The best Chicago news of the past week was the announcement that the city’s police will be better trained to deal with the mentally ill.
Maybe there are a few people out there who think that mental illness is no immediate, personal concern of theirs, certainly not the kind of mental illness that might involve the police. Maybe they think it’s just the stuff of news stories, the kind we’ve seen too much of lately, about less fortunate people in unfortunate places.
The rest of us know otherwise.
Mental illness touches all kinds of families, all kinds of workplaces, everywhere, and where there is mental illness, particularly where there’s a shortage of decent care, there’s a reasonable chance the police will be drawn in.
Police officers, however, are rarely trained as social workers, and their lack of understanding of how to deal with mentally ill people can make a bad moment worse.
Amy Watson, an associate professor at the UIC Jane Addams College of Social Work, tells the story of one man she interviewed for her study of the interactions between police and mentally ill people:
A landlord called the police about a suicidal tenant. When the police arrived, the tenant, a large African-American man, was on the couch. The police gave him orders.
“He was trying to process and comply,” Watson says, “but before he knew it, he had a pile of police officers on him. He was scared. He thought, ‘I could get killed here.’ “
At the same time, she says, the officers no doubt had entered the house without knowing what weapons might be around, not understanding that the man might not be able to fathom their orders quickly.
“If everybody in the situation is scared,” she says, “it’s likelier to turn into something they need to be scared of.”
Watson is on the new city committee that proposed the expanded training for police. Under the plan, more officers will go through the 40-hour crisis training that some already take; all officers will go through a shorter program.
The city’s 911 dispatchers also will be trained.
It won’t turn police into psychiatrists, but it will help them better understand how to recognize mental illness and how to productively respond.
I know from my own family how hard it can be to comprehend mental illness and how hard it can be to respond usefully to someone who suffers from it.
Mental illness comes in many forms and manifests in different ways. It can be tempting, though wrong-headed, to respond as if the ill person is simply behaving badly, knowingly, willfully.
“Mental illness,” as it’s explained by the police department’s Crisis Intervention Team program, “is a mental or emotional disorder that substantially impairs a person’s thought, perception of reality, emotional process, judgment, behavior, or ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life.”
I have a relative in another city who during a breakdown, after she’d gone off her medications, called the police to claim other relatives were trying to kill her. They weren’t, but she believed they were.
When the police arrived, they didn’t know what to believe. Then she pushed an officer. If she’d been a large person, or a man, or a different race, she may not have gotten away unharmed or un-arrested. The officer, fortunately, recognized that he was seeing not a dangerous criminal but a person whose perception of reality was warped. His calm made all the difference.
There was a time, Watson says, when Chicago had better resources for the mentally ill. But mental health clinics have closed, casualties of the city’s strained finances. Chicago lacks the mobile mental health units that operate in some other cities, lifting the burden from police. The Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team staff has shrunk.
“I think the problem is particularly large right now because of the lack of services,” Watson says. “Things become a police issue. It’s very big in terms of what police are being asked to do.”
Police are called on to deal with mentally ill people in a variety of places. They may be summoned to a business. Called to a home. They may take the mentally person to the hospital, only to have the person quickly dismissed.
“They’re frustrated,” Watson says. “They don’t see the mental health system stepping up.”
There’s plenty of frustration to go around. Chicago’s renewed commitment to police crisis training is, at minimum, a worthy attempt to ease some of it for everybody.
Twitter @MarySchmich
