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Jail and prison will never be places a person with mental illness finds healing

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Twenty-five years ago, while serving time in a California prison for a parole violation, I was talking to a forensic psychologist when I began to feel a sense of hope.

I sensed that this psychologist understood me. I shared my actual feelings with her and was vulnerable, the first time I’d really done that with a mental health professional.

In one of our sessions, she told me the reason I was in prison was not because I was a criminal. It was because I had a problem with alcohol and suffered from clinical depression. To reinforce her statement, she encouraged me with a quote from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven.”

“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run,” she said, repeating a line from the song, “there’s still time to change the road you’re on.”

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