Hello and welcome to all families of mentally ill Americans who are wrongly incarcerated for offenses that arose from mental health problems or who face an increased risk for imprisonment due to a common, health condition. Greetings to everyone who has been victimized or have/had relatives and friends who were abused or killed by extrajudicial police violence. This human rights advocate empathizes with you because of the murder under secret arrest of Larry Neal in 2003 and oppression to keep his death covered-up http://WrongfulDeathofLarryNeal.com . I spoke about it on the brief video embedded below, filmed by Press TV in 2012, which is also at YouTube link http://youtu.be/584tgKJwobY . The video is about systemic racism in America, but acute mental patients, especially those who lack wealth, are at risk no matter what their race is. Search this blog for the video of a Caucasian, Kelly Thomas, being killed by police in California.
It is painful to lose relatives to violence or avoidable deaths and injuries caused by negligence. Yet that is a danger everyone in a society faces when acute mental patients lack proper treatment and subsistence assistance. Assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) programs have proved to reduce homelessness, arrests, hospitalizations and incarceration by 85% or better among program participants in New York when compared to their experiences three years before joining an AOT program that mandates psychiatric treatment and provides subsistence assistance.
I believe that together, you and I can Change things. Homelessness, prison, and death must no longer be America's answers to poverty and mental illness. Acute mental patients do not usually vote for politicians who pass laws and decide budgets that have tremendous impact on their lives, but their millions of relatives and friends do. Every area should have police officers trained to deal with mentally challenged people without violence as well as sufficient hospital beds for inpatients for crisis intervention and for long-term care. Mental ill people in America who require containment must become hospital inpatients rather than prison inmates. Mental illness is like physical diseases such as heart trouble or diabetes in that it requires continual monitoring by health care professionals. That is why every community also needs active AOT programs to promote community safety, reduce its prison budget, and help acute mental patients be restored to wholesome living. The good news is that caring for the mentally ill saves money. Treatment Advocacy Center reports:
A study of mandatory outpatient treatment costs published today in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that use of assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) can vastly reduce overall costs of mental health services for persons with serious mental illness.
“Common sense has always argued that treating people with severe mental illness is a lot cheaper than arresting, jailing and/or hospitalizing them – not to mention more humane,” said Doris A. Fuller, executive director. “Now Duke University and its research partners have produced the numbers to validate it.”
I believe most Americans are decent people who would care about marginalized psychiatric patients and vote for public officials who are committed to improving their conditions. However, people can only care about conditions that they know about. Articles in "Dog Justice for Mentally Ill" blog are published to inform and recruit the general public to help give Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill. You assist in this justice quest every time you share an article or video from this blog with your online networks. You are invited to "follow this blog" by using the widget in the upper right margin and read more articles listed in the blog's index. Over a million incarcerated mental patients and families of murdered and abused sick people thank you for your concern.
Animal rights laws prevent dogs from being treated like my brother Larry Neal and other psychiatric patients in this blog were. Everybody deserves at least "Dog Justice."
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill advocates at
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Read more about AOT programs at this link
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/solution/assisted-outpatient-treatment-laws
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/solution/assisted-outpatient-treatment-laws
Dog Justice for the Mentally Ill
1 comment:
"People who experience forms of developmental or mental disabilities are often times doubly targeted by police violence due to high rates of poverty and homelessness ... To be plain, very little information is collected on a national level concerning police injuring and killing of people with disabilities. The problem comes from a larger failure to gather information on a national basis about police injuring and killing civilians as a whole. Police departments either do not collect, or are reluctant to collect, this kind of information. Reports of police injuring and killing civilians are scattered and imprecise." Continue reading at
http://www.disabled-world.com/editorials/cops.php
One would think that a nation intent on starting wars in other countries for the sake of human rights there would keep count of the disabled citizens its own police brutalize and kill. But that is not the case in the USA. Let us require an accurate accounting of all people (particularly our mentally and physically disabled citizens, elders, and children) who fall victim to overuse of force by police.
Once the public and our representatives understand the scope of the problem, we will be in a better position to protect and provide for elders and children and to give ASSISTANCE TO THE INCARCERATED MENTALLY ILL.
Mary Neal, director
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/aimi
Dog Justice for Mentally Ill
http://dogjusticeformentallyill.blogspot.com
Dog Justice for the Mentally Ill
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