A Revolutionary Idea: What If We Decriminalized Mental Illness?

Huffington Post

Here’s a sobering statistic: did you know that people who have an untreated mental illness are a horrifying sixteen times more likely to be killed by law enforcement? Furthermore, half of all people who were killed by the police had some sort of disability. And the sad truth is, this vulnerable population — those broken, disenfranchised individuals who need help more than anything — are more likely to have an encounter with the police than they are to have one with a crisis counselor.

 

Mental Health and the U.S. By the Numbers

It’s no secret that the United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Experts have advised us of this for years now, but the problem has only seemed to have been exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A report from the US Census Bureau, published in December 2020, corroborated these findings. They found that 42% of Americans had reported symptoms of depression or anxiety, a staggering increase of 11% when compared to the previous year.

Even more telling, a study from the Centers for Disease Control also found similar evidence of a mounting mental health crisis, revealing that substance abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation had dramatically increased during the global pandemic. 13% had admitted to either starting or increasing their intake of substance use, 11% had seriously considered suicide, and 26% had “trauma or stressor-related disorder symptoms.”

With a nation in peril, what can we do for these people who feel helpless and as though there is no hope for the future? While there is no firm consensus that any single, unilateral solution may suffice, there is ample evidence that help for them is indeed possible. Rather than turning our backs on these struggling persons — or even drawing a gun upon them, we can take an alternative approach. We can, instead, offer a much-needed helping hand.

 

The True Cost Of Helping

One of the biggest pushbacks when it comes to addressing the very real issue of mental health in the country is the dollar value of trying to assist them. After all, outreach programs and mental health services cost money, and taxpayers are already stretched quite thin when it comes to paying their fair cost of helping their neighbors. From earmarking their funds for public schools, to funding the local law enforcement branches, to even keeping our city streets intact, how can we reach even deeper into our pockets to try to save our mentally ill demographic?

It may come as a surprise, then, to realize that extending assistance to the mentally ill is not the vast money sink that it may initially seem. Rather, implementing services for our mentally ill friends and family can actually save us money, to the tune of $1 billion per year. Another study also carefully did the mathematics, and pointed out that the price of incarceration of a mentally ill person could range as high as greater than $60,000 per year, but averaged about $32,000 annually. If the issue isn’t the financial aspect of helping them, then what is it?

Perhaps it’s considered a moral issue. Historically, mentally ill people had been deemed as somehow lesser, as though they were somehow inferior or flawed. These perceptions have been around for centuries, predating the Middle Ages, where those who suffered from mental illnesses were burned at the stake or chained to beds, where they were robbed of both their agency and their lives. Even as recent as the past century, mentally ill individuals were lobotomized without their consent, further crystallizing this unjust and inaccurate perception.

 

What About the So-Called “Miami Model”?

With so much inherent bias against the mentally ill, what are our next steps? How can we actually start to implement a program to help them, rather than denigrate them? One such method is to follow the lead of the southern Florida city of Miami, which has taken the initiative to start shuttering its prisons. Studies had shown that the state of Florida had more mentally ill people in prisons than in state psychiatric hospitals, and by 2004, the Dade County Jail had ten times the number of mentally ill inmates than it had less than two decades before.

In a bold move, the city started closing the prisons, and the unthinkable happened. For starters, taxpayers started to save around $12 million per year. Over 6,500 law enforcement officers underwent crisis intervention training. And in the most staggering turn of events, the local law enforcement managed to respond to a grand total of 72,000 mental health crisis calls, yet wound up arresting a mere 138 individuals. Rather than sending out police to respond, instead, crisis units rose to the task.

Now, other cities are starting to follow suit, with major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and Denver all paving the way for mental health care reform. With Miami serving as a model of a successful shift in not only how they think, but how they respond to the mentally ill people within their community, it’s unquestionably paving the way for other cities to implement similar systems. In many ways, this is an incredibly inspiring trend, proving once and for all that mentally ill people in our country are not a problem to be solved, but rather, human beings wholly worthy of compassion.

 

A Grassroots, Yet Systemic Intervention

If the city of Miami proved anything, it was that making a change was not only possible, but also easily feasible. No small city itself, the cultural melting pot proved to be a strong advocate for the mentally ill. However, there is still much that needs to be done, and shedding our negative perceptions of mentally ill people is certainly going to be an arduous task. For now, treating mentally ill people with compassion is one person’s task: yours. Getting involved with your community’s outreach programs, for example, can help expose you to those who need the most help.

Decriminalizing mental illness can steadily be dismantled when we all work collectively together to help make it happen. Volunteering can help, as can guiding our mentally ill neighbors toward recovery centers, such as the one that can be found at Mission Harbor Behavioral Health and others across the country. No, change won’t happen overnight, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. Instead, steady, actionable changes on an individual level can eventually lead to a nationwide shift — and we can finally live in a society that doesn’t revile its mentally ill, but rather, accepts and embraces them.

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