Police Mentally Ill Policing and Mentally Ill

Police Mentally Ill

Policing and Mentally Ill Individuals

There is a significantly higher proportion of mentally ill individuals in the criminal justice system than compared to the same proportion of the United States in the society in general. It is estimated that a mentally ill individual is about eight times more likely to enter into the criminal justice system than they are a mental hospital. These individuals, as the video and the interview illustrates, have special challenges that make them difficult to deal with. Often they hear voices and are paranoid schizophrenics that require a host of special medications to allow them the possibility of being stable. However, many of these individuals face specific challenges that make it difficult for them to access and maintain an effective treatment regimen. This paper will provide a brief overview of how this situation arose and what implications it has for modern police forces.

It is important to put this problem in its historical context to fully understand how the situation arose. During the 1950s and the 1960s the United States began to change the way it thinks about the mentally ill. Legislators began to close state run mental hospitals that provided care for patients that were in need of mental health services. These individuals were left to attempt to access services from the different communities in which the lived rather than the state facilities. As a result, many of these patients no longer were able to receive the care that they needed. In 1955 there were 558,239 public (state and county) psychiatric beds available for mentally ill individuals and the population of the United States was 164.3 million which resulted in the availability of public psychiatric beds was thus 340 beds per 100,000 population; however, in 2005 there were 52,539 public (state and county) psychiatric beds available for mentally ill individuals and at this time the population of the United States was 269.4 million resulting in the availability of public psychiatric beds was thus 17 beds per 100,000 population (Torrey, Geller, Stanley, & Jaffe, N.d.).

By closing these facilities, many mentally ill patients lost their access to mental health care and no longer received treatment of any kind for a variety of reasons; mainly that there was excess demand for services that could not be met by the community facilities. Since many of these individuals could no care for their basic needs, many of these people ended up homeless or in prison. Some of the cases of people with mental illnesses would ultimately lead to violence if their conditions were untreated. In the documentary some of the ex-prisoners would hear voices that told them various alarming things. One man heard voices that he thought was the devil and others were just violent without their intended medications.

In the interview, one man was beaten badly by a police officer. The man had quit taking his Prozac which left him in an unstable state. When police officers encounter such individuals they have no idea that this individuals are mentally unstable or have any idea why these people might act in social unacceptable ways. Police officers generally do not receive much training about how to handle mentally ill patients. Traditional protocols that are developed to handle various routine situations might not be ideal to effectively handle someone with a mental illness. Furthermore, a police officer might be perceived as a threatening figure that might could set of their paranoid delusions and increase the likelihood of an incident.

It is argued that police need better strategies to deal with mentally ill individuals (Conan, 2012). There have been many cases in which police have been abusive towards a mentally ill patient for a variety of reasons. One reason might simply be because they do not understand the person's condition and feel threatened by their erratic behavior. Furthermore, many of these individuals that are incarcerated and then released end up right back in prison shortly after their release (PBS, 2009). While there are some facilities that can help the mentally ill, these facilities are often ill equipped to handle the number of parolees that need services. Furthermore, there are other limitations such as the patient consenting to the medications that they need. One man who was a paranoid schizophrenic refused to take his medication even though he had a history of violent behavior when he was off his medications.