mental illness

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that police are immune from being sued over the shooting of a mentally ill woman in San Francisco, the Associated Press reports. While the shooting victim Teresa Sheehan said the police should have made reasonable accommodations for her under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the court said that it was not taking up that question because it hadn't been fully considered by the lower courts.

The court's decision is here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1412_0pl1.pdf

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that two Georgia mental health patients are entitled to care in the community, there has been a push by the U.S. Department of Justice to move patients out of state hospitals, The Augusta Chronicle's Tom Corwin reports. Transfers from institutional to community settings can't be carried out over the opposition of patients, if their placements can't be reasonably accommodated or if patients wouldn't be able to benefit from being out in the community.

There have been unintended consequences of the court ruling in Georgia. The state has not been meeting patient-care standards and there have been a number of unexpected deaths in community-care homes, Corwin reports. U.S. District Judge J. Leon Holmes ruled 3.5 years ago that the Justice Department was seeking to enforce patients being moved to community settings even though parents and guardians of patients hadn't asked for it.

Corwin found that the death rates for patients in long-term care in the community is higher and that many parents fear that "patients will not receive a comparable level of care in the community, and particularly for the many medically fragile patients, this could prove fatal." 

The U.S. Supreme Court has taken up a police shooting case--and this time the victim wasn't a man of color, but a woman with mental illness who was shot to death in her own residence, Slate's Cristian Farias reports. Farias notes that one advocacy group estimates that at least half of all people shot to death by police have mental health issues. One issue in the case is "the extent to which the Americans With Disabilities Act serves as a check on police officers’ interactions with people with mental illnesses" when they are exhibiting erractic or violent behavior. Farias noted that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during oral argument that '''isn’t the ADA ... intended to ensure that police officers try mitigation in these situations before they jump to violence?”'

There are just a few states that doesn't mandate outpatient treatment for the "frequent fliers"--the people with serious mental illnesses who repeatedly are in local jails and hospitals, the Washington Post's Annys Shin reports. The Treatment Advocacy Center, released a report this week "on the outcomes of established mandatory outpatient treatment programs in New York City and Summit County, Ohio, where assisted outpatient treatment has been in place since the 1990s." Studies of those programs found that court-ordered outpatient treatment "reduced the incidence of psychiatric emergency crisis services, hospitalization, and criminal justice involvement," Shin reports.

As the trial proceeds in the murder of Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1979 while walking to a NYC bus, the Associated Press' Adam Geller reports on how confessions like the one in the Patz murder case can be clouded by defendants' mental illnesses. The presiding judge has found that Pedro Hernandez's confession to Patz's murder is admissible, but some experts said the defendant's history of mental illness "raise difficult questions about whether a suspect is exercising free will in talking to police, and greatly increase the potential for false confessions." Only the final part of Hernandez's interrogation was recorded, not the hours of questioning before he gave a videotaped recording.

Of the 300-plus people who have been cleared by the Innocence Project, a quarter falsely confessed, and 30 to 40 percent of those people were mentally ill or mentally disabled.

The Seattle Times reports on the practice of locking people in the middle of mental-illness crises at emergency rooms because there are not enough beds available in the psychiatric system. The crux of this ground-breaking report: "'Psychiatric boarding,' as it is officially called, or 'warehousing,' as it is known to mental-health advocates, has long taken place on occasion in Washington, which ranks at the bottom of the country for psychiatric-treatment beds per capita. But now this once-rare, controversial practice has rapidly become routine here — traumatizing thousands of mentally ill residents, wreaking havoc on hospitals, and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars."

After the move to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and get them out of asylums, no infrastructure was developed to support them in the community. Instead, many end up in jail and entangled up in the criminal justice system. The Wall Street Journal reports on the depth of the problem: "The country's three biggest jail systems—Cook County, in Illinois; Los Angeles County; and New York City—are on the front lines. With more than 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, they represent by far the largest mental-health treatment facilities in the country. By comparison, the three largest state-run mental hospitals have a combined 4,000 beds." "Society was horrified to warehouse people in state hospitals, but we have no problem with warehousing them in jails and prisons," Thomas Dart, sheriff of Cook County, told the WSJ.

The New York Times has a report on a putatative class action filed against a Nevada psychiatric center alleging it had the practice of putting patients with mental illness onto buses to San Francisco and other California locales with one-way tickets. “In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” San Franciso City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the New York Times and who is prosecuting the lawsuit. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”