Throughout the book, there were many ethical dilemmas uncovered, some include a nurse telling Pete to lie to get Mike treatment, jail guards participating in physical violence against inmates, and a doctor failing to treat someone mentally ill because of laws that are in place. These all raise the question, what is the morally right thing to do? Individuals that are mentally ill deserve treatment, however there are laws that are meant to aid a patient, yet can get in the way. For example, the patient’s right to refuse can get in the way, because if a mental ill patient is clearly delusional refuses treatment, the doctor cannot do anything about it; unless the patient is in danger to themselves or others, and/or gravely disabled.
Considering
…show more content…
Montross, goes on to describing another issue that revolves around how psychiatric patients are treated. She discusses how patients that are brought to the emergency room, while psychiatric beds are not available, tend to be discharged without medications and an adequate follow up plan. In other words, these patients are just thrown back out into the streets (Montross pg 1407). This will result in the patient continuing to act out, due to their symptoms that relate to their condition, and then will end up back at the hospital. It is a never-ending cycle, and health care professionals, are not appropriately assisting these patients. This could be due to laws, the stigma of the mentally ill, and/or the health care provider does not feel there is anything they can do for this patient. Regardless, all patients deserve to be treated equally, thus this disconnect between the health care system and the legal system need to be changed. In addition to scholarly evidence, the student nurse, T. Z., has personal experience of witnessing the disconnect between the mental health care and the legal system, and lack of adequate treatment for the mentally ill. The student nurse, T. Z., observed a teenage patient at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, simply be “detained” at the facility because of court orders. Once the patient’s time is up, they will be allowed to leave, yet many of them claim that once they are done with treatment that they are going to go back to using drugs. Depending on their program, most of them stay around 45 days, then they may go back to using. They can extend their stay if the patient requests it, yet some do not have the insight to do so, and therefore the treatment may fail. This is not helping the patient, because once they are done, they can go back to using. This observation demonstrates how
In addition to, some Consumers are not aware of their illness. Never-the-less, in the State of New Jersey people who are deemed as a danger to themselves or others due to a mental illness is involuntarily committed to this facility by a judge who has written the orders. At “Greystone Parks Psychiatric Hospital” there are certain protocols that must be followed before people are admitted into this facility. The protocol is as follows, patients stay in either the A1/B1 units.
In doing so, doctors also disregarded the patients’ autonomy in their decision to have themselves committed for their altered mental state. Invalidating the patients claim and affecting their trust, which is the pinnacle of the patient-doctor relationship. With psychiatric patient even more so because there must be a level of trust in the person’s claim and in their determination, that they might be having a breakdown. A beneficial scenario for the parties involves would have been if the doctors’ actions promoted more good, or beneficence, and gave Jessie better tools to cope with his PTSD. Instead, of taking an inactive approach, which allowed the situation to escalate to the point he became a danger to himself and others.
Your discussion presents an interesting perspective on business principles. Managing financial needs of a hospital and patient’s satisfaction goes hand and hand in the hospital field. This also can create a negative impact when it comes to prescribing pain medication. An ethical dilemma arises for emergency room providers who in relation to new reimbursement tactics centered upon patient satisfaction scores (Kelly, Johnson, & Harbison, 2016)
The author provides evidence from different studies completed throughout the years. The author’s arguments and basic assumptions are valid. With the large amount of information provided in the chapter it bakes and valid the authors assumptions and arguments. The author’s argument did not have to persuade me. It did however give me more information to believe the system and policy dealing with mental illness individuals is flawed.
Many jails and prisons now are trying to improve their care of prisoners with mental illness in order to adequately perform this assumed responsibility. However, past and current criminal justice policies and state laws too often hamper their ability to do so, sometimes because of a lack of resources or legal restrictions on the type of care they can provide. The Future I & II—Shifting Policies and Priorities Today, our criminal justice system has assumed the responsibility of caring for many of these individuals with mental illness as part of its core function despite having never been designed for the treatment of the mentally ill as a primary medical treatment provider. Some solutions proposed by the 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center and
Also receiving the treatment within the jail will allow them to continue to practice safe habits when released rather than behaving criminally and impulsively bringing them back to prison. The National Alliance on Mental Illness believes that prisoners with mental health deserve access to quality mental health treatment. They give statistics to prove that mental illnesses within jails are a big problem and later provide links to what they have already done to help mentally ill prisoners in jails not receiving the treatment they need. The author believes, “People with mental illness who are incarcerated deserve access to appropriate mental health treatment, including screening, regular and timely access to mental health providers, and access to medications and programs that support recovery”(“Treatment While Incarcerated”). To be able to involve all of these different types of treatments, prisons first need to be able to include educated staff.
There are too many patients and not enough beds or caretakers (Maine DHHS Increasing Support to Expand Capacity for Psychiatric Services in Southern Maine). So the author is saying not only do they need more beds, they also need more people in the mental health care profession. However, a huge problem with mental conditions is they can go undetected and ignored for a long time. Some doctors say they don 't always have enough time or the right set of skills to handle that patient (Hopper). The author states that mental conditions are very hard to treat and diagnose.
Another issue that the American prison systems were facing was their constant practice of locking away mentally ill individuals to very long prison sentences that only seriously worsened their conditions, and even made their chances of overcoming mental illness, nearly impossible. Even medications that were prescribed to these individuals made them suffer serious and sometimes even worse, side effects. Although some states banned the high rates of mentally ill individuals to prisons, this only meant they were more targeted and thrown in jail for petty offenses by police. Many prisons do not have the resources, nor the skills needed to adequately and appropriately care for the mentally ill, therefore many of them suffer and even die from this
“My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” (Stevenson 18) The wrongful convictions of people with mental health issues in the justice system are widely discussed in the book ‘Just Mercy’. In the chapter ‘Mitigation’, Stevenson’s focal point is on the mistreatment and injustices that mentally ill people endure while in the system. This chapter in particular opened my eyes to the struggle these people face, ways we can help to prevent it, and how I have started seeing it in my everyday life.
Untreated mental illness is dangerous and over time we have learned that locking people with a mental illness is not the solution but makes it worse. People with untreated mental illness face many consequences. “People with untreated psychiatric illnesses comprise 250,000 people, of the total homeless population” (mentalillnesspolicy.org). The quality of life for these individuals is extremely heart breaking, and many are victimized regularly.
In the book Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, one of the biggest focal points is mental illness. Mental illness can be tough to talk about, simply because the phrase “mental illness” encompasses such a wide range of conditions and conjures up images of deranged people, but it is very important, especially in this book. There is a certain stigma that people who are put into mental hospitals because they have medical problems or are insane and a possible danger to society. While this is sometimes true, it is far more common for patients to need help for a disorder, but just don’t know where to go or what to do, and can end up putting themselves or someone else in danger.
Many psychiatric hospitals have closed down, which the only option left for the mentally ill was to be taken in jails and prisons. In the documentary we learn
The shift is attributed to the unexpected clinical needs of this new outpatient population, the inability of community mental health centers to meet these needs, and the changes in mental health laws (Pollack & Feldman, 2003). Thousands of mentally ill people flowing in and out of the nation 's jails and prisons. In many cases, it has placed the mentally ill right back where they started locked up in facilities, but these jail and prison facilities are ill-equipped to properly treat and help them. In 2006 the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that there were; 705,600 mentally ill inmates in state prisons, 78,000 in federal prisons, and
Ethical Dilemmas Every day throughout the world healthcare officials are presented with different ethical dilemmas. In the case of Jamilah Shah three of these dilemmas arise in the areas of authority to consent, beneficence versus maleficence, and autonomy. Depending on how these dilemmas are addressed can determine any future legal implications that may arise due to care that may or may not be provided.
The good news is that mental illness is much more treatable now than it was even 20 years ago. Medications and therapies developed in past two decades have moved mental illness from a shameful problem that was not discussed to a routine chronic condition with ready treatments. Unfortunately, treatments are dramatically under utilized to the detriment of individuals who suffer pain and anguish. Undertreatment ultimately leads to higher costs for state governments because patients receive care in more expensive settings like emergency departments and are hospitalized or end up in jails and prisons.