Police officer interaction with mentally ill and the

Police officer interaction with mentally ill and the policies enacted to reduce the negative interactions with those who suffer from a mental illness. The major issue here is the view of mentally ill. To find out how we better help those with a mental illness, we must convey it is a serious problem. The above is the amount of negative interactions with a minimum of physical altercation with police and schizophrenics publicized by major newspaper outlets.

Training Procedures For Officers. According to a recent news release from the American Psychiatric Association, they examined officer behavior in more than 1, 000 emergency encounters. CIT-trained officers had sizable and persisting improvements in knowledge, diverse attitudes about mental illnesses and their treatments, self-efficacy for interacting with someone with psychosis or suicidality, social distance stigma, deescalation skills, and referral decisions. The effectiveness of CIT training was also supported by data from the trained officers’ emergency encounters, which were more likely to result in referral or transport of the person to mental health services and less likely to result in arrest—a form of prebooking jail diversion. ” The Mental Health Based Mental Health Response has shown to be the most effective out of the three specialized responses.

Source: Colorado Institution.

Whenever many of these arrests go trial, more than half of the defendants try to claim “insanity” as a defense. They try to claim that it happened in the heat of the moment, or that they were under duress, or that it was out of necessity. This sounds like a cop out. This sounds like a cheap way to get away with their crime with a lesser, or in some cases, no sentence. The persons failed to know right from wrong; acted on an uncontrollable impulse or some variety of these factors

An overwhelming majority of the population dislike the use of the insanity defense. Many say it is an easy way out for defendants and that their lack of punishment is not right. An interesting thing to note is that jurors are more harsh on defendants who use the insanity defense. (Steadman, 1985) Many people are under the belief that becoming acquitted under the insanity defense is a cope out and that acquittees are not getting the punishment they deserve but these beliefs are far from the truth. (Steadman, 1985)

Treatment for mental illness has been around as early as the 1600’s, beginning with Reverend Samuel Willard, who attempted to treat the mentally ill by dunking them in freezing water (obviously with limited success). In the following century, Benjamin Rush “Father of Psychiatry”, began intense research into mental illness. Treatment through psychotherapy actually began much later with Sigmund Freud and his conception of psychoanalysis, this too has evolved vastly over the years.

The majority of incarcerated individuals with mental illness find themselves returning to an incarceration facility at an alarming rate. This is due to the ineffectiveness of the criminal justice system to implement appropriate mental health care options prior to an inmate’s release. Due to the fact that there are limited mental health programs on the outside, individuals released become more unstable and irrational. Thus, allowing the individual to unfortunately relapse into familiar criminal behavioral patterns. Consequentially, the same behaviors that directly contributed to their initial introduction into the criminal justice system. The prison environment, because of its structure, tends to be more disciplined and regimented as opposed to the unstructured and carefree environment on the outside. While incarcerated, individuals suffering from mental illness will find that their daily activities are controlled by prison officials, and can find themselves in confinement if their behavior becomes unmanageable. In sharp contrast, there is no direct supervision over an individual’s daily activities upon release, and their dysfunctional behavior may go unnoticed by outside authorities. These individuals are now solely responsible for managing their own conditions, and all too often become frustrated and overwhelmed when dealing with everyday life. The current public mental health system is in desperate need of restructuring. Establishing a mental health care program that would adequately provide extended mental health services upon an inmate’s release may dramatically reduce recidivism rates. This could be established between prison health officials working in conjunction with community outreach programs that specifically specialize in a variety of mental health services. If there is to be any positive reform in the mental health service industry, it is vital that mental health programs be readily available to individuals after the incarceration phase has ended.