Our mental-health-care system is broken. Ten of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are incarcerated. Here’s what this crisis looks like from the inside — a series of lost lives and a few rare victories — as reported by John J. Lennon for Esquire.
EXCERPT
Nearly 20 percent of the fifty-two thousand prisoners in New York’s prison system—ten thousand in all—have mental illness. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state’s correctional facilities and supervises its parolees, is not alone: Nearly four hundred thousand of 2.2 million prisoners nationwide have a psychiatric diagnosis. Compare that with the thirty-eight thousand patients that the country’s state-run psych hospitals can accommodate. The math is as easy as it is shocking: Ten out of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are behind bars.
The financial toll is enormous: Treating prisoners with mental illness costs twice as much as providing community-based care. State prisons spend an estimated $5 billion each year to imprison nonviolent offenders with a disorder. As the National Alliance on Mental Illness says, “In a mental-health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help.” Jails and prisons have become our de facto asylums.
I didn’t need such figures and reports. In 1998, my brother Eugene, thirty-two and ten years older than me, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Though our family had known for a while something was wrong, we’d chalked it up to his crack addiction. But it was the other way around: He used drugs to mask an unraveling mind. He’d lost his job as an electrician at a hospital in the Bronx; he’d been evicted from one apartment after the next; friends spotted him wandering the streets, shoeless, strumming a guitar and ranting Bible verses. He was at the mercy of psych wards, shelters, and jail. If there was a safety net, he’d slipped through it.
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