The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/mental-health/)
Mental health advocates applaud changes in Portland that have shifted responsibility from police to paramedics to transport mentally ill people to hospitals. But the changes have created a host of new challenges.
After a 64-year-old frequent arrestee took her own life in his jail, a Colorado sheriff took partial blame, saying “this is an incredibly broken, deteriorating system.” A lawyer for the woman’s family says the jail had ample warning what might happen.
“It is easier for the political class to bury” police “than to defend them,” writes former NYPD officer Eugene O’Donnell, in a stinging indictment of the failure of authorities to help cops deal with the stresses and frustrations that are leading some to suicide. “Cops (feel) they are the hunted and disposable,” O’Donnell wrote.
Police, trained in crime prevention and suspect apprehension, struggle with the role foisted upon them to deal with someone in the midst of a crisis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells the story of a mentally ill man who died after many encounters with police.
“We are doing a terrible job for the most severely ill,” said John Snook of the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center.
The Suzanne Wright Foundation proposed to the Trump adminnistration a “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes” — project. It would use volunteer data to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.”
When you apply a criminal justice model to mental illness, “you’re getting what you should get—a disaster,” warns Miami-Dade County Judge Steven Leifman, a pioneering advocate for developing alternatives to incarceration for seriously mentally ill individuals.
Mental health courts offer troubled individuals a treatment alternative to jail. They’ve begun to take hold in rural Minnesota’s “Iron Range,” where the fourth such court in the state recently began hearing its first cases.
According to a study of the Michigan Department of Corrections, prison workers are more likely to show symptoms of depression and anxiety or suicidal ideation than even first responders or members of the military.
A media probe of U.S. jail deaths finds that scores of facilities have been sued or investigated for refusing inmates medication, ignoring cries for help, failing to monitor them despite warnings they might harm themselves, or imposing such harsh conditions that the sick got sicker.