Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune article supports a position I’ve held for years. By ignoring or under-serving people with mental health problems we are manufacturing state wards, preteen moms, and felons and this is making our cities dangerous and unsafe.
Our current policies of dumping the mentally ill in detention, jail, and prison places a huge burden on educators & juvenile, criminal justice workers, and especially the families (often grandparents, and foster and adoptive parents) that live with them.
Not much good comes from incarcerating people with mental health issues. Recidivism is now 70 percent after many years at 66 percent.
Not much teaching gets done in a classroom populated with disturbed youth on Prozac. Safety and behavior management becomes the teachers primary concern at the expense of educating all the other youth. Our nations miserable graduation and drop out rates, STD rates (we lead the world), and crime rates (we also lead the world) are all tied to how we ignore and under-serve people with mental health issues. Follow us on Twitter Sample 4 minute video of Mike’s awesome talk on child protection Support KARA
Forcing foster/adoptive parents and service providers (educators, social workers, juvenile & criminal justice workers) to be the front line in managing mental health issues of the children and youth in their charge is an overwhelming task that rarely ends well for the children and youth. These children need professional guidance to overcome the serious issues that have triggered dangerous behaviors and the explosive increase in psychotropic medicating of five and ten year old children in our society.
The article points out that 70 per cent of the youth in juvenile justice suffer from a mental health issues and 50 percent of juveniles in the system are on psychotropic medications. In the criminal justice system, 80 per cent of the women and 25 percent of the men are receiving mental health services.
What is not stated in the article that 90 per cent of the youth in juvenile justice have passed through child protection services & that at least a third of the children in child protection services are proscribed psychotropic medicines for their behavior problems.
What people fail (or refuse) to see is that the vast majority of the mental health issues that trouble our communities today result from abuse and neglect that started at the birth of a child to a mom with her own child abuse/mental health issues. From the medical community and my own experience as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem (almost 20 years) this is the core issue.
If these troubled moms had been helped to deal with their own troubles before having babies, the families they later had could be just fine and the cycle of abuse and dysfunction ends.
Instead, generation after generation of disturbed youth are now filling our schools and streets and making parts of our cities dangerous places to live. It’s way more expensive and far less effective to provide services to an 18 year old in the juvenile justice system than it is to make sure a two year old gets the care he or she needs to survive in this world.
It is also the right thing to do.
Mentally ill swamp Minnesota’s jails and courts
- Article by: PAUL MCENROE , Star Tribune
- Updated: December 11, 2013 – 5:40 AM
Witnesses tell a Senate panel that Minnesota has fallen behind in services, care.
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Minnesota’s county jails and courts are being overwhelmed by adults with mental illness because the state lacks suitable housing, health care and therapeutic services to stabilize their lives, legislators were told at a state Senate hearing Tuesday.
Thousands of mentally ill inmates and patients under court commitment orders are cycling through the criminal justice system, failing to make the transition back to their communities after they leave treatment or confinement, according to a series of witnesses who work in criminal justice and mental health care.
“We’ve allowed jails to become the dumping ground for the mentally ill,” said Hennepin County District Judge Jay Quam, who presided over the county’s Mental Health Court the past three years.
“I hate to say this, but Minnesota is … behind Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi,” he said. Quam urged legislators to streamline the legal process for committing people to state care and getting them out of county jails.
“We need a mental health response to a mental health crisis,” said Sue Abderholden, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI). “Mental health treatment is not just a pill. It’s therapy, stable housing, a job, a crisis plan and support.”
‘We did not do well’ for mentally ill
Legislators held the hearing in preparation for funding proposals to be introduced in the 2014 session, prompted in part by a series of Star Tribune stories detailing mental health breakdowns in the state’s criminal justice system.
“When the state institutions closed down, we promised all kinds of programs, but we did not do well at all for the mentally ill,” said Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, who led the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “After 30 years, they are living under bridges, homeless, in jail.”
It’s estimated that 70 percent of youths in Minnesota’s juvenile justice system have at least one mental health diagnosis and 60 percent of the adults in jail have similar disorders.
In Ramsey County’s juvenile system, for example, records show that more than 50 percent of the adolescents are on psychotropic medications. And among inmates in the state prison system, at least 60 percent of the women and 25 percent of the men are receiving mental health services.
“The recommended solutions haven’t changed for years,” Abderholden said. “I hope you will fix them.”
Consequences with jail terms
Addressing one widespread perception, Abderholden urged legislators to understand that most mentally ill people are not violent or dangerous. “People with a serious mental illness are more likely to be victims and not the perpetrators,” she said.
Among NAMI’s legislative proposals is the creation of quick-response mobile crisis teams in each of the state’s 87 counties — groups of experts who could help divert a mentally ill person into treatment rather than jail.
Quam told legislators that the court commitment process for adults with mental illness needs to be streamlined and capped at two weeks because inmates with mental illness “decompensate” rapidly as jail terms drag on. He said it often takes six months for a jailed, mentally ill person to go through competency and commitment hearings.
And when mentally ill offenders in state prisons are finally released, they often find themselves back behind bars, their probation revoked because they were unable to find housing. “There have been times when we’ve — I hate to use the word — ‘dumped’ a mentally ill person at the hospital’s emergency room because there are no resources for them,” said Nan Larson, director of health for the Department of Corrections.
Paul McEnroe • 612-673-1745
