Mental Illness and Substance Abuse

¶ … Mental Illness and Substance Abuse on Criminal Offenses for analysis. This is a research that was conducted on the participants in the Hawaii Jail Diversion Project that deals with people with mental disorders and reoccurring substance abuse. The research was conducted by Dr. John Junginger, Dr. Keith Claypoole, Dr. Ranilo Laygo and Dr. Annette Crisanti. The research focused on determining the effects of serious mental illness and substance abuse on criminal offences in accordance with the report given by Junginger et.al (June 2006).

The researchers used probing questions to get explanations on why the offenders committed the kind of offenses they committed and then cross checked the answers against police arrest reports. They also used an identical five point scale to estimate independently whether the index offense was as a result of direct or indirect effects of serious mental illness or substance abuse. Interclass correlation coefficients and confidence intervals were used to assess the reliability of both direct and indirect effects of serious mental illness and substance abuse on the index offenses.

Major disagreements were spotted when the participants claimed to have forgotten about disposition hearings which meant two of the raters had to attribute to indirect effects of serious mental illness or substance abuse. Among the observations made by the researchers according to Psychiatric Services (2006) were that none of the participants claimed to have been arrested for behavior that could be construed to unobtrusive display of psychiatric symptoms. Also violent offenses motivated by delusions were noted to have been directly influenced by serious mental illness.

23% according to report given by Junginger et.al (2006), of the offenses were rated to be a direct or indirect result of substance abuse. The research showed that the effect of substance abuse was greater than psychiatric symptoms on criminal offending. These findings do not support thee literal interpretation of the criminalization hypothesis that serious mental illness has been criminalized through unreasonable arrests of people with mental disorders.

However many people displaying psychiatric symptoms were over represented in jail and there is no tangible evidence to prove that it is their mental illness that got them to jail. Indeed unless it can be shown that factors unique to serious mental illness are specifically associated with behavior leading to arrest and incarceration, the criminalization hypothesis ought to be reconsidered. It should put into consideration more powerful risk factors for crime inherent in social settings.

Though jails and prisons continue to be seen as psychiatric warehouses, this may not indicate mental health care crisis but rather much of a public policy crisis in accordance with Junginger et.al (2006). Melissa Schaefer Marabito (2007) has it that since the 1970s a large number of people have entered the criminal justice system of which can only be attributed to criminalization hypothesis. She goes on to critic the criminalization hypothesis saying that it oversimplifies the complexity of historic al developments by only focusing on.