What makes Sammy run?
Huge and helpless, schizophrenic and hypertensive, Sammy Allen has fallen between the administrative cracks of a local mental health system that can't seem to get its ACT together (continued)
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From a 1996 psychiatric evaluation: "One thing is for sure. He does know how to manipulate the mental health and legal systems to get what he wants...I would also recommend that the Treatment Team work with Sammy to help him understand that the hospital is not his personal Club Med or refuge from all the problems of the world."
"I actually believe he is not as mentally ill as he acts," Sammy's father says. "At times he talks sensible, he knows the scripture, he talks to you with good common sense, he knows how to handle his own money like a normal person. He has a problem, but I think he's actually using that problem to take advantage of the system and of the police force, because they all know him and aren't gonna hurt him. I ain't never heard him be beat up or nothing like that. I believe he's not as sick in mind as he pretends he is."
But when Sammy shows up at a local psychiatric emergency room and announces, "I'm sick, take care of me," he can't be readily dismissed or moved on as homeless and a behavioral problem, because he's been officially diagnosed as being mentally ill. And he has a 26-year paper trail of commitment papers to prove it. So, usually, the ER keeps him overnight, administers medication, and sends him back out into the community.
"I think part of what it's about is Sammy just becomes so frustrating that it's somewhat human nature that people tend to hold on to the part of him that they can say he's milking the system," theorizes Logan, who does believe Allen suffers from a legitimate mental illness. "On the other hand, there's still that sense of 'Gosh I'll throw whatever [medication] I can at him just to see if it'll keep him out of the hospital long enough next time.'"
Jefferson House is a plain brick two-story building located on a retail strip of Oak Cliff filled with pawn shops and rent-to-own stores. A glass door opens to a 20-step flight of stairs, which Sammy labors to ascend.
At the top of the stairs, a worker sits behind a desk in what serves as the Jefferson House lobby. Nearby stands a filing cabinet that has been affixed with a crudely lettered sign that proclaims "NO ONE GETS MEDS"--the rest has been ripped off. Tony DeFreece hands the desk clerk Allen's medications, and she puts them in the filing cabinet, which holds approximately 15 additional paper sacks of medication.
Sammy is assigned to an eight-bed room approximately 30 feet long by 10 feet wide, with each of the beds spaced a few feet apart. The mattresses and sheets are stained. A ceiling panel over the room's two fluorescent lights is missing. Two of the three ceiling fans don't work. The doorknob is falling off. A few broken-down bureaus are scattered around the room. The bathroom consists of a shower the size of a large telephone booth and two toilets, both missing their stall doors. For this Allen pays $340 a month. (DeFreece acknowledges that boarding homes can be unappealing places to live, but he points out that no one else will take the population with whom ACT works.)
Jefferson House has 11 rooms and 58 beds. Its population fluctuates, but recently 54 men and women lived there, 28 of whom were DMHMR clients. It provides three meals daily, plus it posts someone--usually an ex-DMHMR consumer--at the front desk. Curfew is at 10 p.m., and no one is allowed out of his room after 11 p.m.
Sammy spends much of his time watching television, either sitting in the day room or in his room, surrounded by his garbage bags filled with soiled and foul-smelling clothes, some of which are starting to mildew. He urinates in his bed, and the sheets are not changed. He is constantly harassed by residents and the desk clerks to wash, to lower his voice, and to stop his ranting.
At different times a resident tries to sell Sammy cufflinks, a belt with "Ellis Unit Death Row" stamped on its buckle, a lighter, two cans of soda, an umbrella, and the over-the-counter antihistamine Benadryl. Allen weighs each offer seriously and occasionally makes a deal. In the television room, a resident offers Sammy a three-quarters-full lighter in exchange for some of his soda. Allen lets him keep the lighter and pours him a cup. Another resident picks through the ashtrays looking for stubbed-out cigarettes to smoke. One man sits in a chair in the day room, points to different residents, and says, "See that guy over there? He's crazy."
Formerly a flophouse for alcoholics, Jefferson House is a privately owned boarding house (or residential hotel) that only recently started taking in the mentally ill because they were easier to control and were less of a problem, according to a manager there.
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