Are People with Mental Illness America’s Throwaways?

Most people with mental illness are America’s throwaways. The majority of the general population still does not understand mentally ill people. All a person has to do is watch television programs to discover the stereotypes of mental illness.

Reform efforts in the mental health field resulted in many of the most severely ill going without needed treatment. The reform efforts have reached a pinnacle in lack of treatment for the mentally ill.

Nowhere in our society is the debacle of institutionalization of the mentally ill felt more than in our criminal justice system. That, along with major cost-shifting by the states to the federal government following the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, has led to the largest component of today’s health crisis: The criminalization of Americans with severe psychiatric illnesses. In fact, America’s jails and prisons are now surrogate psychiatric hospitals for thousands of individuals with the severest brain diseases.

According to data collected by The U.S. Department of Justice, in mid-2005, there were 2,186,230 prisoners in local jails and state and federal prisons in the United States. The data estimated that approximately 7 to 16 percent of prisoners have severe psychiatric disorders. However, other studies have suggested that approximately 10 percent of prisoners have severe psychiatric disorders. Thus, approximately 218,000 individuals with severe psychiatric disorders are incarcerated in the nation’s jails and prisons at any given time.

This number is equivalent to the population of such cities as Akron, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; Montgomery, Alabama; Richmond, Virginia; or Tacoma, Washington. Thus, the nation’s jail and prisons have become, de facto, the nation’s largest psychiatric hospitals. There are now more severely mentally ill individuals in the Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail, or New York’s Riker’s Island Jail than there are in any single psychiatric hospital in the nation.

A 1992 study of American jails reported that a shocking 29 percent of the jails acknowledged holding ill individuals with no charges against them. These individuals were being held awaiting psychiatric evaluation, the availability of a hospital bed, or transportation to a psychiatric hospital. These jailings were done under state laws permitting emergency detentions of individuals suspected of being mentally ill and were especially common in rural states such as Kentucky, Mississippi, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

This same study found that the vast majority of U.S. jails do not provide adequate psychiatric services to inmates with serious brain disorders. More than one in five jails has no access to mental health services of any kind. Corrections officers in 84 percent of jails receive either no training or less than three hours training in the special problems of people with severe mental illness.