Not criminally responsible: How an accused finds the road back home
HALIFAX — At the height of his mental illness, Breton Umlah believed his family and friends were members of a shadowy intelligence agency, and he desperately wanted to join them.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a young man, Umlah’s search for the agency’s top secret building led him to a house in Halifax, where he scaled a fence, broke his ankle in a fall and — in great pain and emotional anguish — promptly took off his clothes.
“I was on a cocktail of medications that made me very manic, and that caused me to go psychotic,” he said in a recent interview, recalling the night in May 2012 when police charged him with four offences, including trespassing and mischief.
“On that particular night, I was not who I am … I was sick and my behaviour was not me.”