Inside a Mental Hospital Called JAIL - Have We Turned Our Backs?

[N'Zinga Shani]

Inside A Mental Hospital Called JAIL – NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 2/9/2014

This is another compelling reason for everyone to have health coverage. 

Do you have relatives who need mental health care? One of the 10 essential services that must be provided under the ACA is Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders.

http://youtu.be/IIKo8DxODGo Help Is Available Signing up for the ACA 18:00

"The largest mental health center in America is a huge compound in Chicago, with thousands of people suffering from manias, psychoses and other disorders, all surrounded by high fences and barbed wire. Just one thing: It’s a jail. The only way to get treatment is to be arrested.

Psychiatric disorders are the only kind of sickness that we as a society regularly respond to not with sympathy but with handcuffs and incarceration. And as more humane and cost-effective ways of treating mental illness have been cut back, we increasingly resort to the law-enforcement toolbox: jails and prisons." 

This report in the New York Times is true in most states in America.  It is true in many of our schools throughout the USA (including Connecticut) where children with mental health disorders are often punished (criminalized rather than clinicalized); this is particularly true for children of color, and particularly black boys.  The school-to-prison-pipeline is real for them. Their contact with the penal system often starts in school and continues throughout their often short and traumatic lives.

"More than half of prisoners in the United States have a mental health problem, according to a 2006 Justice Department study. Among female inmates, almost three-quarters have a mental disorder."

Where are those today who from the 70s through the 90s advocated for the closing of mental health facilities without adequate planning for effective alternative treatment facilities?  Where are the safety nets we heard so much about then? This is why we, as well-intentioned members of communities, need to think things through before we push through legislation.  Along with legislators and the various professional communities, we need to work collaboratively (and not adversely) to develop effective and long-term solutions to societal problems. Putting sick people out on the street without provisions for housing, health care, and other necessary support systems was and is short-sighted.  Prisons are no place for the mentally ill, but that is where more than 60 percent of them are ending up. Politicians continuously cut funds for the treatment of the mentally ill, and municipalities balk at higher taxes to provide alternative facilities.  As the economic crunch of the past decade took its toll on the average citizen, the numbers of advocates for the mentally ill have dwindled to being negligible.

"In the jail here, some prisoners sit on their beds all day long, lost in their delusions, oblivious to their surroundings, hearing voices, sometimes talking back to them. The first person to say that this system is barbaric is their jailer.

“It’s criminalizing mental illness,” the Cook County sheriff, Thomas Dart, told me as he showed me the jail, on a day when 60 percent of the jail’s intake reported that they had been diagnosed with mental illness. Dart says the system is abhorrent and senseless, as well as an astronomically expensive way to treat mental illness — but that he has no choice but to accept schizophrenic, bipolar, depressive and psychotic prisoners delivered by local police forces."

“People are not officially incarcerated because of psychiatric ailments, but that’s the unintended effect. Sheriff Dart says that although some mentally ill people commit serious crimes, the great majority are brought in for offenses that flow from mental illness.”

Please read the complete article linked below.  Please become an advocate for children with mental health disorders.  Visit OneWorld at: http://oneworldpi.org/health/index.html

Read the story > http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/inside-a-mental-ho...