Crystal Fox
Appearances
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
The stigma is a hard one for me to understand because the stigma mostly has to do with everybody. And it has to do with systems, and it has to do with government. They've created such a difficult pathway for parents and such a difficult pathway for these individuals to succeed.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
So there's a little confusion with those numbers. When they talk about 1 in 5, 1 in 8, they're talking about all mental illnesses.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
So they're talking about somebody who goes to the doctor and has anxiety or depression or maybe some PTSD from childhood trauma. They're talking about individuals who might have postpartum psychosis. They're talking about anybody who has a mental health issue or emergency. They're not talking about those with anxiety. schizophrenia, and psychosis disorders.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
The numbers are somewhere between 1 in 100 to 3 in 100 that have this level of serious mental illness that has to do with psychosis and schizophrenia. Now, you are right. There are a lot of people who know somebody that has these disorders, maybe an extended family and stuff, but it's not as much as you would think.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
A big part of the problem is those that have those other mental health conditions, like anxiety, depression, PTSD, these kind of things can actually advocate for themselves. Most of the funding has gone to them. Most of the funding has gone to caring for those with some sort of mental health condition. There's no money or very little money that's going to this organization
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
one to three percent of the population. Those with the most seriously mentally ill, those that were taken care of at the state hospital by people like me. Those people are incarcerated. Nobody sees them. Nobody wants to see them. And that's where Arizona Mad Moms came in was because out of all the various groups, even raising my kids with autism.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And trust me, we were kicked out of some really nice restaurants because of my daughter. We've done our share of what you would call discrimination. But again, nothing compared to what my son went through with his schizophrenia. Nothing compares to what happened.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Shortly after he was sentenced, he went to prison and within 30 hours committed suicide. So after that, I was asked to speak at a hospital committee meeting for the Senate. And I spoke at the end, actually, the House as well. I think it had both sides on it. And after that meeting, we were just flooded with people who were dealing with the same issues.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Good question. I didn't get any help or support. I also don't think I reached out, and I should have. Again, having my background, I think I thought that doctors and these hospitals that I tried taking my son to and all these places would see what I saw. I didn't know that you had to literally... write down a whole agenda. I didn't know that you had to be suicidal in order to get help.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
I didn't know that psychosis wasn't enough. I didn't know that they would transfer him and not call me when he got out. I didn't understand how serious HIPAA laws were against parents. And I did not experience the support. And I think most of the Arizona Mad Moms have never felt supported. So my son, during his psychotic break, which lasted until his death, murdered his father.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And again, the first time he attempted to assault his dad, again, if this was my daughter Tia, she would have gone to a hospital or she would not have been removed. But with Joshua, even though his dad was going to file a petition, again, to have him placed inpatient this time, he wasn't on drugs. And even the last time, he was still psychotic.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
That's why I knew it wasn't drugs the first time he went to the screening center. This time, during that petition process, my ex-husband called the police to just take him to keep him safe because he was trying to kill himself and others, and they took him to jail instead. And that's what started the whole incarceration process that led to, again, the murder and then the death.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And I even took him, being a nurse, I knew what to say. I took him to seven different screening centers and seven different hospitals to try to get him help. He was turned away by everyone. During that time, I had let them know that he had pulled a knife, that he was delusional, that he was threatening, that he wasn't making sense. Basically, I was afraid of him because he wasn't suicidal.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
They didn't admit him.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
That's right. You're allowed. So for some reason, society has decided you're allowed to be psychotic. And it's okay to be psychotic, but it's not okay to be suicidal. And I would like to change that because it is not okay to be psychotic. More people commit suicide and homicide during psychosis than any other time.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
It is. Arizona, one of the things that we did do is we created, it's not named this anymore, but it was for Joshua's dad, John. And we created a bill in Arizona that requires screening centers to collateral information in writing from the caretaker or the parents. And it's required to go into the medical chart.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
So we are hoping that will help to not just provide the intake departments in these hospitals and these centers more collateral information to be able to admit, but also to provide more safety to the family members so what happened to John doesn't happen to anybody else. And we also created in Arizona, when you mentioned anosognosia, we also created a bill training individuals on anosognosia.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
It is. It's a class for behavioral health peer supports and staff who work in the centers that work in our... We have SMI clinics that work in our clinics to get that training so that they understand a lot of people think that anosognosia is just somebody being a jerk or somebody not being defiant or somebody choosing to... choosing this process, this thought process disorder, and it's not.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And that's what created the Arizona Mad Moms. So probably around January of this last year.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
If I told Josh that he didn't have syphilis or hepatitis, which I did do because he didn't have it, he showed me the spots on his body that were not there and said that he knew that he had that disease and he knew I was trying to kill him because I wasn't getting him help for that disease. You couldn't tell him, even with a lab test, that he did not have that disease. That's not denial.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
That's a medical emergency.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
I would like to, and many of us mad moms would like to, escalate psychosis to the level that we've escalated suicide. If somebody says they're suicidal, they're straight into a hospital, paid attention to, it's important. Even if they've said they're suicidal 300 times and had been admitted to a hospital 27 times. They're still admitted for suicidal thoughts.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
But if somebody comes in and says that they're out of their medicine, people are following them, they think that the aliens have come down and taken over their body, that's not a reason to admit somebody. That's not a reason to treat somebody. And we want to elevate that to the same level of emergency that suicide is.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yeah, I think people need to hear that in a society that we need to decide. We need to decide, are we going to love and care for our neighbors, even if they're deranged and insane? Are we going to care for those individuals in society? Or should we place them in asylums or institutions where people who want to care for them are going to care for them?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
House and Senate of Arizona.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
The idea of placing somebody in the jail system for having schizophrenia, even when they do these horrendous things, which I know they're horrendous things, and I understand that, but not treating them why they're in jail and prison is, is torture. My son believed that he was being raped, that everybody was against him.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
He jumped off a balcony breaking his back and both of his heels because he thought he was resurrecting a female from hell. He tried to kill himself multiple times. He felt that the devil had come into his body. He could tell because it was changing the way he looked. Leaving people in jail to be laughed at by guards and to be treated like that is inhumane. It's absolutely inhumane.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And whether you're going to incarcerate people, whether you're going to put them in a hospital, or whether we're going to try to treat them in the community, somehow we have to have love and humanity for these individuals that once they're treated would never do those things that they did.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yep. So yesterday, Josh was so inflicted with his illness that he did not know how to use the telephone. Between September 27th, where somebody taught him how to use the phone, And yesterday, a year ago yesterday, we talked every single day for 30 to 40 minutes, depending on what the devil would let him do, what his voices would let him do. We talked about love and kindness, forgiveness.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
We talked about his schizophrenia. I tried to give him hope. We talked about his delusions. That's how come I know so much about him. So on December 19th, one year ago, he was transferred to prison. And 2020, they didn't do cell checks.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
I can. So I'm also a psychiatric nurse. I've been a psychiatric nurse for 30 years. I worked at the Arizona State Hospital and retired from the Arizona State Hospital. Anastomosis is a symptom of psychosis disorder and really mania. So anytime you have bipolar with psychosis and severe mania, that's the high end.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
where people just ramble and they think that they have special powers, stuff like that. They truly believe that. So, anosognosia affects those people, including those with schizophrenia, and anosognosia is a symptom of the disease.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
What Arizona Mad Moms and many of us who have experience working with psychosis, we believe if you have that symptom of anosognosia, which many people call lack of insight. So when I used to document as a nurse, I would write whether people had no insight into their illness, that they thought that their hallucinations and their delusions were real and you could not convince them otherwise.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Some people had partial insight or a little, some anosognosia where you might be able to, they see that they need medicine, they might be sick, but they still believe their hallucinations and their psychosis and their mania. So you can have varying levels of anosognosia, but those that have severe anosognosia where they don't understand that they're sick,
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
that they think that their psychosis and their mania is real. They are the ones that Arizona Mad Moms most supports. They're the individuals that are severely mentally ill. We're also the individuals that often need treatment against their will or involuntary treatment because they don't understand that they're sick. My son was one of those individuals.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
He truly believed his delusion and his hallucinations were real, and he could actually see them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
It was tricky. And my son Joshua, he had some psychotic breaks when he was younger. He had his first psychotic break when he was 18. He believed that people were chasing him and after him. He believed that he needed a gun in order to protect himself.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
He believed that I owed him the money from things that happened to him in his childhood, which I didn't know at that time what he thought those were. I later found out that he thought that his... Dad had raped him, had his friends come over and rape him, and then put it on the internet and made money. This could not have been true because his dad did not work the internet.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
I've asked my other kids, and we have no recollection of John doing any such things.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yeah, his dad did not have any access to the internet. He did not really know how to work the internet. He also, I've talked with all my other kids, and none of us have any thoughts that John would have done such a thing. We believe that's what's called a delusion, and it's a fixed delusion. And so that's where he thought we owed him money. So at that time, I did, in Arizona, we have petitions.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And so I petitioned him for involuntary treatment. And they let him out within a day and said that it was because he was on drugs.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
That is true. That is true.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
he was on drugs, which again complicates things for a lot of people who have schizophrenia because when their symptoms get really bad, they tend to go to drugs in order to mask those symptoms, in order to help themselves. Trying to fade out what comes first, the psychosis or the drug use, often comes with years of having to fade that out.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Even myself, up until when Josh was 17, so up until just a year before that, believed that Josh's issues were related to substance abuse and not schizophrenia. So at 17, I was around him enough that I saw the mental illness coming first. but I did not know it was schizophrenia.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
I thought maybe it was like a bipolar disorder where they have highs and lows, or I thought maybe he had so much anxiety it was making him paranoid. So even me with my experience had a hard time sorting this out at first.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yes. And that's true for everybody. It takes up to three to five years to get a clear diagnosis of schizophrenia. They rule out everything else first. And that's something that Arizona Mad Moms and several other psychosis organizations really want to see changed. I don't know if you remember, so I know... This group that listens is well aware of autism, and I have two children with autism.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And I believe that autism, when my daughter and son had it, was diagnosed, my daughter was diagnosed at two, and my son was diagnosed at eight. Back in the day, individuals did not get diagnosed with autism, often until they were in school, because pediatricians didn't know how to identify it. That's where we're at with schizophrenia.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
The high schools, the parents, society doesn't know how to identify those early signs of schizophrenia. And so one of the things we'd like to see improved upon, because I believe if we can diagnose autism at one and a half years old, we can start diagnosing schizophrenia a lot earlier and get treatment to these young kids, young adults a lot earlier.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
It's gonna take focus. Society, the United States, has gone backward. If you think about Dorothy Dix, back in the day, she went into jails and found people that were seriously mentally ill and said, no, they need a place to go that would be a hospital. that would be able to treat people rather than incarcerate them. So we pulled everybody out of the jails and we placed them in hospitals.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Then around the 1940s and 50s, there was a change. And I believe that change happened because they thought it was the best thing. but it has not been the best thing. So that change was is that we took people out of hospitals and they were supposed to get community care in society. That did not happen. And these individuals, instead of getting care in the community, were incarcerated.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
There's never been a focus on psychosis or schizophrenia because we've just incarcerated people with this illness. And we've closed all the hospital beds. This is a big word, but personally, I believe it's like state-sanctioned torture, really, for individuals with schizophrenia. Imagine our individuals with autism, which there has been some, that end up incarcerated.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yes. And I will tell you again, my youngest daughter is severely autistic. There is no question she's got the epilepsy. She's cognitively impaired. She actually had a brain tumor. So she's got multiple disabilities. She functions pretty much as a three or four year old. There's no question. that she has autism and that she's cognitively disabled. No question in society.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
No question if you spend any time with her. But my oldest son, Austin, had what they used to call in the old days Asperger's syndrome. We, again, same with him. And he was also twice exceptional. So he was also gifted. And he was diagnosed with ADHD. So trying to work out which issue he was having. We even questioned whether he had bipolar disorder as well. There's a lot of interlap.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
Yeah, thank you for asking.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And what they're starting to find in the genetics is genetically, there's a lot of interlap between all these diagnoses.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
That's the million dollar question. And that's the question I ask a lot of people. So when I worked at the Arizona State Hospital for 30 years, one of the units that I worked out, and this is my favorite one that I like to talk about, was an open unit. It had open doors. So our patients came and went as they pleased. They were getting ready for discharge.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
They were truly psychotic, schizophrenic, or bipolar, but they were stable on their medication, but still receiving a lot of supports. They were getting ready to go out into the community, so it was a slow transition back in those days. This is the 1990s when Clozzapine first came out. We went to the movie theaters. We went to what we call Park and Swap, a swap meet. We went on the bus.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
We went to restaurants. They had dances to go to. They had all these different activities, but we've removed... all of those social situations. And so the thing with schizophrenia is just like the thing with developmental disabilities, they need support for an extended period of time with staff. And there shouldn't be any stigma around that.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
It was a slow start, a slow progress. We had gotten together. My son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. while he was in jail. And there was a group of us that were following his trajectory through the criminal justice system. He had trouble with maintaining his sanity, and he had to go back for Rule 11. And through that process, there was a group of us that followed him.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
The brain of somebody with schizophrenia that's been suffering with psychosis cognitively is impaired. They have to relearn stuff just like a person with a stroke has to relearn things. The difference between autism and schizophrenia, again, is we don't provide physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. Those things aren't provided.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
And so the re-entry back into society is very difficult. And this is the questions we need to ask ourselves. I talk with the police. and they don't want to really deal with mental illness. You talk with the jails, they don't want to deal with mental illness. You talk with the store owners that are around the homeless population, they don't want to deal with mental illness.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Crystal Fox: One Mothers Journey Through Tragedy
We took all these people out of a safe place in asylums or hospitals, had people like me who care deeply. 30 years, I knew some of those patients longer than I knew my children. We took them out of those places for people who wanted to work with them, and we placed them in a community that does not want them. So that is the question.