Editorial: Violence and Mental Health

The recent federal report on the Baltimore Police Department made unusual emphasis on the difficult relationship between police officers and people suffering from mental illness.

Inadequate use of violence during those encounters is the result of the agents’ lack of training, according to the report, but the generalized failure to deal with mental patients is a political issue more than a police issue.

One of the great problems is Congress’ inability to acknowledge the importance of the topic and to create concrete measures to help the nearly 44 million people in the U.S who suffer from some type of mental illness. Still, the discussion on what should be a health priority is contaminated by the divisive gun control debate that paralyzes everything.

This year, Congress had in its hands a measure favoring the treatment of mental patients through better organization and accessibility to services and with state subsidies, and ordered health insurers to cover mental health as much as they cover physical health. The project passed in the House of Representatives with extraordinary support, only to die in the Senate.

The problem is that the measure was the Republican response to the child massacre at the Sandy Hook school, when it defined that massacres are not caused by a mental patient’s easy access to war weapons – as argued by Democrats – but by mental illness itself.

The final blow to the bill was the amendment made by Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) that reinstated the right to carry a gun for mental patients after treatment. The intransigence to change the current law to favor of more access to weapons confirms that the priority was never mental health.

Mental illness is a national problem. A third of all homeless people suffer from it, as does a fairly large percentage of the people locked up in local state and federal facilities. The lack of treatment has a high financial and social cost when the options are the streets or prison.

Police officers have to deal with this population in tense situations. That is a reality for which agents need to be trained. The sad part is that – in the absence of political interest regarding mental patients – for many of them, their first social contact is with a police officer in a dark alley instead of a doctor.