Mental health cases tax police, emergency workers

My friend Lily Casura at Healing Combat Trauma sent this.

Mental health cases tax police, emergency workers
LISA RATHKE,Associated Press Writer

"Because they're completely falling through the cracks," he said. "They're not cracks, they're chasms."

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Police found him sitting on the floor of his old apartment near a bucket of urine, still dressed in his hospital gown.

The apartment had been condemned for the squalor — food on the floor, flies — and his smoking in bed. But the mentally ill man, just released from the hospital, had managed to get back in. For the second time in four days, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital.

Three firefighters, a battalion chief, the police chief, two police officers, a code enforcement person and a housing official responded, and finally, an ambulance crew — at a cost of thousands of dollars, Police Chief Michael Schirling said.

Police and emergency responders around the nation have long struggled to deal with people who have mental illness, and some say the situation is only getting worse. A poor economy and cuts to institutional programs threaten to overwhelm personnel trained to deal with crime and vehicle accidents, not mental crises.

"The problem seems to be accelerating in scope and severity of late," the police chief said. "More folks in need of mental health services, more significant issues occurring on the street as a result, and fewer available services for folks in acute crisis or those who are service-resistant."

On the same day they removed the mental patient from the condemned apartment, police searched the other end of Burlington for a homeless man who'd been yelling at kids in a residential neighborhood. Parents wouldn't let their children out alone. Some called 911.

The man has paranoid schizophrenia and other mental illnesses but has refused treatment, so police charged him with disorderly conduct. The chief called it a "workaround," designed to get him into the mental health system by judicial order.

"It's a perversion of the system," he said.
read more here
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091121/ap_on_re_us/us911_mental_health