Helping Mentally Ill

The Jan. 23 editorial describing the shameful deficiency of our system of caring for people with severe psychiatric illnesses helps demonstrate several critical issues often difficult to appreciate.

Mental health workers providing the first line of care become representatives of the entire inadequate system in the minds of suffering patients, grieving families and the general public. The forced intrusions of urgent social issues into the treatment setting subtly turns mental health workers into law enforcement officers from the public’s point of view. This diverts attention from the primary issue of providing competent mental health care. And it also promotes numerous threats to the basic confidentiality required for all mental health treatments to work, as an understandably outraged society demands more and more information from the mental health “police” in order to protect the general public. Consequently, patients and their families suffer even more.

BARNET D. MALIN MD

Public Information Liaison

Los Angeles Psychoanalytic

Society and Institute

Beverly Hills