Mental illness isn’t criminality

Re “Shutting door to treatment,” Column One, Dec. 7

This article states that about 350,000 of the 2.1 million U.S. prisoners suffer from severe mental illnesses. Other disturbing facts go unmentioned. Sheriff Lee Baca has more than once said that the L.A. County jail system, the largest in the country, is also the largest mental facility in the nation.

Per capita, the U.S. has more people incarcerated than any other country in the world.

How far have we really come? Bedlam has come to mean chaos, but we forget that Bedlam was a London hospital. By the mid-1300s, it had come to be used exclusively for the mentally ill. Such asylums have become synonymous with inhumane hellholes, but the word “asylum” means a place of refuge, shelter or protection.

At least our ancestors recognized the need to distinguish mental illness from criminality. We seem to have largely lost that distinction.

Perhaps we need to go back to Bedlam of the 14th century and have another look; people then were attempting to do something right, and we have lost our way.

Debra L. Wiley

Inglewood

People suffering from a serious mental illness who collide with the criminal justice system can move forward with positive outcomes when the best practices available are implemented.

Psychiatric mobile-response teams, clinicians who ride with police officers, crisis-intervention team training for police officers, mental health courts, jail diversion programs, jail discharge linkage services, assisted outpatient treatment programs under Laura’s Law (which can allow a judge to order severely and often violently mentally ill people to accept treatment) and full-service partnerships provided under the Mental Health Services Act are some programs that can work together to make our system function as it should -- to provide high-quality mental health care and hope rather than criminalization and tragedy.

How many more need to get hurt or killed before we get this right?

Mark S. Gale

West Hills

The writer is on the California board of directors of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and is vice chairman of its California Criminal Justice Committee.