Argumentative Essay On A Mental Health Issue

Most law enforcement agencies do not provide special training for officers on how to deal with mental health crisis. If they get any training, this is usually provided by police academy in a four-hour core training class. Police officers who have little training often believe that this population is violent. Therefore, people with mental illnesses are 50 to 67% more likely than those without the illnesses to be arrested (Slate, Buffington-Vollum & Johnson, 2013, p.188).

There is a rough estimate of around 60 percent of incarcerated individuals that are diagnosed with mental illnesses. This is due to what could be called the criminalization of the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been America’s response to poverty and mental illness. An estimated 40 percent of the mentally ill Americans end up in the criminal justice system. Around 2 million people with mental illness go to jail every year, that’s ten times more people in jail than in state funding psychiatric treatment.

When someone commits a crime, a news reporter sometimes ends the story by saying that the person was suffering from some type of mental illness. This causes the public to believe that everyone with mental illness must either be committing crimes or are more likely to do so. Those who are mentally ill are sometimes left to find treatment in their own

For instance, one study used approximately 2,100 disturbance call reports over sixty months that involved people with a serious mental illness. This study found that when police responded to the disturbance calls, they transported individuals to treatment seventy-seven percent of the time (1690), while not transporting individuals for treatment about seventeen percent of the time (366). Only 118 individuals were transported to jail. Of those disturbance calls, thirty-nine percent (848) were reported as a suspect with a mental illness or almost twenty-seven percent as potential suicide calls

According to LA Times, “at least 59% of the 185 public mass shootings that took place in the United States from 1900 through 2017 were carried out by people who had either been diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack,“ (Duwe). These numbers refer to public mass shootings, which include, but not only refer to schools. What this statistic means is 109 shootings at most could have been avoided by having schools identify students with mental illnesses and making schools provide effective support for these students. However, PBS claims, “Schools do not all screen students for mental health issues. Even if students are successfully identified, many areas lack the community-based mental health treatment options that would be needed to help

Mental health is a big problem in the United States and their needs to be programs and organizations to help the mentally ill. Society has turned a blind eye to the mentally ill and do not care for them that much, which makes the mentally ill feel unwanted. Mentally ill people need outlets that act like family to them so that they feel wanted. Although the 21st Century Cures Act, was passed to help mental ill people it has not done enough. We need to have more programs and facilities to help mentally ill people and educate the schools and the public about mental illness.

Conversations about criminal justice reform have to include the issue of incarcerating the mentally ill if the United States is serious about reducing mass incarceration and recidivism.

Certain federal government organizations such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Medicare and Medicaid coverage have spent a total of 111.4 trillion dollars in support of the mental health programs with in the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs and at most, 386 billion dollars on block grants with in each of the 50 states. Among the annual funds that are put into the justice system for mental health care plans, the more serious discussion is among the manifest of not having enough “community based” health care facilities for the mentally ill. “These people don’t think there’s anything wrong with them and these are disproportionately the ones who end up committing felonies or misdemeanors, ending up in jail or prison or even ending up homeless” – E. Fuller Torrey. According to a survey that was published by the US and District of Columbia, forty four out of the fifty states had been housing double the number of mentally ill patients than the state’s largest remaining psychiatric hospital.

Also, the correctional facilities help inmates with mental illness

Nearly one in five Americans can suffer from any type of mental illnesses.

Rehabilitating the Criminally Insane In Daniel H. Birman’s heart-wrenching documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story, viewers meet Cyntoia Brown a troubled young girl whose traumatic life leads to a murder charge. Delving further into the film, the audience learns of Brown’s diagnosis of Border Line Personality Disorder a chronic mental illness. After her fate is sealed with a life sentence viewers are left with a lingering question: how can the mentally ill be provided with adequate treatment in prison?

One in four people is a pretty large ratio. These people could be your family or friends, and the fact that many of them are not able to receive the proper treatment that they require should be alarming. Mental illness affects more lives than one would expect and this epidemic could be easily solved if mental healthcare were to be more accessible. Currently, The United States spends as little $113 billion on mental health treatment. That works out to about 5.6 percent of the national health-care spending, according to a 2011

Mental health plays a huge role in the everyday lives of people and their physical health. While some think that mental health services are not important, should not be provided to many, and should not be available in schools, mental health care should be available to all who need it for free and be available in schools. Free mental health can help those struggling and the public be aware of the issues, help those get the help they need, protect the individual and

It is not just everyday people on the street who overlook mental illness. Doctors are guilty of doing it too. Health Affairs Journal claims doctors do not take mental health as seriously as physical injuries. The 2016 study from Health Affairs Journal concluded that medical professionals are less likely to help or follow up with patients with depression than they are with a chronic physical illness, like diabetes or congestive heart failure. This creates a negative bias in the medical field, which is where the mentally ill need help from the most.

Mental illnesses do not just affect a minority; they affect the people who have them and their friends. Likewise, the