Portland resident Kelli Caldwell’s mother suffers from severe mental illness and episodes of psychosis. She also had access to multiple firearms and other weapons. As her mother’s mental illness progressed, the responsibility fell on Caldwell and her family to remove the weapons so her mother wouldn’t harm herself or others. Caldwell tried appealing to law enforcement, social services, healthcare agencies and courts for help in removing weapons from her mother’s possession. But help has rarely become available to her.
Caldwell recently wrote about her decades-long journey navigating systems of law enforcement, social services and healthcare agencies for The Marshall Project. She joins us for more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end this week with Kelli Caldwell. She’s a musician, a writer and a Portlander who grew up in the Willamette Valley. She recently published an essay for The Marshall Project. It’s called “Mom’s Last Gun.” It’s about her mother’s lifelong struggles with serious mental illness and her repeated but often unsuccessful efforts to help her mother or keep her away from guns.
Kelli Caldwell joins us now. It’s great to have you in the studio.
Kelli Caldwell: Thank you.
Miller: I thought we could start where you start your essay. Do you mind telling us the story of what happened one day when you were 11?
Caldwell: Sure. Well, I stayed home to watch my mom. One day, I stayed home from school when I was in sixth grade because she was in a psychotic episode, and this was not the first time. I had experienced that often throughout her life and my life with her, a single mother. And she was talking to the cupboards, and going outside and listening for signals from God, and things like that. Very entrenched in a psychotic episode.
Then at one moment, she came downstairs and she was holding a gun, basically kind of as if it was a ceremonial piece or something presented to me. And she said we needed to go. Men were coming to rape me and chop me up. I’m sorry, that’s a graphic thing to say, but that’s the reality of what was going on in her mind and the fear, the level of fear that would bring her to that place. So she felt the merciful choice was to kill us herself. I didn’t know that this gun was in our house, but that was my first introduction to it.
Very shortly after that, I basically said, “OK, let’s think about this for a second, Mom.” And she put the gun down on the table. She said, “You’re probably right.” And then, my aunt burst in the back door and told me to walk to the police station. I did that. And then my aunt said later she threw the gun in the Willamette River, and my mom went to the mental hospital for a couple of months after that.
Miller: That’s just one terrifying story of one crisis moment. You have a lot of similar ones.
Caldwell: Yeah.
Miller: Before we talk more about the efforts that you’ve gone through for decades to help your mother, I’m curious if you could just give us a fuller sense for who she is in addition to somebody who deals with mental illness. I mean, a sense of her talents and her spirit.
Caldwell: Yeah, thank you. That’s really important in this conversation. My mother is someone who has gone through extreme challenges that most people don’t understand. She has three co-occurring mental illnesses and is very much on the extreme end of people suffering. And we can talk more about what her symptoms are.
She was a single mother who was a really hard worker, never stopped being an extremely hard worker, extremely talented and smarter than anyone I know. She was an incredibly talented wearable artist. She had a show actually with the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts one year where six of her pieces were the finale of the show, and has had socialites and celebrities buy her work over the years. Bob Dylan’s drummer, for example, has one of her vests, or did. And her work was just beyond most anything people have seen or anything on the red carpet.
She was also very much an activist. She called her senators every day to say what was on her mind and she cared very much about homeless people. She started her own little organization that was pretty much just our family – Blankets for Burnside. We would make sandwiches for homeless people, and collect jeans and things, and take them down to Portland, open up the back of my mom’s car and hand things out to people on the weekends. She actually brought a homeless woman home for a couple of months one time because she felt it was worth trying that, and to help that woman get into a better place.
So, she taught me a lot of things. She was also extremely difficult for our family because of all of her illnesses. But the full picture of who she was is part of the reason that I need to tell this story and be fair to people like her.
Miller: You eventually moved to the East Coast, partly, you write, to distance yourself from your mother. But then in 2020, you wrote you had to come back. What was happening in 2020?
Caldwell: Actually, I was on the East Coast back in 2000 and I came back shortly after that. So I had been back in this area since the early 2000s. I distanced myself from my mother when I had my children in 2013 and I needed to keep them safe from the continued fixation on having guns.
But in 2020, after about 10 years of keeping some space, I had to go back because I had been told by a therapist that I saw, this is something that agencies should be able to handle. You have done enough with your mother. You have suffered some of the consequences yourself to your body. And it takes a toll, the trauma. Agencies should be able to do this work.
So, I was called by Adult Protective Services in 2020. They said that there was an incident that they were concerned about. My mother was saying my brother had hurt her and he was living with her in her house with his partner. And I knew that wasn’t true. When the Adult Protective Services said that, I immediately said, “My brother would never do that. He’s not that kind of person. My mother’s in a mental health crisis. Here’s the history, many hospitalizations and many issues.”
I came to find out then that she was in the wind, as often was the case, she was out in her car, and we needed to find her and get her into some help. So, I finally decided, after talking to adult behavioral health in her county, Yamhill County, and not getting very far, as well as talking to the police in our hometown, Newberg – who had been very, very much involved over the years and good allies – that I needed to come back. The system wasn’t finding her or maintaining to get her help that she needed.
Miller: What kinds of roadblocks did you run into as her daughter and telling people this history, still trying to get her help?
Caldwell: It’s pretty constant, the roadblocks, so I could talk about that all day and probably all week. One of the primary roadblocks is privacy, which is understandable. And it’s very complicated; I understand that. But basically, what you run into is if your loved one is not in immediate crisis, or imminently about to commit suicide, or imminently holding the gun pointed at someone, or has committed a crime – which we were working hard to keep her from doing – if that is not urgent and someone’s not right about to die right that second, they can’t confirm or deny whether or not they are helping or involved or they know who your loved one is. And that was the case with my mom.
So when I was driving around looking for her, and the police were driving around looking for her, adult behavioral health was not able to tell any of us that my mom was already in a hospital in McMinnville for a short stay – always too-short stays in the last 40 years, basically, for someone like her. And at many steps along the way, I basically called agencies, hospitals in desperation to say, “I understand you cannot tell me about my mother, but please let me tell you about her history. Do you know about the guns?” And there were other things to be concerned about. She had some knives, I know, that were in the hospital. So things like that, just some of the roadblocks.
Miller: Oregon is one of about half the states in the country that has passed so-called extreme risk protection laws or red flag laws. The basic idea being that if someone is a danger to themselves or others, then their firearms can be taken away. What happened when you tried to use that law?
Caldwell: It was 2020 and the law was new in 2018. So I want to acknowledge that, first of all, that it was new and we were in the pandemic, and everything was difficult for everyone. But what happened was, it was suggested to me by the police that I try that. It was never mentioned to me by any of the other agencies and I think that’s maybe something that should change as part of their protocol. I had never heard of it and was advised by the police to get an attorney by the state referral line, who could help us get an ERPO [extreme risk protective order], they call it.
When I talked to that person, the attorney basically said, “I don’t really know that much about working with that, but I would recommend doing an involuntary commitment for your mother. That’s a quicker way to get her help and you can deal with the gun later,” basically. And in the middle of crisis, I think a lot of people whose family members are experiencing this sort of severe mental health crisis, there’s so many things that you’re working to try to deal with that, as silly as it may sound, the gun was just like, OK, we’ll just move on. There are so many other things we needed to accomplish, including finding my mom.
Miller: You know, it seems like one of the real terrible catch-22s here is that, in various ways, the message you were given is “we can’t help you now.” In a sense, things have to get even worse. You’re trying to prevent her from hurting somebody or committing a crime, and you were almost literally told, well, until she commits a crime or until she is about to hurt herself or somebody else, you can’t help. We can’t even tell you where she is.
But on the other hand, these laws are there for a reason. Privacy is important in a lot of cases. And so you can understand the reasons for any of these laws. And in a country with the Second Amendment, there’s very strong beliefs about not infringing on that constitutional right. I’m curious how you think about changing the laws in ways that would balance these different needs?
Caldwell: You mean privacy laws for …
Miller: Privacy …
Caldwell: Gun laws?
Miller: Guns, involuntary commitment. In various ways, you ran into the same basic thing: “It’s not bad enough yet.”
Caldwell: Yeah, I don’t have all the answers and it’s very complicated. And as much as I know, and I’ve lived on this land my whole life, I know that there’s a lot I don’t know. So I’m not going to claim to be an expert. But I have run into, my family members have run into – and I have listened to other folks whose family members have extreme mental illness – these barriers where we are not listened to by the agencies, the doctors. Maybe we are listened to mostly by the police. And I know police get a bad rap for dealing with mental health challenges, but that has not been my experience in my hometown. They were my best ally for 40 years and the Newberg police deserve credit for that. They had a great program there actually, for this type of thing.
Anyway, family members are not listened to by these folks. And it’s also important to recognize that we are not able to be cared about by our family members, because of the nature of their illnesses. It’s often difficult for them to see us. So no one sees us. And we’re working our tails off to try to save, in many cases, our family members. I think that could be changed.
You don’t have to tell me things about my family member necessarily, although in certain circumstances, that would help a lot. But make time and make it a basic step in these situations to listen to family members and let them tell you what’s been going on. My mother is very good at doing what is very common: turning it on, we call it, for five to 10 minutes with mental health evaluators, with doctors, with various other people because of her paranoia, to pretend like she is holding it together a lot more than she is. So I have sat there beside her, where she’s telling me or my brother Dylan, who’s been a hero in this whole thing, that we’re going to be the next God. And then the next five minutes, the doctor comes in, she turns it on. The doctor doesn’t give enough time and patience to actually push through, and we leave without getting any help. We see that in so many steps along the way.
Miller: Just briefly, you mentioned at the end that your mom is now getting care in a care facility. Did you have any misgivings about publishing this essay? You have about 45 seconds to answer that. Apologies.
Caldwell: Yes, that’s OK. I have tremendous respect for people going through mental health challenges and severe mental illness. I want to be sure to say that my mom is on the very extreme end and these are spectrum illnesses. Most people are not dangerous and are not on the level of the things that are in this essay about her. So yes, I had misgivings because I don’t want to contribute to misunderstanding or stigmatization, but we also need to be able to talk about the whole story and the truth of what it’s like to try to help loved ones.
Miller: Kelli, thanks very much.
Caldwell: Thank you so much.
Miller: Kelli Caldwell is a musician and a writer. You can find her new essay in The Marshall Project.
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