APA President Goes to Hill to Urge Provision of MH Services to Incarcerated Individuals

More than 2 million times every year, individuals with serious mental illness are arrested. Moreover, more than half a million people with serious mental illness are incarcerated at any given time. In fact, 44% of jail inmates and 37% of state and federal prisoners have a history of a mental illness.“Those numbers are staggering no matter how you look at them,” said APA President Altha Stewart, M.D., at congressional briefing titled “Innovations and Challenges in Providing Mental Health Services to People in Prison and Those Reentering the Community.” APA was one of the sponsors of the briefing.Driving the crisis are the higher rates of arrest of people with mental illness for petty crimes directly related to their disorder, such as public nuisance, public urination, drunkenness, or behavior perceived by others as dangerous, said Stewart, who is also a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Health in Justice-Involved Youth at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Longer stays for people with mental illness, coupled with low utilization of evidence-based treatments during incarceration, confounds the problem.Psychiatrists are the most highly trained, highly skilled physicians to manage the treatment of incarcerated individuals with serious mental disorders, yet are underrepresented in correctional settings, with typically just one provider for every 150 inmates, Stewart said. The costs, too, are staggering: total expenditures on prisons is ...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Altha Stewart APA President criminal justice system HR 4005 incarceration Medicaid Rep. Paul Tonko Robert Morgan serious mental illness Source Type: research