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How the Mentally Ill Are Treated

Since there isn't enough to be horrified about these days, read this St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation into the abuses taking place in Missouri's mental institutions. Thousands of "mentally retarded and mentally ill people… have been sexually assaulted, beaten, injured and left to die by abusive and neglectful caregivers." The public tends not to find out about this stuff thanks to "secrecy laws, shoddy investigations and ambivalent police and prosecutors." Every year, meanwhile, state officials promise to "do better." Here's what doing better entails:

In 2002, a privately run home in Bolivar let a man's bed sores rot his flesh so badly that he died. Two years earlier, state workers repeatedly and severely beat mentally retarded boys in Marshall…

One mentally retarded man [in a facility near Overland] prone to swallowing things died in November after swallowing an ink pen. The resident, Michael Pallme, was supposed to be watched constantly.

Another patient, Rudy Wallace, died in March from burns so severe his skin began falling off after a worker left him in scalding water.

But those incidents are only a fraction of what has occurred inside the state and private facilities that house more than 11,000 state residents who have the most severe cases of mental retardation, developmental disabilities and mental illness.

Now in a country where pundits will applaud one presidential candidate for flying back to Arkansas to execute a functionally-retarded criminal and where another president orders the torture of a mentally-disturbed prisoner so as not to "lose face", maybe this won't come as a surprise, but it should still be intolerable.

Some very cursory searching on Google and Nexis didn't bring up any similar stories about mental institutions in other states, but I'm probably looking in the wrong place. The largest "institutions" in the country nowadays are prisons, which house some 300,000 people with mental disorders, and tend to have poor mental-health services and plenty of abuse to go around. In 2003, Human Rights Watch did a report on prisoners with mental illnesses:

In the most extreme cases, conditions are truly horrific: mentally ill prisoners locked in segregation with no treatment at all; confined in filthy and beastly hot cells; left for days covered in feces they have smeared over their bodies; taunted, abused, or ignored by prison staff; given so little water during summer heat waves that they drink from their toilet bowls…. Suicidal prisoners are left naked and unattended for days on end in barren, cold observation cells. Poorly trained correctional officers have accidentally asphyxiated mentally ill prisoners whom they were trying to restrain.

It doesn't even take "the most extreme cases" to see things are bad. From people who have worked closely on this issue, I've heard plenty of stories of, say, prisoners who simply won't be "officially" classified as mentally ill despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, and will then get written up by guards at the first outburst of strange behavior (say, compulsive masturbating in their cell), leading to a longer prison sentence. Is this likely to make things a) better or b) worse? Yeah, I wonder too.

A summary of the HRW report is here. Among other things, HRW notes that until this country gets serious about the community mental health systems that were supposed to replace mental hospitals after "deinstitutionalization" in the 1960s, prisons will continue to serve as mental institutions of last resort. I'd like to know what effects the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, passed by Congress in 2004, has had but perhaps it's too early to tell. It also appears that the "war on drugs," the gift that keeps on giving, has disproportionately affected the mentally ill as the prison population continues to expand and expand without end.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 06/21/06 at 4:23 PM | E-mail | Print

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Comments

Yes, the treatment of the mentally ill can be truly horrendous. Take a look also at the "boot camp" industry for teenagers:

http://www.nospank.net/boot.htm

Posted by: HoosierNan on 06/22/06 at 7:18 AM

Look for info on the California state hospital system. They have a horrendous record of patient deaths, beatings, etc.

Posted by: mindymac on 06/23/06 at 12:06 PM

Hello,
Great article. I would like to write a few words about my son Joey Terry III. My son was shot dead by the Miami Fl Dade Co. sherriffs dept last Nov 12. Joey was depressed and suffering from a break up with his girl friend. He was staying with his grandparents in west Miami when he suddenly got up grabbed two knives, one a butter knife and jumped the back fence. Cops came and followed joey down the street. they never did get out fo subdue joey they just used the bull horn to tell him to drop the knives... Joey walked 3 blocks when a police helicopter drove by and this freaked Joey who jumped a house fence grabbed a gardner hostage. the cops who had followed my son for 3 blocks as he slowly walked the street then circled around and shot my son in the neck. one of the cops was recently reinstated by an arbitrator to his job. the two cops were named Kennedy and Martinez. Martinez fired the fatal shot into my sons neck. we have no idea if he suffered or not. or if he was killed instantly or whatever. it is so incredibly sad and so pointless. My son had NO criminal history, was a junior college grad in police science, was a high school grad, was an army honorably discharged vet and decorated as well. Why shoot down a man without using LESS THAN LETHAL FORCE. i asked the cops why? they said they didn't use taser cause of liability reasons. WHAT? they are more interested in money than a PERSON'S LIFE!!!!!!!! They are completely out of control! We retained a local attorney and hopefully no more good people will be shot down like a dog.......
Anyway, that is the end of my sweet son Joey's life. Thanks to cops who have no tolerance for those who are mentally ill he is now dead. This has devistated our entire family.
I hope that incidents like this will not happen again but i guarantee you they will.
Joe Terry Jr
Guadalupe, CA
guadalupejoe@hotmail.com

Posted by: Joe Terry Jr on 06/23/06 at 2:35 PM

Certainly this issue is most compelling, yet I can easily understand how the all-important man in the street might simply shrug his shoulders, feeling that it's not his problem, or that there's absolutely nothing he can do about it.
Of course I believe that this is exactly what the Gov. wants him thinking...
A while back, I read in the AP News a long list of all the instances where a disgruntled worker brought a gun to work...
...Sure, you know, address the issue of work environment, of prison environment, of civil rights categorically denied, of overcrowded and uncomfortable school environments, ect. Then, maybe, after business is all taken care of..., our man in the street won't be so upset by all the "insurmountable problems" in the world--that he's not even going to bother asking why the Gov. is doing such a lousy job of it...
In the final analysis, the big answer here is that all the people who do all the s__t work are the ones who should be getting those 30 year pensions...
So very many people are, like, the cops are the heroes here, so...; maybe we just need to hand out medals to the "garbagemen," instead of the cops who have all the opportunities in the world (also read no one has any rights because the pigs don't want to wear their safety equipment?).
It's just too damn bad that our "heroes" are too damn good at baffling with B.S....

Posted by: Michael L. Wagner on 06/25/06 at 10:48 PM