Enacting laws that afford humane treatment to those individuals whose psychiatric symptoms prevent them from recognizing their need for treatment.Creating authority in state criminal codes for judges to divert non-violent offenders with severe mental illnesses away from incarceration and into appropriate treatment.Establishing assertive community treatment programs to address the needs of people with the most severe mental illnesses.NAMI is pursuing the following strategies for reducing the criminalization of people with severe mental illnesses: For persons with mental illness, today's system represents a reign of terror and error," Flynn declared. "If anything, the NBC program shows how this situation has only further deteriorated. Many have come to the attention of local law enforcement agencies, and jails and prisons increasingly have become a virtual dumping ground for people with mental illness. Instead, countless numbers of people with mental illness have been left on their own without treatment or medical attention. When deinstitutionalization occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, large state psychiatric hospitals were supposed to be replaced by community-based treatment programs. The report also presented extensive evidence of abusive conditions to which these ill individuals were subjected. It's easier for a person with mental illness to get arrested in this country than to get treatment."Īs early as 1992, NAMI published a report, "Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill: The Abuse of Jails as Mental Hospitals," that documented the disturbing trend of incarcerating individuals with serious brain disorders, usually for minor offenses. "We're not talking about a few isolated cases, we're talking about hundreds of thousands. "This problem requires in-depth media coverage and exposure," said Laurie Flynn, executive director of NAMI. NAMI hopes that heightened exposure will bring about change in the broken healthcare and correctional systems that have long been assailed by NAMI.
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Arlington, VA - NAMI applauds tonight's Geraldo Rivera NBC News special "Back To Bedlam" (9:00 p.m., ET) for exposing our nation's failed mental healthcare policies that result in the incarceration rather than the treatment of hundreds of thousands of people with mental illness.