Page SR-1 of tomorrows *New York Times* (Sunday, Feb 9) includes an article: Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail by Nicholas Kristof. > > Here are some excerpts: > > [begin excerpts] > > THE largest mental health center in America is a huge compound here in Chicago, with thousands of people suffering from manias, psychoses and other disorders, all surrounded by high fences and barbed wire. > > Just one thing: Its a jail. > > > > 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. > > 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. > > 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. > > Its 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 jails 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. > > > > The sheriff says such examples are common and asks: How will we be viewed, 20, 30, 50 years from now? Well be looked on as the ones who locked up all the mentally ill people. > > It really is one of those things so rich with irony: The same society that abhorred the idea that we lock people up in mental hospitals, now we lock people up in jails. > > A few data snapshots: > > * Nationwide in America, more than three times as many mentally ill people are housed in prisons and jails as in hospitals, according to a 2010 study by the National Sheriffs Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center. > > * Mentally ill inmates are often preyed upon while incarcerated, or disciplined because of trouble following rules. They are much more likely than other prisoners, for example, to be injured in a fight in jail, the Justice Department says. > > * Some 40 percent of people with serious mental illnesses have been arrested at some point in their lives. > > In the 1800s, Dorothea Dix led a campaign against the imprisonment of the mentally ill, leading to far-reaching reforms and the establishment of mental hospitals. > > Now we as a society have, in effect, returned to the 1800s. > > > > In 1955, there was one bed in a psychiatric ward for every 300 Americans; now there is one for every 3,000 Americans, the 2010 study said. > > So while more effective pharmacological treatments are theoretically available, they are often very difficult to access for people who are only borderline functional. > > Some people come here to get medication, says Ardell Hall, a superintendent of a womens unit at the jail. > > They commit a crime to get in. > > > > TAXPAYERS spend as much as $300 or $400 a day supporting patients with psychiatric disorders while they are in jail, partly because the mentally ill require medication and extra supervision and care. > > Fiscally, this is the stupidest thing Ive seen government do, Dart says. > > It would be far cheaper, he adds, to manage the mentally ill with a case worker on the outside than to spend such sums incarcerating them. > > Cook County has implemented an exemplary system for mental health support for inmates. > > While in jail, they often stabilize. > > Then they are released, go off their medications and the cycle repeats. > > One woman in the jail, Kristen, said she had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders. > > On the outside, her prescription medication cost $100 a month, so she skipped it. > > When Im not on my medicine on a regular basis, I dont make decisions well, she said, explaining her long arrest record for theft and narcotics offenses. > > > > As Sheriff Dart puts it: Weve systematically shut down all the mental health facilities, so the mentally ill have nowhere else to go. Weve become the de facto mental health hospital. > > Do we really want to go back two centuries? > > Doesnt that seem not only inhumane but also deluded -- on our part? > > [end excerpts] > > The article is online at: > > > Ken Pope > > 3 COGNITIVE STRATEGIES THAT DENY, DISCOUNT, & DISMISS TORTURE: > HOW INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, GOVERNMENTS, & CULTURES ENABLE TORTURERS: > > > The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. > --Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:08:40 +0000
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