Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Becoming friendly to the mentally ill


While race is a frequent factor in cases of police misconduct, mental illness comes up often as well. This has been especially true in Portland.

I have written about the Aaron Campbell shooting before, and how the procedures local police use are not recommended for dealing with suicidal or mentally ill people. Police training is important, but there are good reasons to question whether mental illness should be a police matter at all.

A few weeks ago Parade had several articles related to Alzheimer's. One of them focused on Knoxville, Tennessee becoming an Alzheimer's friendly town, inspired by several town in Europe that have done so. Much of the certification simply relates to people being trained on how to best deal with people who may be disoriented.

I care a great deal about dementia, and I do want everyone to be able to be good with dementia patients, but I think the mentally ill need this more.

I would like to see a push for cities to become friendly to the mentally ill friendly. I am not aware of a program for this yet. There seems to be a church-focused program in California, but I could not find anything else. That's okay, their program and the dementia-friendly programs can provide some patterns.

This will again be an area where guilt has to be faced. We have made some horrible policy decisions regarding the mentally ill and their care. Focusing on seeing them can only help. Maybe then we will find better solutions for health and treatment and homelessness. The first thing we can learn to do is to understand what their distress might look like and how to best help.

One of my greatest disappointments ever was reading Fixing Broken Windows. I had read an article on it, and the basic tenet that if a place looked like no one cared about it, no one would care, made sense. My mistake was thinking that meant something along the lines of helping businesses owners get their windows fixed, instead of perhaps fining them for leaving the windows broken when they could not afford the repairs. "Community policing" I thought meant strengthening communities by caring about the people in them, but that was never how it was implemented.

There is still room for us to care about each other and help each other. That's the direction I'd like to see.




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