Dr. Paul Appelbaum, director of Columbia University's Department of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, says that in situations like this, families often “remove a child from the home, not just to move them in that direction, but to They realize they can get rid of them,” he told me. Although the risks to society have been reduced, the risks to children have also increased. He said people with mental illnesses are at higher risk of becoming victims of violent crime than the general population.
This week, my news colleague Glenn Thrush reported on the tragic death of Marcus Johnson, who “suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia” in an Illinois prison. “Jails and prisons in this country have become the largest providers of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many severely mentally ill people currently being held in prisons as in hospitals,” Thrash wrote. There is. Meanwhile, the number of state hospital beds for people with severe mental illness “reached a historic low of 36,150 beds” in 2023, according to a January report from the Treatment Advocacy Center.
What can be done to help these families?
First, as the Times editorial board argued in 2022, we need to reconsider the idea of building community mental health systems like the one envisioned by President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1990s, most state inpatient psychiatric hospitals closed. These hospitals will be replaced by “approximately 1,500 community mental health centers across the country, each providing five critical services: community education, inpatient and outpatient facilities, emergency response, and partial hospitalization programs,” the editorial board said. The meeting stated. But Kennedy's vision never came to fruition.
Many women said supportive housing, such as that provided by community mental health centers, was at the top of their policy list. That would require significant funding, but as the editorial board wrote, the cost “would be partially offset by the money saved to police departments, prisons, and hospitals.”
Some of the women expressed concerns about situations involving their children and police officers who are not adequately trained to deal with serious mental illness. One parent said, “The SWAT team came to our house after receiving a report of a mentally ill person, but we didn't know how to talk to them.'' She wanted police officers to be better trained and have counselors on board. Some cities, including Eugene, Oregon, and Los Angeles, are experimenting with sending unarmed civilian workers trained in mental health to respond to people in crisis.
