Communities are not equipped to handle mental health problems
Based on my own personal experience, combined with what I learned from the reading as well as talking to others with experience, I feel that that those at the top have never in their lives dealt with the mental health crisis firsthand and appear to have no empathy. During the pandemic, I worked as a security professional at a hospital as well as hotels converted into housing for at risk homeless people. I don’t claim to be an expert in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly certain that a good number of the people I witnessed (and dealt with) at the Emergency Department as well as at the hotels were either addicted to drugs or suffering from some kind of mental health condition. Due to a lack of community resources, many of these people have no where else to go, and typically end up in either the emergency room or in jail. The conditions these people live with can be very incapacitating, and without proper treatment, trauma increases.
I understand that handling this issue is not an easy one, though a good place to start would be to invest in more mental health courts. A task force looking into problem solving course found that mental health courts were effective in providing integrated services, reducing recidivism, and with due process being preserved (Orr et al., 2009). And in addition, despite initial short term costs, the long term savings created by keeping people with these conditions out of the criminal justice system more than makes up for it (Slate & Johnson, 2008). My mother worked at a high level locked psychiatric facility and found that many of the individuals had been self-medicating with street drugs to deal with their symptoms, because they had no alternative. Mental health courts offer a pathway to get off street drugs and on proper medication. Still, without additional resources within the community, there is only so much that can be done by the courts. This has been shown in states like Alaska, which have a strong lack of community services (Slate & Johnson, 2008).
There are those who might argue that these people should not be forced into treatment, saying that this “violates their civil liberties”, and that they should choose to be treated. What this does not take into account is that something I learned after talking to a court officer with many years of experience in my area. She says that some individuals are so ill that they don’t even realize they need help, thinking nothing is wrong with them. They don’t want to do what anyone says even if it is for their own good. If we they go without treatment, they face nearly impossible odds without housing or being able to get work.
The court officer I talked to brought up another issue, government corruption. The state capital had sent billions of dollars to our area to help deal with mental health problems in our communities. Problem is, the money seems to have vanished, or rather, as she put it, was lost in transit somehow. Getting the resources needed may be next to impossible is there is no accountability in the distribution of funds.
References
Slate, R. N., & Johnson, W. W. (2008). The criminalization of mental illness: Crisis & opportunity for the justice system. Carolina Academic Press.
Orr, C. H., Hall, J. W., Reimer, N. L., Mallett, E. A., O’Dowd, K., & Frazer, A. C. (2009). America’s problem-solving courts: The criminal costs of treatment and the case for Reform. NACDL. https://www.nacdl.org/drugcourts