Susan McDonough had struggled with mental illness for years and had become lost to her family and friends sometime in December of 2008.  Her brother, Mark, attempted to file a missing persons report with the local police in Reading, PA.  They refused to file a missing persons report on his sister saying that she was an adult and did not fit the criteria for a lost person.  Mark then went to the Muhlenberg Township police to ask for help.  They filed Susan appropriately as missing and endangered due to her mental illness.  Tragically, Susan was found deceased on May 30, 2009.  Her unnecessary death has prompted her family to urge change in the mental health law for assisted outpatient treatment in Pennsylvania.  Her death also emphasizes the need for law enforcement officials to file missing person reports appropriately. We at Outpost for Hope believe that this tragedy could have been avoided and perhaps, Susan's life would have been saved.   Please join us by standing with this family and signing a petition at the Treatment Advocacy Center that supports a change in outdated treatment laws in Pennsylvania.  With your help, vulnerable people may receive the care they (and their families) so desperately need.

Losing Susan

By Jason Brudereck
Reading Eagle

A half a year ago, Susan McDonough returned to the home where she thought she still lived. But the house in the 300 block of Linden Street had been sold at a tax-claim sale in September. It was empty and abandoned.  Susan, 43, broke into a room at the rear of the house. The room was once a kitchen but had been walled off from the rest of the house. There is a door from the room to the backyard. She curled up on the concrete floor there. It's likely she soon froze to death, investigators believe.  Her decomposing body was found May 30 by a man working for the house's new owner. She died alone.

But Susan, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia more than two decades earlier, was not without relatives and friends. They had been searching for her until the day they were told she had been found. Now her relatives are hoping Susan's death prompts a change in laws that had prevented them from forcing her to get treatment. "It breaks my heart to think she had to lie there alone," said Mark McDonough, 46, her half-brother. "It's just such an undignified way to go - that she had to lie there for so long."

Artists often show us a different way of seeing the world and sometimes challenge us to consider another view. Artists in Action is a social awareness project involving writers and artists who have their own perceptions of the word 'lost' and what it means to them. If you would like your art or writing about lost or 'missing, missing persons' to be featured here, we invite you to email us a link to your work and a description for consideration.

"Help Me Rhonda"

Written by Marquita Plomer (c) 2009

Photograph (c) Jeremy Sykes

The message of Susan Sontag’s essay, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, reverberated in my thoughts as I looked at the images that Jeremy Sykes had created for his exhibit at Camera/Arts Gallery in East Sacramento. The resonating thought for me was the “obligation of conscience” that she so eloquently articulated.

All of the images are framed directly onto debris that Jeremy has collected from our streets and byways. Old signs, pieces of metal and wood fencing, wire mesh, plastic grating and other bits of sizable pieces of junk whose origin is unknown. Not unlike the people whose images adorn this debris.

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