by Jane Field
A former mitigation specialist still remembers the wife of a death row inmate who broke down in tears as he met with her to go over an affidavit for her husband’s defense case. Late into the night, his role shifted from a researcher for the defense team to an ad-hoc support person, although there was little he could do other than sit quietly with her and listen. The toll of her husband’s circumstances as a newly condemned prisoner of the State of Texas was beginning to break her and their children. It was her children that she was worried about in that moment.
The mitigation specialist described seeing the children’s faces collapse under the stress of their father’s sudden disappearance from their lives. “It was like a sudden death,” he remembered, “except he hadn’t died.” Instead, whenever they had the gas money to make the long drive to Livingston, Texas, where Texas men’s death row is held, they saw their father caged and restrained. Triggered by the enormity of this stress and the intense social stigma they experienced at school, these young children were now beginning to show symptoms of the same mental health struggles — depression, anxiety — that their father had battled in the years before his crime. Their mother feared a terrifying cycle was beginning, and was trying to find help for her family, but there seemed like nothing that could be done. Her family didn’t even qualify for support from Victim Services because they were not considered victims of a crime.
Although it is often overlooked by trauma experts, researchers who study the impact of death sentences on a loved one generally recognize it as a potential trigger of PTSD. At the Texas After Violence Project, we’ve spent over ten years conducting long-form life history interviews with people who have been impacted by the death penalty, and our interviews with family members of death-sentenced individuals are particularly poignant in the struggle they document. In 2019, we undertook a special project to look beyond the demonstrated trauma of a death sentence, asking, What happens when family members seek treatment for this trauma? What barriers do they face, and how might we, as a society, begin to address this harm? This project resulted in a comprehensive report, Nobody To Talk To: Barriers to Mental Health Treatment for Family Members of Individuals Sentenced to Death or Executed.
Among other findings, we discovered that it is difficult for family members of individuals sentenced to death or executed to even make it into the office of a mental health professional, let alone to see them long enough for a formal diagnosis and treatment of the unique trauma they experience. Instead, death row family members must overcome significant obstacles if they hope to receive care, all while experiencing low levels of support from existing social circles or even more severe forms of social isolation due to the stigma of their loved one’s death sentence. Furthermore, those closest to them may also be experiencing severe stress from the experience.
One death row family member described the moment he realized he might be suffering from this condition as well. “There was a young lady sitting next to me that had a brother on death row, and she went to a therapist and the therapist said she had PTSD, and I thought, maybe I have PTSD. I understood PTSD as what happened to our Vietnam veterans. That’s what I saw as PTSD. But then I got to thinking about it and I was like, okay, I think I might have PTSD, and began to look around and realized that yeah, my whole family has PTSD.”
There’s an adage that there are no rich people on death row, and while it may not be universally true, it frequently is — people with existing resources are able to hire more experienced lawyers and receive a lesser sentence. This often means that death row family members also do not have the resources to seek out mental health support, even if it is an option they want to utilize. One family member we spoke to during our research asked, “Who do you talk to? Who do you go to? Because a lot of people that have loved ones on death row, they don’t have the finances to seek therapy or to see someone on a regular basis, and it’s like, okay, do I pay to go to a psychiatrist, or do I send my [family member on death row] money to eat?”
That makes it particularly significant when a death row family member is able to reach out and receive help from a mental health professional. Unfortunately, even then, there are barriers due to a lack of experience and understanding from mental health professionals unfamiliar with the realities of capital punishment. The individuals we interviewed in 2019 described meeting with mental health professionals who expressed shock and disbelief when they learned of their client’s relationship to the death penalty. Death row family members who have received therapeutic help also described wondering if the person whom they spoke with might support the death penalty, or feeling that the therapist might not empathize with the family member’s grief over losing (or anticipating the loss of) their loved one, since society deems those on death row “the worst of the worst.” This meant that those family members stopped seeing those therapists, and sometimes decided to avoid any therapeutic help in the future, as well.
We believe that we, as a society, have a responsibility to care for those who have been most harmed by our criminal justice system. But what does that care and support look like? How can mental health professionals, in particular, make small changes so that they are better prepared to work with death row family members, especially at pivotal moments that might determine whether or not that person continues to receive care? In addition to considering barriers to treatment, our 2019 report goes into just some of the solutions we might adopt to begin to address this harm and make treatment more accessible. If you are a mental health professional and are interested in becoming more involved after reading the report, we also invite you to take our NASW-accredited online training, Working in Clinical Settings with Family Members of Persons Sentenced to Death or Executed, by report author, Susannah Sheffer.
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Jane Field is the Associate Director of the Texas After Violence Project. She conducted many of the interviews for TAVP’s 2019 report on the experiences of death row family members seeking mental health treatment.
