No Saints Here: A Cautionary Tale of Mental Illness, Health, and the Cost of Ignorance in the Long Star State

Aaron's book has a publisher and a new title! It is being published by Stoney Creek Publishing https://stoneycreekpublishing.com/ and is expected to go on sale March 2025! Right now I am making a final check before handing the manuscript over. Then it goes through a couple of rounds of editing. Aaron wanted to use his life and our experiences to make a difference and it feels good to get his voice out into the world. This title came from concerns of his friends and youngest brother that the story might fail to authentically capture Aaron’s lack of sainthood. He was no saint.

We all failed him. Our collective lack of sainthood is a major point of the book. It is an honest look at our mistakes and their consequences. Sometimes these were sins of omission, often because what we now know as essential elements of best practices in mental health had not been published and were not general knowledge, even across mental health professionals. Examples include an understanding of trauma, the importance of emotional regulation, and of firmly centering practice on building capacity both for social and emotional skills and opportunities to experience success.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) study was the first to explore the relationship between abuse in childhood and adults risk (Felitti, et al., 1998). It was not published until 1998, eight years after Aaron was abused in Straight Inc, and long after he landed on the streets. Prior to the ACES study, child abuse was generally assumed to be rare and trauma informed or trauma sensitive were not terms applied to therapy much less the environments that children and youth experienced. Truthfully, he had experienced multiple ACEs; a teenage mom, a father with serious mental illness in prison, and a violent household with raging alcoholism. All of that before he entered school and it was all compounded by school failure in a system that not only failed to recognize trauma, it failed to see and effectively support his learning disabilities. It was decades before PBIS recognized the need to teach expected behaviors and effective self regulation and conflict resolution strategies. We were ignorant and he paid.

Then, worse than what we all failed to do, were the sins of commission. The practices that may have inflicted the most harm were the behavioral strategies perpetuated by professionals who saw only an endless list of undesirable behaviors to extinguish, while failing to recognize assets or give opportunities to broaden those seeds of strength. We all underestimated the basic need to experience competence, and none of us knew anything about the accommodations that might have made success possible in school. I bought into that deficit mindset and aligned with those who were failing my child. I was an inept disciplinarian, who when the prescribed consequences failed sometimes resorting to yelling, and even spanking. My discipline might have worked with a child who would have acquiesced to any sloppy attempt at parenting. That was not Aaron.

Then the match that lit the kindling our collective ineptitude stacked high was the horrific abuse he lived through at Straight. I would like to be able to say that we are all wiser now that we have access to evidence based practices, but the truth is that too many children and youth still face the same strategies. Each section begins with Aaron and my experiences but perhaps the most important pieces are the closing chapters which provide evidence for more effective strategies. Our experiences are meant to provide a backdrop to help the reader apply alternatives.