Answer Addiction

Tag: mental health crisis

  • Seattle Grapples With How To Handle Repeat Offenders With Mental Illness

    Seattle Grapples With How To Handle Repeat Offenders With Mental Illness

    Seattle’s mayor says that the city and state both need to step up and find a better solution for handling repeat offenders with mental illness. 

    Seattle’s mental health crisis—intertwined with homelessness and drug abuse—has become not only a matter of public health, but public safety as well. Recent attacks on innocent strangers have highlighted the growing problem.

    Crime against people is up 43% from 2016, according to the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), which echoes the city’s own figures.

    According to NPR, part of the problem lies in not knowing how to deal with repeat offenders who are living with mental illness.

    In March, a man named Jonathan James Wilson was charged with attempted assault for grabbing a woman he did not know and attempting to throw her off of a 40-foot-high overpass. Wilson, who was homeless, had been arrested three times since September 2018 for assaulting strangers.

    According to KIRO, a Seattle Municipal Court judge decided to dismiss all of the assault charges “by reason of incompetency” after Wilson was given a mental health competency evaluation.

    Mental Health Revolving Door

    Just last Tuesday (July 9), 29-year-old Christopher Morisette was arrested for randomly stabbing three people in the downtown area, including a valet worker. It was later reported that Morisette, too, was a repeat offender. Since 2009 he has had 34 cases filed against him, according to the Seattle Times.

    Morisette received a diagnosis of unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and unspecified substance use disorder, according to a forensic mental health report on his condition. Police say he reported using methamphetamine on the day of the recent attacks, and that he had no memory of the time between July 4 and his arrest.

    His mother, Susan Morisette, told the Times that her son has been through a “mental-health revolving door” in the last decade—repeating the cycle of going to jail, receiving help, then becoming unstable again. “It’s hard to get my hopes up when he’s doing well because I know it’s not going to last,” said Morisette.

    Examples like these illustrate what Seattle is facing in terms of homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness.

    Underfunded Programs

    Following the attacks by Morisette, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said, “I think what this incident this morning shows is we know we have severely underfunded and are unable to deal with significant mental health needs, and we have to do better as a city, county and state,” she said according to KOMO News.

    City Attorney Pete Holmes says Seattle is struggling to provide the necessary support to combat this problem. “We’re finding out that the system is really at its maximum,” he said, according to NPR. “I think the judge and I even agree on that—that those services really are at their limit.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Virgin Islands Struggle With Mental Health Crisis After 2017 Hurricanes

    Virgin Islands Struggle With Mental Health Crisis After 2017 Hurricanes

    The children of the U.S. Virgin Islands were deeply affected by the trauma of surviving two massive hurricanes.

    The U.S. Virgin Islands are still struggling to recover from the two devastating hurricanes that hit them along with Puerto Rico and the Southeastern continental U.S. in 2017, according to a report by NPR.

    While they slowly rebuild their island’s infrastructure, schools, homes and businesses, the population is also dealing with a mental health crisis fueled by the stress of disrupted government services, lost jobs and severely damaged homes.

    Children appear to be having a particularly difficult time. The hurricanes damaged many of the island’s school buildings, forcing them to resort to two four-hour school sessions each school day in order to house and continue education for the kids with half the classrooms.

    This change appears to have severely disrupted the typical education process for the children of the Virgin Islands, resulting in behavioral problems and widespread mental health issues. The educational disruption comes on top of the initial trauma of surviving two Category 5 hurricanes.

    “We see… regression in behaviors, especially with our little ones who had been potty-trained, reverted to using diapers,” says mental health counselor Vincentia Paul-Constantin. “We see a lot of frustration, cognitive impairment, hopelessness and despair” among older children, she added.

    Researchers have found that 60 percent of adults on the island now suffer from depressive symptoms and/or PTSD, as well as 40 percent of children. According to the report, over 20 percent of students in grades 7-12 reported suicidal thoughts and 1 in 12 had attempted suicide.

    According to Virgin Islands educators, the past two years have seen a large spike in children acting up in the classroom and an increase in defiant behavior. This has continued even after the schools finally returned to their normal schedule in October 2018.

    “They show up in defiance, actual defiance to authority. We have children who are sleeping in the middle of the day,” said Cancryn Junior High School Principal Lisa Ford. “You try to wake them up, they become angry. And maybe that’s what we’re seeing — a lot of anger and defiance.”

    The culture on the U.S. Virgin Islands places a lot of shame on mental illness, making people reluctant to seek help. At the same time, there were already very few mental health professionals available. The local government only employed one full-time and one part-time psychiatrist for the entire island, and they and private mental health professionals have reportedly been overwhelmed by a new demand for care.

    To help combat this problem, Governor Albert Bryan recently declared a mental health state of emergency in order to expedite the recruitment of psychological experts.

    “This is a kind of ‘cry in the dark’ kind of community,” Bryan told NPR. “A lot of that is driven by the stigma. You wouldn’t ostracize somebody who had high blood pressure. Why would you ostracize somebody who has some kind of personality disorder?”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Inside The Mental Health Crisis In Federal Prisons

    Inside The Mental Health Crisis In Federal Prisons

    At some federal prisons in the midst of a mental health crisis, the number of inmates receiving care has fallen by 80% in the past four years.

    Despite promises for better health care and oversight, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has dramatically cut the number of inmates on its mental health caseload, according to an investigation by the Marshall Project.

    In part, that’s because the prison system didn’t add more employees while officials promised more care, increasing the workload for the existing mental health staff without providing the resources to do it. 

    “The catchphrase in the bureau was ‘Do more with less,’” Russ Wood, a long-time federal prison psychologist, told the Marshall Project. “The psychologists were getting pulled off to work gun towers and do prisoner escorts. We’re not really devoted to treating.”

    As of February 2018, only 3% of federal prisoners were classified as mentally ill enough to need treatment. At some facilities, the number of inmates getting mental health care has fallen 80 or more percent in the past four years.

    Afterward, suicides and self-harm increased, data shows. Between 2015 and 2017 the figures for suicides, suicide attempts and self-injuries rose by nearly one-fifth. And, having fewer prisoners on the proper medication or receiving the care they need could have other effects on the prison system; the average monthly rate of prison assaults bumped up 16% between 2015 and 2016. 

    FCI Hazelton in West Virginia—the lock-up where Whitey Bulger was killed earlier this year—had among the largest decreases in mental health care treatment, accompanied by a sharp increase in the assault rate which rose from 29 per 5,000 inmates per month to 40 per 5,000 inmates per month. 

    In addition to failing to hire mental health providers, the federal prison system has come under scrutiny for reassigning non-security staff to cover for guards—who also face understaffing problems. Using a practice called augmentation, federal prisons routinely force teachers, medical workers, counselors and cooks to work as correctional officers, a USA Today investigation found earlier this year. 

    The paper reported on the problem two years ago, but since then it seems only to have gotten worse, according to prison workers. 

    “The problems have only escalated,” said Eric Young, president of the union for prison workers. “Some of the facilities are making those assignments every day to avoid paying overtime to corrections officers.”

    View the original article at thefix.com