The state of public mental health care is deplorable in this country, a condition we continue to ignore while either incarcerating those with mental illness, offering them respite in inadequate and often abominable shelters, or all to typically by dismissing the problem as unsolvable. The mentally ill often comprise a large portion of the prison and homeless populations in this country, either from perpetrating minor crimes or from a lack of newly developed medications which might alleviate their condition enough to allow them to find employment and maintain a somewhat stable life. However, present laws regarding the mentally ill are often inadequate to ensure law enforcement has appropriate methods for dealing with their plight and in the richest nation in the world our medical insurance coverage for the mentally ill is minimal or not available. In Out of the Shadows, author E. Fuller Torrey reports, “we have 5.5 million Americans who suffer from acute mental illnesses. Of these approximately 159,000 are imprisoned mainly for minor crimes (shoplifting and such); 150,000 are homeless (about 1/3 of those who are homeless)” (The Mentally 1).
Each state has laws, or a lack of them, when it comes to coping with the problem of the mentally ill who do not have adequate care or shelter. Unfortunately, many states have inadequate methods and policies in place for dealing with the mentally ill and most end up in jails, on the streets, or in public shelters whose environment is as deplorable as anything ever conjured up in the pages of a Dickens novel. Experts on the situation often blame our revolving door policy between lockup and the streets as a causative factor in the number of mentally ill persons in prison or among the homeless. Many critics of the mentally ill and the public at large are controlled by their fears that the mentally ill are a source of violent crime, however, the number of murders committed by the mentally ...