with his wife.
But he still tried to latch onto something. He showed up at Mecklenburg County’s mental health center and wrote: I feel like hurting someone or myself.
MORGANTON – A month after a jury returned mixed verdicts, the woman who shot a Burke County law enforcement officer, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down, was sentenced to commitment at Broughton Hospital in Morganton and, upon release, two to four years in prison.
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