Use of Psychiatric Drugs Soars in California JailsThe article describes something COTTonLINE has been saying for a decade or more. Without mental hospitals, the not sane are being left "on the street" until their illness causes problematic behavior. At which point they end up in jail or prison or dead.
The number of jail inmates in California taking psychotropic drugs has jumped about 25 percent in five years, and they now account for about a fifth of the county jail population across the state.The article points out that jails are scarcely a "therapeutic environment" and few of the mentally ill so housed can be expected to improve. Psychotropic drugs do make prisoners more "manageable" and that's not trivial in conditions of overcrowding.
Amid a severe shortage of psychiatric beds and community-based treatment throughout the state and nation, jails have become repositories for people in the throes of acute mental health crises.
Across California and the U.S., far more people with mental illness are housed in jails and prisons than in psychiatric hospitals. That poses well-documented challenges: Insufficient staff training and patient treatment have contributed to inmate suicides, self-mutilation, violence and other problems.
In Los Angeles County, whose jails have been described as the largest mental institution in the country, about 30 percent of the 18,000 inmates are mentally ill and most of those diagnosed are on medication, said Joseph Ortego, chief psychiatrist for correctional health services in L.A. County.
I do not believe, when the decision was made to close our mental hospitals, the intent was simply to move those no longer so warehoused into jails and prisons. It should have been a foreseeable outcome.
