Personally Speaking: Christopher Sharikas (Part Three)
By Lisa Dailey
(Nov. 17, 2017) Treatment Advocacy Center was founded by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey in 1998 to change laws and policies preventing individuals with serious mental illness from getting timely treatment. It is a disgrace that during literally the entire tenure of this organization, Christopher Sharikas has languished in prison and remains there, untreated and delusional, to this day.
Christopher, like other people with serious mental illness in prison, is extremely vulnerable and has been victimized many times in the twenty years since his incarceration. A short, slight seventeen year-old when he was sentenced, Sharikas has been raped and beaten. He has lost teeth and his nose has been broken. As we have previously reported, research shows that those with schizophrenia are uniquely at risk for violence in prison.
Deciding whether or not to take medication has proven to be somewhat of a Catch-22 for Christopher. When he takes antipsychotic medication, he becomes sedated and passive and is an easy target for other prisoners. But if he refuses medication, he becomes aggressive and gets involved in fights. Due to long-term damage to his brain from lengthy periods of psychosis, a report from a doctor in 2007 indicates that Sharikas is unlikely to return to his original baseline of functioning.
Christopher’s delusions persist. At times he believes that he is involved with gangs. (He is not.) He believes that in the past he had been shot 35 times. (He was not.)
“I could be the next Jesus Christ,” he said in a recent interview with the Washington Post. “He says when I die, he’ll end the world. When I’m with him, I don’t have nothing to worry about.”
Inmates with serious mental illness pose a dilemma for corrections professionals. Sometimes it is necessary to place Christopher in solitary confinement for his own safety, but solitary confinement is extremely harmful to those with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses and exacerbates symptoms. The high prevalence of serious mental illness in prison has become the status quo in Virginia. But most agree that prison is an extremely dangerous place to be for an individual in psychosis.
Christopher’s mother Sana drives three and half hours each way to visit her son every week. She leaves in tears. As she told the Washington Post, “I just want to give him a decent life, before I go back to my creator.”
Twenty years after the creation of Treatment Advocacy, the case of Christopher reminds us why our work is not complete. Changes to laws are important, but they are not retroactive. Sharikas’s crime was serious and his victim’s suffering should never be overlooked. But his actions arose from an untreated mental illness and he has already served almost twice the maximum recommended sentence for his crime.
With no further legal options available, we join other advocates and Christopher’s family in calling on outgoing Governor Terry McAuliffe to commute his sentence so he can be sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment at long last.
