Jim O’Neill’s eight-part series on one woman’s decades-long struggle with schizophrenia, “Rosie’s Journey,” was just published in the Dallas Morning News, with the final installment running last Sunday. Before the series’ publication O’Neill, 43, moved to Bloomberg News in New York, where he now covers higher education. Prior to his two years reporting for the Morning News, O’Neill spent nine years at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Edward B. Colby: How did you first learn about Rosie Sims?
Jim O’Neill: Well, my beat at the time for the Dallas Morning News was covering Dallas County government, and that included the county jail system, and I had done a number of stories on problems with the jail’s health care delivery to inmates — under U.S. Supreme Court rulings, inmates are required to receive proper medical care but they weren’t getting it, and people were waiting weeks and even months to get proper care, both people with chronic illness, people with mental illness, and so forth.
And then, as a result, I was kind of keeping up on the conditions there, and found out that this one woman had died in the jail. So I wrote a small piece that ran inside the metro section when I found out that she’d died, and it wasn’t very clear what caused it, but it turns out she was mentally ill — she had schizophrenia for many years. And I thought that it might put a human face on the whole issue of inmates in jails with mental illness, because more and more people are ending up in the jail rather than in state hospitals, and [that’s] obviously not the most appropriate place for them, since they don’t necessarily get the proper treatment. So I approached the family and it took a bit of time, but after awhile they warmed up to the idea of telling her story, and I have to give them a lot of credit because so many people, even today, feel that mental illness is a stigma, and without their cooperation and willing[ness] to share their story, none of this would have been possible. So that’s how I first learned out about Rosie, and then how we decided to try and use it to tell the bigger story and put a human face on it.
EBC: In talking with the family, how long did it take to reconstruct her story?
JON: Well, it took a number of pretty long sit-down interviews with the two daughters, Tosha and her sister, and then I also interviewed their brother by phone, who is living in Ohio, and then other family members were reluctant to get involved, but eventually they were able to convince their father to talk as well, and I met him. And then beyond that, obviously, I went and talked to other people involved — they were able to get me in touch with one of the paramedics who responded to the scene where she died. I also talked to some experts on mental illness, I went to the various state hospitals where she spent time over the years, and also drove out to Floydada, which is the small town in West Texas where she grew up, and drove around there and spent some time getting a feel for where she was raised and all.
EBC: Was it odd writing a narrative of Rosie’s life without being able to interview her?
JON: Oh, absolutely, it was a pretty big challenge. But luckily, talking to enough people, they had a lot of great memories about her, and that was part of what I wanted to do in the series — keep coming back to the fact that this wasn’t just a crazy woman, as outsiders might see her, or a bag lady walking down the street, homeless, but she was a mother, she had been a daughter, she had been a wife, and all those roles were wrapped up in her as well, and there were people who loved her and had these great memories of her. So I kept trying to weave that in as well as the parts when she was having her episodes with hearing voices and that sort of thing. And on top of that, I was able to get the medical records, a lot of medical records from her times in state hospitals and also in the jail, which helped flush out a lot of what she was experiencing in there — the doctors’ analysis of how she was behaving. So I was able to provide some detail that way as well, even though I wasn’t ever able to talk to her directly.
EBC: Rosie’s long struggle with schizophrenia included countless heartbreaking moments, from her times wandering the streets to her attack on her own sister to her seemingly preventable death from pneumonia in jail. What did you find saddest about her story?
JON: Perhaps that it’s not as unique as we might want it to be — that there are a lot of people out there who struggle with this all the time, and it seems to be very much under the radar, that a lot of people don’t know about it or don’t talk about it, that people just dismiss it — ‘Oh, that’s a homeless person sitting under the train tracks,’ or something. And yet, at one time they were little kids that had a bright future, potentially, and that a lot of this could be prevented. I think there are some successful programs out there with the right money and the right resources that could prevent a lot of this from happening. Unfortunately, still, a lot of the drugs to treat mental illness do have side effects, and it’s hard to keep people on their medication. But again, that’s I guess part of what’s so sad about these illnesses — and how it affects not just the person involved, but layers and layers of people around them, from family members to friends to unintended victims of their violent behavior.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.