THE OTHER DR. GILMER, unnerving murder with serious mental health implications

THE OTHER DR. GILMER: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice
BENJAMIN GILMER
Ballantine Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system—a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time.

When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community—right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. He'd been in prison for nearly a decade by the time Benjamin arrived, but Vince's patients would still tell Benjamin they couldn't believe the other Dr. Gilmer was capable of such violence. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong.

Vince knew, too. He complained from the time he was arrested of his SSRI brain, referring to withdrawal from his anti-depressant medication. When Benjamin visited Vince in prison, he met a man who was obviously fighting his own mind, constantly twitching and veering off into nonsensical tangents. Enlisting This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig, Benjamin resolved to get Vince the help he needed. But time and again, the pair would come up against a prison system that cared little about the mental health of its inmates—despite an estimated one third of them suffering from an untreated mental illness.

In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime. Rather than get treatment, Vince Gilmer was sentenced to life in prison—a life made all the worse by his untrustworthy brain and prison and government officials who dismissed his situation. A large percentage of imprisoned Americans are suffering from mental illness when they commit their crimes and continue to suffer, untreated, in prison. In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer argues that some crimes need to be healed rather than punished.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The carceral economy that makes corporations wealthy is evil.

That's my bias, right there; I make no apologies for it, and if your opinion is otherwise, this review will make you angry and upset, and feel (correctly) that you are being shamed and blamed for your absence of empathy and decency. Doubled if you claim to follow a religion.

A man with Huntington's disease, who was sexually abused by his parent, is serving a life sentence in prison for murdering that parent. Here is what the incarcerated man said to the author, when asked what he wanted this book to show the world when it was written:

Before I left the prison that day in 2018, I asked Vince to tell me the most important things he wanted this book to say. This is what he said:
Prison is torture.
Sexual abuse changes you forever.
We are all at the mercy of our brains.
Listening is healing.

Dr. Vince Gilmer will, it is almost certain, die in prison. There is no cure, or really any treatment, for Huntington's disease. His entire lifetime of service as a family physician in a poor area counted for nothing when weighed against the awful crime of strangling his abuser.

That's the nature of the system. For-profit prisons need prisoners; mental-health services cost a lot of money but make no one any profits. Guess which one we-the-people fund, generously? Mental health services can't guarantee good outcomes, some people can't be helped (Vince Gilmer, for example), so spending taxpayer money on the off-chance that this specific person who has committed a violent crime might be able to benefit? What a waste...there are corporations whose bottom lines could get fatter if he's jammed into jail.

As a result of untreated intergenerational trauma, exacerbated by a fatal degenerative neurological disease likely inherited from the parent who abused Vince Gilmer in childhood, he will die alone, in misery, in a corporate profit center. At the very least his life should end in a cold, uncaring corporate medical-profit center. (There is, at long last, some glimmer of hope for those crushed by medical debts; tiny, inadequate steps towards economic justice are better than the great race backwards occurring on so many fronts.)

If you've read The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row and enjoyed it, you're in the target demographic for the book. If you're thinking "oh pew! this is too hard, too much, too unhappy" then you *should* read it...because your empathy circuits need a bit of exercise. If you're sure peope who commit murder belong in jail, what on Earth are you doing here in the first place?!