Lee Davis was standing naked at the edge of Lake Merritt in Downtown Oakland, enacting the strange steps of a ceremony only she knew.
It was 1999 and she was 25 years old. As she performed the sacred dance that would heal the world, she called on higher gods by first sacrificing beads, and then her body, into the murky urban waters of Merritt’s lagoon. Time was both meaningless and moving backward.
The ritual was an otherworldly plea and a cleansing that would make everything better — if only she did it right.
But this wasn’t reality. Davis’ swan dive into the freezing water that afternoon wasn’t witnessed by the gods, only by a scared young boy and his father in a nearby rowboat.
She was fully in psychosis, brought on by her then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
Davis was fished out of Lake Merritt by the Oakland Police and forced to take a drug test, which she vehemently protested. She wasn’t on drugs, she was saving the world. Why couldn’t they understand? After a stint at John George Psychiatric Hospital in San Leandro, she was released.
That happened three times, Davis remembers. She’d get sent to the psychiatric hospital after an episode, and then let go. Hospitalized, then released.
Left alone, again and again, to her own delusions, she slipped away from sanity.
“It was a torment to be in my own brain and have these different things happening. There were so, so many distressing thoughts,” Davis said.
Time became meaningless. At some point, Davis took out the fuses in her apartment building because they couldn’t be a part of the new world order. She smashed her windows, convinced that the inside and outside words needed to merge. She placed all of her belongings into the hallway of her apartment building to help redistribute wealth.
She became obsessed with a woman she’d met at a party and believed they would marry. She slept in short fits. Eventually, Davis quit her electrical apprenticeship to stay at home and make artful constellations — objects that held deep, cosmic meaning for her, but were frightening to family and friends.
Eventually, she believed she could fly. Why not? It’s so much easier than walking. She went to the roof of her apartment to test the theory. She remembers her father coaxing her back inside.
“If left unmedicated, I would have ended up probably being homeless, and I did lose my housing,” Davis said. “I would be dead now. That’s what the trajectory would have looked like, (probably) with some pretty … brutal things in between.”
Ultimately, it was a friend who forced Davis to get help.
“She realized that things were really off the rails and so she (called my parents) and said, ‘There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong and we need to help her,’” Davis said.
Being forced into mental health care was the best possible thing that could have happened, Davis said, even though she spit on the first medical professional who diagnosed her bipolar disorder.
Davis is managing her bipolar disorder, but it takes “vigilance” every single day, she said.
Since her diagnosis, Davis graduated from Sacramento State in 2016 with a degree in civil engineering. She also earned a degree in anthropology from UC Santa Barbara and now works as an artist.
She has also since finished her electrical apprenticeship; and from 2017 through 2022 she served as chair of the Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board, where she helped make recommendations to reduce the county’s number of mentally ill prisoners and advised the board of supervisors on behavioral health-related state legislation.
Davis said she never would have sought care if left to her own choices, because her delusions were an absolute, unassailable reality in her mind. That’s a common symptom of anosognosia, often seen in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, defined by a patient’s inability to understand and perceive their illness, much less seek help for it.
This is why Davis supports the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act that California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed into law.
Under CARE Court, a family member, first responder or anyone else will be able to petition a new kind of civil court to temporarily mandate and provide housing and care for a person with severe mental illness. (The current state plan is for all 58 California counties to have their CARE Courts running by December of 2024.)
But critics of the law, including Disability Rights California, say it strips individuals with mental health disabilities of their right to make their own decisions.
Davis, however, doesn’t see cruelty in helping people unable to help themselves. The real cruelty is leaving mentally ill patients to fend for themselves on city streets.
“It was not freedom to be tethered to a brain that was impaired in a real way … it was torture, and it was chaotic,” she said. “I was so in the grip (of my psychosis), I was so vulnerable to people on the street. To me, that’s not freedom.”
The reality is that CARE Court is for people who cannot take care of themselves, the kind of people who cannot make logical decisions about their care because their reasoning is lost in a haze of psychosis.
“I’m tired of having private conversations with people who have anti-acute care sentiments, but in private say ‘Maybe there are some exceptions,’” Davis said, exasperated.
That’s not to say she doesn’t see problems looming ahead for Newsom and the CARE Courts, an opinion bolstered by her background in mental health care advocacy.
Unless there are “concurrent and immediate investments” made to the state mental health system, including involuntary treatment, acute care through temporary supportive housing and maybe even permanent supportive housing, Davis said, “then it will be another failed attempt.”
“I appreciate their momentum on certain legislation around this issue,” she said. “It just has to be in tandem with these investments in mental health infrastructure to support it.”
Psychosis is like living in a dream, and never questioning the decisions you make within that dream, she said. The treatment for mental illnesses are well known and easily administered, but help must be sought first; people living with severe mental illness and anosognosia aren’t capable of that.
“If you see a child with a broken leg … it’s a very clear picture of what recovery would look like,” Davis said. “I think people don’t necessarily see (mental illness as) temporary and treatable, and people can live full and meaningful lives.”
