we see it every day. on the news, in the media,confrontations between people with mental illness and authorities. in the worst cases these encounters end intragedy; or people with mental health issues find themselves being run into a dysfunctionalprison system, instead of getting the appropriate care. all this stress can be really bad for peoplewith mental illness, and then.. um... it happened. um... i had a psychotic break. i never thought that that could have happenedto me. i had symptoms of a lot of different mental health issues... anxiety depression,mania, um... all kinds of stuff; but i had
never heard a voice before, and that happened.i had never had a delusion. i began thinking i was god. i could not make that delusiongo away, and i started believing it... and when i heard the voice, i knew i was in serioustrouble and i knew i needed to get help. i ended up threatening to harm this woman…who i wasn't even mad at. but in a delusional mental state i was just doing things thatdidn't make any sense. a young man, homeless, and schizophrenic,beaten to death. police shooting death of a mentally ill manat miami gardens... the police department had not properly trainedofficers... kristiana coignard, a mentally ill 17 yearold girl who was killed by police in texas...
the death of a 26 year old man while in thecustody of deputies has been ruled a homicide. the victim, robert sailer, had down syndrome. there are series' of trainings that law enforcementneed, that exist, that are great. one is cit– crisis intervention training. that's specificallyto train officers on how to identify people with mental illness, how to intervene in away that does not escalate. you're not barking commands, you're not immediately escalatingto physical confrontation, and you're trying to help de-escalate the situation. you'recalming the situation and trying to really get that person to a place of health. so weather we like it or not, police officershave become the first responders to mental
health crisis in the neighborhood. so... sowe were seeing that people living with mental illness were being locked up because of theirmental illness. you see the man in the green we now know is35 year old glenn broadnax lie down in the middle of the street, after that he startsto run out into traffic with police on his tail. then the shots. because the nypd have not had the trainingto work with people with mental illness... they can't differentiate a person with mentalillness with... y'know someone who's really trying to actually hurt someone. i was here... with my cousin when i realized"oh my gosh we're in the middle of a shooting"
so we were literally here, like, standinghere, and when i realized we were in the middle of a shooting, i grabbed my cousin and said"lets run". and as we ran this way that's when the bullet... hit me. (muffled screaming) please! please don't do... hyper vigilance in the sense of who you maynormally think is here to protect you, maybe the police. you in fact may see them as peoplewho are against you. previous exposure to trauma may include thepolice... and you know heaven forbid if they are arrested and treated in a certain waythen that just reinforces who they can really trust.
they all knew that i was suffering from amental health... problem. that's the only thing that hurt me and that's why i'm so committedto crisis intervention training... is because... if i had been diverted to a mental hospitali wouldn't have a felony on my record, and um... i would've immediately gotten treatment.because when i did get treatment–finally. when i got medication that worked, i cameout of the delusion, and i was so... like, sorry... everything came around. but thatpolice intervention is so important when the police are trained to deal with mental healthcrisis, and they can actually get somebody to a mental hospital. as appose to takingsomebody to jail. prison. the last stop on a long line of badencounters for individuals who suffer from
mental illness. it seems crazy to treat ahealth issue this way, doesn't it? after all, we don't send people to jail for having cancer. and yet we criminalize the mentally ill fora disease that produces behaviors that are completely beyond their control. they would come with a straight jacket, orthe bull squad would come and if you were... y'know, fighting back, they'd maybe try tomaybe get you upside down. any way to restrain you. and sometimes people have a fracturedarm, they was real rough, and you're going off, and you're having a manic moment andyou hit one of them, they might snuff you, kick you -
i mean, i -out of my whole 18 years -i dida total of approximately 4 years in solitary confinement. the prison system is ill equipped to treatpeople with mental illness. guards resort to abuse to force compliance. medical care, including vital medication andtherapy, are more often than not - neglected. this lack of care leads to horrific encounterswhich defy our very sense of human decency. one out of every three inmates in tennesseeprisons is mentally ill. jason toll was one of them. in august, 2010, officers at river bend armedwith tasers and shock shields forced jason
toll out of his barricaded cell. they then carried him out of the cell to anunlit prison yard -and restrained him with shock shields. we need to, as much as possible, decriminalizemental health care. there are many people who come into custody,who come into the criminal justice system, largely because of their mental health challenges. and we need to identify that -not that weneed to excuse crime or excuse certain behavior that needs intervention -but we need to understandhow ineffective criminal justice involvement -especially incarceration is for folks withmental health challenges.
pete early has written books about the treatmentof people with mental illness. this is somebody that needed help for hermental illness. she didn't need punishment, and she endedup dead. early says instead of helping mckenna, theyput her in isolation for a week before the day they tried to transfer her. it is not good for anyone's mental healthto be in solitary confinement. it's not good for anyone's mental health to be isolatedfrom other people for any length of time. even a very brief period of time. so that's a big problem -the das and the judgesdon't know anything about people with mental
illness, and they're really punishing people.and as i said before -put it on camera. it's all about money and jobs. the fact that you'reprofiting from someone's incarceration causes an issue because at the end of the day, themotive is to make money, and to make a profit. and so, in that sense, these corporationsare incentivized to fill the beds and so there's no incentive to decarcerate -there's no incentiveto rehabilitate. inmates are enduring quote "barbaric" andhorrific treatment, and living in a perpetual state of crisis. the lawsuit alleges that instead of the medicalcare these people are supposed to receive -specifically at this facility -the prisonershealth needs are instead ignored, and underfed.
there was a desperate attempt to escape theconditions inside the east mississippi correctional facility -that's a for profit prison wherethe mentally ill are being housed. they had my son on the ground, they had oneboot was on his neck. another boot was kicking him and hitting himand there was a boot also on his head. and he had a huge swelling and marks all overand they would not get him medical help until they pushed the swelling on his head downwith their physical hands and then got him ice and forced it on his head. and um... y'know,pressing it very hard. it's such a traumatic experience that you'relike walking around in a daze. prison guards, sheriffs, they don't understandthat.
so they think that you're actually being rebelliousor that you're being defiant. and so, you get a lot of abuse. i mean, cause if you don't answer them, oryou don't do what they say, they have other ways of making you do what they want -andbecause you're not reacting in a way that they would want you to react, the abuse keepson coming until they either give up, or they just throw you in a cell and say "forget it". what i probably urge is -any authorities thathave oversight to areas where they incarcerate other people to use the least restrictivemeasures possible to provide the safety of the other inmates and their staff -but also,to respect the human rights and the human
needs of that prisoner him or her self. becausethat's very important i ended up getting out of building nine, wherethey kept the mental patients and was allowed to live in general population. and i was fineuntil, you know, they would mess with me. and when they would mess with me, we had alot of racism going on, we had a lot of officers that were from upstate -and one guy had ababy -a black baby -tied to a tree with a noose around his neck. and he would stand in the mess hall and hewould be standing there like this. and we're walking by -when you live -when you have amental diagnosis in an institution, we all stay together.
so it's like you have to walk the line. and you're walking, and just imagine you seethe officer- sergeant standing up there with a black baby tattooed on a tree with a noosearound his neck. i don't know about nobody else, but it wasa trigger for me. and i walked over to him and i said "how canyou stand here like that?". and he said "get away from me, n-----r. is what he said. and he raised his hand uplike he was going to hit me. is this a humane or compassionate way to treatanother human being who is suffering from a terrible affliction?
prison makes mental health conditions much,much worse. and in doing so, we've turned a public healthproblem into a criminal one. it's time for us to re-think how we approachmental health. i was able to walk out the gates of bedfordhills after 18 long years... and i thought that i was okay–in there. i thought thati was as normal as normal can be, but the day that they opened that gate i realized...that i wasn't well. i, after being incarcerated for 18 years it took me three hours to leaveoff those grounds. i just could not put one foot in front of the other, go outside thatgate. i kept looking at the gate in me, and that's because that's all i've seen for somany years was me and a bar, me and a gate,
me and a needle, me and pill; and to knowthat i had freedom from all of that right now was just too much. release from prison, the end of a long terriblenightmare for individuals who suffer from mental illness. sadly however, for many theend of a prison term does not mean freedom. instead: it's part of a vicious cycle thatsends them right back to incarceration. so... i know- i know i lost my car i lostmy house i lost... every position i ever owned. so when i came back out i was on the streetpretty much, i was pregnant and on the street. i remember going to shelters, i couldn't getin to some of the shelters out there. i was having troubles with everything i was tryingto do. i knew i was court ordered to do a
program without id, without this, withoutthat and no one would just except me into their program. so i was going through themotions trying to get the id, trying to get this, trying to get set up to do what thecourt was asking me to do. but before that could happen i wound up getting arrested again. probation and parole in america traditionallyhas been the "trail-em, nail-em, jail-em" approach. supervise them, catch them doingwrong, and lock them back up. non profits are absolutely critical to thefunctioning of these systems and providing incredible, important services. we think that people are best served by communitybased services where people live in the least
restrictive setting possible and receive theirtreatment in the community... and so these are the services that are being cut, and havebeen cut for years. mental health is the first thing on the chopping block and so we seeover and over again the really cost effective programs are the ones being cut. so... what you see is you see a communitythat is without mental health services. which–once again–is going backwards. at one time eachcommunity had it's own mental health center that was sponsored by the city. it was justlike you have a city clinic or community clinic, they also had a mental health treatment center.those things have been absolutely wiped out. housing housing housing is one of the numberone things you hear. like, living in the shelter,
people have told me that being in the shelterfeels just like jail. the conditions are so poor that it feels so unsafe. it gets very difficult for folks to addressany issue without knowing where their gonna sleep at night. that's one of the reasonswhy we got housing. i'd love to have- sitting here telling you 126 units of housing i'dlove to able to sit here and say i have 1,000. and that probably wouldn't be enough. there'salso- built into the program, everybody no matter weather you're a community bag-which is people are low income, that have a job,that are functioning, that are working well- they can access our services and people thatare here, that are on a mental health program,
that are on a mental health program or onsubstance abuse program and as a result have gotten into this wonderful housing- they alsocan access it. so everybody gets service, across the board. i just found myself in a world that didn'tunderstand me, i didn't understand it. i didn't know how to cross the street, i didn't knowhow to use a cellphone i didn't know how to use a microwave... and how do you tell peoplethat? that you don't know how to do these things. i no longer knew how to live amongnew york-people that never sleep. i couldn't do it. i felt like um... i wanted to killmyself. contemplating going back to bedford and asking the "can i come back" and i couldlive in prison! i did it. my mom was gone
my grandparents were gone, everyone that wasdear to me, that help stacy... was gone. discharge has to be more about integrationinto community, not just "here are your pills, come to see your po this particular day, seeyain a week"; but a full understanding of what does it take to be in a community and stayin a community. housing yes, benefits yes, how you're gonna live and eat absolutely.but the other things are: how are you going to build community, how do you build yournatural strength, the natural supports in your life. those are the things that reallykeep you out. people are lining up in crisis on the street,because they aren't able to get their community based mental health services they aren't ableto get the treatment they need. so weather
we like it or not police officers are nowneeding to fill this role of... like a community social worker. right? i mean the mental healthprofessional. the current way we administer mental health treatment has failed in america,and we've relied upon the criminal justice system to be the safety net and that's a horriblesafety net. but it doesn't have to be this way. reformof probation, community based services, housing. in 2014, mayor de blasio convened a specialtask force to look at many of these issues, the solutions are obvious. what the task force gives us is an opportunityto amp it up. there's going to be 350 officers trained by the end of summer. those officerswill be in the location- in the precincts
that are around the first diversion centerwhere we can hook you up with care and really get you some help, as appose to taking themto jail. so we're putting the diversion center and the training together, they work handand glove. we think that that's going to have a real impact and officers feeling like theyhave more tools. get treatment to people with mental healthconditions early on in the process so that people like me don't slip through the cracks-likei did, back in 2010. we need good quality care. when rich peoplehave mental health breakdowns they get good quality residential care. there's enough medicalmoney–the affordable care act has helped with this a bit– that we can provide goodquality care residentially on a short term
basis, but also day treatment in the community.we should have teams that go into the community, into people's homes, communities, neighborhoodsto provide crisis intervention. and so it just shows again that we're settingourselves up for failure. if we don't have the community supports, what do you expectpeople to do? so i think it's important that we give goodservices and good recognition to mental health challenges at every step of the way beforea person comes into the criminal justice system, while they're in that system, and after theyleave that system. ultimately, we need to rethink how we viewmental illness in this country. we need to treat it as a public health concern, not acriminal justice issue.
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