On his last day in Mexico, Eric Rosenthal visited a mental institution. An activist had brought him to the Ramirez Moreno psychiatric hospital to see the human rights abuses that took place within its premises. It was a place where people with mental illness, most of them so overmedicated that they could barely walk, lived in utter squalor, without access to appropriate treatment.
Eric, then a newly minted human rights lawyer who had been working with the indigenous people of the Chiapas, recalls the experience, “When I went to the Mexican psychiatric institution, I was horrified by what I saw. From that moment, I knew this was what I had to do.” In short, it was a moment of obligation.
A moment of obligation usually has a long history leading to it. Eric’s earliest experience with mental illness was through his grandmother who suffered from manic depression. In college, he took psychiatry courses but during the course of his volunteer work at a hospital, Eric found himself appalled by the dehumanizing treatment meted out to patients with mental disabilities. It convinced him that his real vocation lay elsewhere.
It was in Israel where Eric went after graduation as part of the international peace movement that he found it. Eric was so deeply inspired by the Israeli and Palestinian human rights lawyers that he decided to pursue his calling for social justice by enrolling in law school. However, poor LSAT scores forced him to put off law school for a few years. “The best thing that ever happened to me was that I got horrible LSAT scores.”
Meanwhile, he took a job as a paralegal at an organization working to advance the civil rights of people with mental disabilities in the United States. And that’s how and where he found his passion—empowering communities of people with mental disabilities. In a classic illustration of the ability to see possibilities even when faced with setbacks, Eric says, “The best thing that ever happened to me was that I got horrible LSAT scores.”
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