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How Society Criminalizes Mental Illness TodayMar 26 '08 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Someone once said that a civilization should be judged on how it treats the lowliest of its citizens.
My client MQ felt suicidal, and admitted himself to the mental health ward of a local hospital for treatment. He has a long history of mental health problems, and multiple dysfunctional family issues as well. The admission nurse asked a security guard to confiscate MQ's lighter, normal practice in such situations. Unfortunately the guard neglected to follow orders. That security guard's negligence cause the following chain of events to occur. After a typically short term of treatment the hospital, because the government was unwilling to continue footing the bill for my impoverished, uninsured client, decided to discharge MQ. When he was informed of the impending discharge, MQ unsurprisingly differed with the decision. He still felt suicidal, and told the hospital personnel that if they discharged him, he would kill himself. Obtaining no satisfactory response, MQ then took out his lighter and calmly lit up his hospital bed, sat in a nearby chair listening to his radio, and prepared to die of smoke inhalation. An alert nurse rushed into the room with a fire extinguisher and put out the blaze before it could kill either MQ or any of the numerous patients and staff of the big city hospital. Police were summoned. MQ was arrested and charged with Arson, and he dutifully confessed to the assigned detective, signing a full statement as outlined above. That's when he became my client. I'm a public defender. Now perhaps you would expect that under these circumstances the prosecution would somehow divert the case from the criminal justice system into some specific mental health program where it could be dealt with fairly and compassionately. If so, you would be wrong. There is no mental health alternative in most urban areas. So the matter gets dumped into an unprepared criminal justice system that has no real idea of how to deal with it. It's just another case to the faceless bureaucracy. Hoping to save my client from the long prison sentence normally associated with Arson charges, I began begging the DA to have mercy. There was certainly no sense trying the case because there was no legal defense, so it had to be a plea. Most treatment programs recoil in horror from a client with an Arson conviction, out of understandable fear that another incident could occur on their premises if they agreed to accept such a patient. So in the end, the best I could do was to persuade the DA to accept a guilty plea to a lesser charge called Risking Catastrophe in return for a negotiated sentence of 11 1/2 months in jail followed by a lengthy probation period, supervised by the mental health unit of the probation department. By the time the jail sentence is served, a social worker from my office will hopefully have convinced some nearby treatment program to take a chance on trying to help this sad young man. And justice will have waved her terrible swift sword once again.  |
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