To a large extent, spending money on more training for how police can best deal with people with mental illnesses is a total waste.
The U.S.-based Treatment Advocacy Center has it right when they say, "Police Training Yes, but Treatment Definitely." I am referring to the recent announcement by the the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Madeleine Meilleur, that the Ontario Government will review how the police respond to the mentally ill.
This latest concern about an age-old problem has resulted from a number of fatal shootings involving the police and people with mental illness in Toronto. The usual response in the past has been to convene a Coroner's Inquest into these incidents. After months and sometimes years, the inquests all come up with a list of recommendations which are mostly ignored.
But, contained in the Globe and Mail report on this latest move by Ontario may be the reason these altercations between police and mentally ill people happen in the first place. The Globe stated
"the closing of beds and the move away from institutionalized mental-health care in Canada has put the responsibility of responding to people in crisis more and more in the hands of the police, who have limited access to health-care experts in these crucial moments."
That was 2010 and this is 2012. We're all waiting.
The police are not mental health professionals and they should not be expected to spend as much time as they do dealing with sick people. In fact, the Vancouver Police Department issued a report in 2008 called, "Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver's Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources." On page 9, the report states that during a sample period, 31 per cent of police calls involved at least one mentally ill person.
In a study done for the London, Ontario Police Department, it was found that between 1998 and 2001, contact with people who suffered mental illness cost the city between $1.5 and $2.4 million.
The Globe article also quoted psychologist, Dorothy Cotton, who is or was a member of a group called Psychiatrists in Blue, part of the Canadian National Committee for Police/Mental Health Liaison. I mentioned this group in my own book on schizophrenia. The primary goal of the organization is to try to ensure that individuals with mental illness are not criminalized.
In the U.S., this concept was expressed very eloquently by Seminole Florida County sheriff, Donald S. Eslinger who said that "sheriffs are not medical professionals," and yet his officers are called on more and more to deal with dangerous situations involving those with serious untreated mental illness.
Our police should not be put into this role and the role would be considerably lessened if we provided proper treatment and resources to those who are ill.
My comment to the concerned cabinet minister in Ontario is to put the money to be used for this study into resources, and to resurrect the task force recommended to look into the laws on involuntary treatment.
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I hope police do not become whipping boys for the abysmal inadequacies of our current mental illness system.
We hadn't reacted fast enough with a medication increase for our increasingly unstable daughter and she had disappeared. The police who came to our home surprised me with their basic kindness. One reassured us that in situations like ours the people usually turn up quickly. He was right and our daughter, plunging into psychosis, had known enough to get herself to the emergency room of Vancouver General Hospital's ER. When she phoned us, the hospital had decided she didn't require admission and were preparing to release her; she wanted us to talk to them. We did, and with the aid of her helpful psychiatrist, she received the hospitalization she needed in order to be safe.
Ironically, in all the interactions with hospital staff during this chaotic time, I never found the same level of basic human kindness that the Vancouver Police brought into our home during a desperate evening.
You talk as if hospitals and other medical establishments are equipped to deal with mentally disturbed and unpredictable people, they are not, they will call in the cops. and the streets are full of mentally disturbed people living on drugs and desperation.
The more that cops are sophisticated and knowledgeable about mental problems; the more tactics they have to cool down situations, the fewer corpses and convicts we will have in our society.