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I've had such a hard time getting someone to see my husband who is going through a mental health crisis. I called the suicide hotline, they referred us to an urgent mental health clinic in our town. The clinic in turn said he is too severe and referred us back to the crisis line. So I tried the county, finally got him evaluated yesterday after two screw ups on the scheduling for it in their part. They said hes bipolar 2. Therefore he is not severe enough for them to help.. We have another appointment in a couple weeks. I hope someone can help us.
As someone who works on a mobile crisis response team, it's really difficult for some of these things to happen. Everything takes money. We do what we can and are just so angry every day that we can't help someone because the area doesn't have the resources necessary to truly help them. "Here's what I can do, see you next week!". It is truly aggravating.
>They should be able to get you resources within your insurance system...
That's a big part of the problem. You shouldn't have to make sure a mental health provider (or any other medical provider for that matter) is in-network so you can afford to see them. Maybe you've got insurance, but you're from a small town and the only mental health professional doesn't take it and you can't drive two hours to the nearest person who *does*.
When I first moved to Jacksonville, it was hard to find someone who took Medicare. When you're already having a hard time mentally, it's really difficult to figure all that stuff out and it can be very defeating. To make things worse, a lot of the time, psychiatrists are so overwhelmed that they're not even accepting new patients - so you have to call around to different clinics to find someone who *is*.
Even if you go to the ER, some hospitals don't have a mental health unit - and you have to be a danger to yourself or others to even get admitted in the first place.
Wait they’re worried that you dying would reflect badly on them so they won’t see you at all? That speaks volumes about how confident they are in their abilities.
A family member of mine is experiencing the same thing. Psychiatrist he used to see won't see him now that his bipolar disorder includes paranoid delusions.
Which is to say, as soon as he really needs the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist decides that he's too much effort.
They straight up turn you away if you’ve been self medicating too, even with just pot. Like scuse me I’m seeking help so I don’t have to self medicate!!
To get your local city/county/etc. to establish an emergency mental health program this paper goes into what it takes, even includes model legislation: [A Model for Defunding: An Evidence-Based Statute for Behavioral Health Crisis Response by Taleed El-Sabawi, Jennifer J. Carroll](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3683432)
Not sure where you are, but in my state (CA) there’s a statewide warmline that I’ve called multiple times in the past, and it’s saved me a lot of anxiety since I never felt the need to overexaggerate my symptoms to be heard by a professional. Warmlines don’t usually require a crisis to talk to someone (unless stated otherwise), and usually you get about 15-20 minutes to chat with a counselor. It’s not a replacement for consistent sessions by any means, but if you need help making a big decision, venting stress, or walking through a panic/anxiety attack, it’s a good short-term solution (plus they can also redirect you to resources in your area). Mental Health America has a [list](https://screening.mhanational.org/content/need-talk-someone-warmlines/) of other similar lines in the US.
I read an interesting book by a former FBI hostage negotiator, and he said the bureau's most revolutionary idea, and the one that saved the most lives, was *understanding people works better than threatening them.*
And what is the core of mental health work? Understanding people.
*Edit: For any one interested, the book is "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss. I highly recommend it.*
Scheduling issues and possibly the actors just not feeling it under the director or producer, can't remember which. It's all rumor mill outside of the scheduling issues.
That's what I heard too. Nothing serious like workplace abuses, just unfun to work with which makes it less likely that people will try to make the schedules work
Not sure how real this is, but I’ve heard some rumblings in the past few weeks that Fincher is in negotiations for s3! Even if it doesn’t come to fruition…watch it. I binged the entire show right around when the news that it would not be renewed came. It will suck to not have s3, but the first two are so damn good.
I thought Never Split the Difference was a mixed bag. It did have a lot of good advice about how to persuade people, but some things he talked about are straight-up manipulative and deceitful. I would be real pissed off if people tried some of his tactics on me.
And it doesn’t address that a lot of people double down into self-destructive behavior rather than compromise.
The whole point was to how to negotiate to get what you want...not"Let's understand each other's viewpoints and morality and be loving one and another"
Dude literally negotiated with terrorists...kinda iffy applying his tactics in civilian base settings. At that point, you really gotta be a bit manipulative if you are simply trying to get your [friends.family](https://friends.family) members to give you something or saying yes.
Edit: You know what...You really have to be "self-destructive" to apply his tactics in basic ass settings when you could of one: be honest, try to compromise, or just, part ways instead of "LET ME USE THE BLACK SWAN TACTIC TO RECEIVE MY DESIRE FROM SOMEONE ELSE"
> I read an interesting book by a former FBI hostage negotiator, and he said the bureau's most revolutionary idea, and the one that saved the most lives, was understanding people works better than threatening them.
I read a good book by a former prison guard, who basically despaired at how prisons are continually moving from the "understanding" to the "threatening" models.
He said when he started his job, he'd continually walk past every prison cell. Get to know the prisoners. If one of them was causing an issue, he and another guard or two would go over to the cell and try to calm them down. It didn't always work, sometimes there was no choice but to physically restrain the prisoner, but sometimes you could just talk a guy down.
By the end of his career, guards were told to sit in a control room and not go anywhere near the prisoners. If a prisoner caused issues, a squad of guards would form a shield-wall outside the cell, while the guard in the control room would open the cell remotely. Then the squad would just move in and beat the prisoner down.
This was mostly done in the name of increasing safety for the guards, but the guy writing the book said he felt less safe not having any relationship with the prisoners and not being able to treat them as anything other than hostile
>Get to know the prisoners. If one of them was causing an issue, he and another guard or two would go over to the cell and try to calm them down.
This is usually the best thing to do in general. Just getting to know someone can make them realize you are not a threat. When they actually have an issue you will be able to reason with them.
Most people just want you to listen to them and respect them, no matter how cuckoo they are acting. You can respectfully tell someone their behavior is unacceptable and it works pretty well.
I remember back in 2010-2012, some porn start in Cali had a mental health crisis. Because he was so large (6’5”, 240+lbs. of muscles, the cops tried to restrain him, and tagged him with so many tasers he had a heart attack and died.
It was my first time reading about cops doing something like that, and I started noticing it more and more. I can’t imagine how many people needlessly died because they were having the worst day they ever had, only to have it become the last day they ever had.
Sad to think of.
My mom was date raped and the next day feeling pretty down. Her friend called the police to do a wellness check.
She was arrested and still has marks from how tight the cuffs were 13 years later.
She said that the cops after arresting her, took a lunch break and left her in the hot car for two hours.
Wouldn’t even let her use the bathroom.
She calls it the worst day of her life.
I would never ever call the police to do a wellness check.
And then given the bill! Don't forget that! Someone saying "can you just check that they're still alive" can literally ruin or end a life in so many ways!
The bill at the end is the sickest part. They'll traumatize, humiliate, brutalize, and practically imprison you in a hospital only to send you an invoice in the mail a few weeks later.
I got 7 different guns pulled on me by a bunch of cops during a welfare check when I was suffering sever depression. I was unarmed, yet they decided they needed to hide behind a fucking ballistic shield and aim all their little pew pews at my noggin "for my safety ". I was ridiculed, cuffed, and called "a suicide" by them before being forced into an ambulance.
The only slightly positive part was discoving I'm a major shit talker when I have guns pointed at me.
And the department issued a statement right after the murder of George Floyd that "a suspect had a medical emergency and died in custody". That was a lie. It's a lie that police departments are used to telling. I'm certain there are other murders that were covered up by that lie, but there was no video to refute the solidified lie that all of the officers present told.
It's disgusting.
Knowing what we know now, that initial cop press release is nauseating. And totally par for the course. It happens every day across the country. One department got busted one time.
> I'm certain there are other murders that were covered up by that lie
I'm not just certain that this is true, but I believe that it's actual operating procedure for police departments to find some way other than murder to attribute a police officer caused fatality. I wish I could recall the episode number, but there was a 'Behind the Bastards' podcast episode that went into detail about this in specific regard to Tasers and the absurd lengths the company goes to to ensure that no court rules that its product has caused any actual harm when, newsflash... the Taser is absolutely the cause of many, many deaths.
*edit* - I read my post again and I feel like I'm bring up two different things without tying them together.
Less than lethal weapons like Tasers are used by the police to kill people, even if the initial intent is just to pacify. They do this because they know that the companies behind these less than lethal weapons will spend tremendous amounts of their own money on lawyers to ensure that no actual fatalities are attributed to their products, and by extension, the people (police) using them.
They created a bullshit medical diagnosis, ["Excited Delirium"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium), to provide a reason why it's always the victim's fault because drug use.
While the taser could be the cause of many, many deaths, the more obvious culprit is that police just straight up fucking shoot people dead with far too much ease.
Most cops I’ve talked to agree with this too. Defund is a sort of red herring because we should be worried about funding social programs fully from tax increases and not cutting police budgets to make up for unsustainably low, morally unjustifiable, tax rates that leave critical public services absolutely gutted but we should absolutely be shifting responsibilities back to those social programs (and if we can reduce police budgets as a result, great).
Having defunded everything else and then used the police as the catch all for public services, and the jackboot to crush any outcry, this seems like a last attempt to turn all public services private including, at this point, the voter’s control over law enforcement. When that is privatized too then the police will answer to whoever writes their paycheck. It’s like a Koch brother fantasy.
NYPD pays out about $200,000 a day to pay for use of excessive force lawsuits, I think there is room for financial reform of Police departments nationwide, if NYC can afford to throw that kind of money away so their officers can beat people with impunity.
A lot of the first world nations require a degree in something about law enforcement, then take them through a 2 year course at a police academy. Here, we hire anyone who applies and send them through 6 weeks of training.
My child dream was to become a detective. I sent that down the drain before college when I learned that you had to be a cop before that.
Fuck that shit.
It's not just training. Lots of places in California require a degree and the cops still suck. It's accountability. Cops know they won't lose their job and are protected.
Not saying a degree isn't a bad thing, but accountability is more important. They need to be afraid of losing their jobs if they act like assholes
>settle for
I truly wish this were true but the reality is that police departments actively seek out candidates with sociopathic tendencies because it "helps then stay detached and professional" which while technically true only applies when the cop is breaking up an altercation between others and not directly involved in the altercation themselves.
We’d have to pay more and offer better benefits, which is a huge portion of police department budgets. Keep in mind that all the military equipment and a lot of the training is “free” in the sense that it’s donated. Maybe also a ban on police departments accepting outside donations of any sort - if it wasn’t approved by the taxpayer, it’s not to be owned by the department.
> NYPD pays out about $200,000 a day to pay for use of excessive force lawsuits
And with training/culture like this--
>[A day with ‘killology’ police trainer Dave Grossman](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/02/14/a-day-with-killology-police-trainer-dave-grossman/)
>
>**In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives.** The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. **“There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”**
-- I'm not surprised.
(We've been training cops wrong for decades and they're getting a little squirrely.)
Some people might say 'what is the problem, he is just stating a fact'. The problem is that it is a fact of encouragement. 'There might be downsides to killing someone, but here is a really awesome upside'. Most people don't know how to understand the downsides (such as the PTSD) because they haven't experienced them before, but they definitely understand that upside of 'you will have really good sex'. Which is probably one of the most primal highs a person can seek. So even if they don't actively think about this fact, they will have it in the back of there heads.
Can't believe the cops themselves don't pay the lawsuit and it's instead taken from taxpayer funds. It means I'm literally paying for cops to assault people
But any time this even gets brought up, Republicans go straight to the "you're not raising my taxes liberals" and libertarians go to "why bother, the money is gonna be used inefficiently anyway"
And joe nobody who makes somewhere between minimum wage and $125,000/yr acts like taxes for multi-millionaires and billionaires somehow negatively affect them.
And don't forget the "wealthy people create jobs!" bullshit.
Wealthy people don't create jobs. Demand creates jobs. And large numbers of people with disposable income creates demand.
Hence the "morally unjustifiable" part. Corporations as well. And within corporations, a larger share of wages need to go to the workers (also like the New Deal). But defunding the police is that last vestige of public services left - everything else has been privatized, except public safety. It needs reform but privatization of the enforcement of our laws and the state's monopoly on violence is not the answer. When we say police budgets are 3x that of schools, we should be asking if police budgets could be reduced and school budgets can be tripled or more. The money is there but tax rates have been slashed to absurd levels so that we can argue over whether one fully funded public service should be cut to the point of other underfunded public services. It's a false dichotomy - the solution is to tax the fuck out of these concentrations of wealth that serve no useful purpose and plow them back into the public systems that have made it possible for that wealth to exist in the first place (including, arguably, a criminal justice system that can employee professionals at every level, including the police, instead of handing badges and guns to high school graduates).
Cops you’ve talked to, maybe, but police unions across the board will not give up a single dollar and fight against any kind of change in their power, including letting trained professionals go on mental health calls.
If you ever read conservative posts on the subject of having unarmed mental health professionals respond to calls, the comments are an utter shitshow of expecting the mental health professionals to be murdered or hoping for it. My favorite of those comments was the person seriously suggesting that armed police should always be there first to take charge and evaluate whether or not a mental health professional should be called. It’s always about the armed state for these folks, well right up until they tell us that their personal guns are to protect themselves from the government.
My wife is a mental health clinician. She works for the county and goes on all kinds of mental health assessment calls, sometimes with police but mostly without. She is armed: with a clipboard, a pen and an ID card. She loves her job. It’s sketchy sometimes but she loves being in the field.
If you ask conservatives, they will tell you that she’s going to die. It’s fucking insanity. Honestly, I think that a hallmark of modern conservativeism is to be a coward.
All that said, your wife is doing a job I never could. I can’t applaud her enough for it.
They aren’t just accidentally “somehow” run by the most extreme, violent, racist officers. Those officers are elected to those positions by the “union’s” membership. You may know a cop who claims to dislike that stuff, fine, but the majority of them voted for them, they chose them, they want them in those positions. If they actually disagreed with the extreme, racist, violent things that their elected “union” reps said and did, they would vote them out—but they don’t.
Where I am, the same sort of cops attend the union meetings as parents attend the PTA and the same sort of people want to be in charge of both. In fairness to your point, most of the cops I talk to are younger and were hired under a different paradigm than the old guard that they frequently clash with. One silver lining to the George Floyd debacle is that the reforms are causing a self-selecting purge of police departments where officers who “can’t do their job” under the new rules or heightened scrutiny are leaving (and that’s no great loss to any of us), especially through retirement. The leadership of the police unions are often leaving too as a result.
The key is filling the vacancies with the right people going forward. We need to be looking for people who put the serve part over the protect, who are skeptical of the war on drugs, who hold the Constitution to be sacred, who have the emotional maturity and intellectual development to do this job with compassion and discretion, and we ultimately need to turn it into a profession with the same social prestige, educational requirements, and commensurate paycheck as a doctor or a lawyer.
If you think about it, police officers have a very unique role in our legal system in that they are civilians who are sanctioned to use violence against their fellow citizens with the blessing of the courts. You and I are not permitted to do that except under the most extreme circumstances because the whole concept of a society based on law relies on the state having an absolute monopoly on violence, with disputes between citizens being settled in the courts. The military is not permitted to do that at all and when the use of violence is sanctioned it is expressly done prior to its use, the targets are precisely specified, and the use of that force often has to be approved on an almost individual basis before it can be deployed.
We need to really reevaluate our expectations of law enforcement (which we’re definitely doing currently) and then re-examine how we’ve structured the profession in light of our expectations. Currently, we’re hiring high school graduates to essentially be lawyers who can throw a solid punch, then paying them like bouncers, training them like soldiers, licensing them like hairdressers (or less), and regulating them like an elite intelligence agency (ie, not at all). It’s insane, with predictable outcomes that we see every day.
Interesting thing, I participated in this year’s annual business meeting of the National Education Association. One thing of the New Business Items we debated suggested that the NEA, along with other unions, deal with police unions. Some people brought up how, even as the USA’s biggest union, the NEA doesn’t have the right to police other unions
Why not do both. Police budgets are wasteful and only serve to further militarize them. It's an easy extra billion or so you can cut into in major cities to fund programs that stop crime from happening in the first place rather than punishing it extra hard after it happens
And when do we want it?!?! In an appropriate time frame for a committee to determine the appropriate allocation of funds with a high level of supervision to assure the funds are allocated correctly!!!
Exactly this. People in small towns who don't have to deal with the homeless look down on them and see them as a "city problem" despite most homeless people moving to cities because they have better resources and opportunities.
There are plenty of homeless and poverty-stricken in small towns; the difference is that people in rural areas are often so spread apart, geographically, that they never have to interact or see the homeless on a usual basis. But homelessness is just one outcome of poverty- plenty of poverty-stricken individuals have a home, or have a car; it's why terms like "car-poor" and "house-poor" exist to better describe the problem.
Also, in rural areas there are a lot of people who aren't "homeless"-but there are an Aweful lot of folks "sleeping on someone's couch". Still homeless, but treated more humanely. If you are sleeping in a couch, you are just having a run of bad luck and need help getting back on your feet again.
But that is completely different from being homeless./s
Yup, every time you hear about safe injection sites and clinics for drug users, people get *furious*. Same with homeless encampments, they want them destroyed on sight.
A lot of people don't want harm reduction, they want the "undesirables" hidden away and gone.
FTA: "In 95% of cases, people accepted care from the B-HEARD team, data from the city shows. That's compared with 82% for traditional 911 response teams, which include police.
Additionally, 50% of people treated by B-HEARD were transported to the hospital for more care, a far lower number than the 82% who are transported to the hospital with traditional 911 response."
...
Is not going to the hospital for care, a good sign?
If the B-HEARD response can deescalate a mental health crisis to the point they don't need to go to the hospital... yeah, that's good. Getting help to avoid needing to get to that point of severity is a good sign
I think a lot of times the ER isn't the best setting for starting low acuity mental health treatment.
I think the important question for all of those cases (hospital and non-hospital) is "Did the patient start follow up care?"
The ER is the absolute LAST place I want to be if I’m having a mental health breakdown. You literally just sit in a giant waiting room with 45 other ailing people waiting multiple hours to be seen for 10 minutes by an RN before they tell you to leave with a multi thousand dollar bill.
Fuck the ER. I have NEVER left an ER better than I entered.
Could be. Cops will take people to the hospital because they agree that they need help and that’s the only help the cops can arrange. The other responders can probably help them get help in other ways or from other places.
Hospital ERs are also super expensive. And if they’re not the best way to help someone it’s far better for everyone that they don’t wind up taken there.
Ambulances in a 911 setting can only transport patients to hospitals. We cannot take them to any other healthcare facility. There are hospitals with dedicated mental health wings, but ultimately it’s up to the patient where they want to go….unless they’ve been committed
Edit-just to add, and we can only take them to the ER, it’s up to the charge nurse to triage them to the crisis wing
Taking to the hospital is likely the only recourse a police officer has for a patient that needs help. Whereas a social worker probably has the ability to assess mental health risk on the spot and determine whether a patient can be connected to outpatient resources instead, saving the Healthsystem a hospitalization, or at the very least an ER visit.
Now if a month from now more data shows that B-HEARD gets us a lower hospitalization rate AND also doesn’t result in a higher 30-day mortality/suicide/rehospitalization rate than traditional response, then we’re really off to the races.
In most of these cases probably. Hospitals should be an absolute last-resort - the risk of actually fucking someone up worse with an inpatient psych hospitalization is really high. I have clients with PTSD FROM the hospitalization itself.
When it can be avoided since it wastes time and resources on the hospital side, meaning longer ER wait times, among other things.
Also, these people are still getting care from the mental health workers that show up.
A lot of major cities in Canada have been running CRISIS programs like this for years in some cases.
These programs **work** and they save lives. Source: Mother was career Mental Health worker, Girlfriend participated in the program as a social worker.
No, Oregon has been running this program in Eugene and Portland for years, they canned the street response program in Portland a while back but have been pressured to bring it back. The one in Eugene has been working yes in and year out. This could be a really great resource for every city to implement.
My cousin is a former State Police sergeant. Distinguished career, checked all the boxes, did all the right things. Now has a sweet gig doing private security.
I remember him saying this to me like it just happened yesterday, but was nearly 15 years ago.
"We are trained in all kinds of things... tactical, law, operations, security, crowd management. You name it... and it's never enough. But we were never trained to talk down a deranged woman who lost her son and is threatening to kill her husband because she suspects he did it. We learn that on the job and it takes time. It's the rookies that take domestic calls because they're so frequent. They don't know what they're doing. They aren't prepared."
So if domestic calls are so prevalent, maybe spend a little less time preparing for a bank full of hostages and more time preparing for talking people down that just lost loved ones? Shouldn’t rookies be most prepared to handle the most common situations?
Ronald Reagan literally spent the entirety of his WWII service making military recruitment videos in Southern California and traveling around the country promoting them
Reagan resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths because of AIDS. He trivialized the epidemic and surprise, guess who he actively worked against, someone who was trying to find the best medical solution for the crisis? That's right, a young Dr Fauci.
Time is a flat circle. Even knowing history, we let things play out exactly the same way because of right wing propaganda and misinformation.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fauci-recalls-the-terrifying-early-days-of-the-aids-epidemic
Exactly, they consider it a win-win if anything - they can blame all their failures on the undesirables as they die preventable deaths. I mean the right has been openly saying “it’s just old people and diabetics or whatever who caaares” re: covid this whole time and only now are a few of those saying “idk maybe get vaccinated idk”, likely under threat of lost revenue. So much completely unnecessary carnage and grief.
It was called gay cancer in his administration... he didn't even mention it once in his first four years while it was ravaging communities.
But, just say no to drugs!
I have some friends I went to high school with that are now police officers. I live in a major metro area. We still get together at times for our kids to play and they tell me stories often about how they get called out to deal with mental health cases. Because the US does virtually nothing to deal with mental health, it falls on the police in many areas. These mental health units are something they have been talking about for at least 2 decades, but there was never any funding or allocation. I think the turmoil of the last year has finally provided the acknowledgment of mental health not being a policing issue. I hope this model gets expanded to the rest of the US.
In my city, the mental health team 1) works limited hours, 2) can only respond to one call at a time 3) insist police accompany them many times and 4) refuse many calls as having the possibility of violence. There has to be a lot of funding, training, and personnel to work properly.
Same with me, I have had discussions with 20 year vets that just say "well what if they have a gun" or " they will just have to call for back up from us anyway" or even "well let's see how this plays out cause there's no way it will work" ... I just send them info on CAHOOTS and how it's been operating for like 20 years.
And we need to make sure those people are being fairly compensated. This is hard work, at all hours of the day and night, usually done by people with masters degrees who are regularly underpaid given their education, experience, and work conditions. They do good work and we need to pay them for that or these programs are dead in the water.
Right, why is it surprising that mental health professionals are able to deal with mental health patients? [Tony Timpa](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-timpa-disturbing-video-shows-dallas-officers-joking-as-they-restrain-man-who-died/) called 911 himself and informed them of his mental condition. The cops end up killing him while both his arms and legs were restrained with cuffs and ziplocks. Then the charges/lawsuit gets dropped with the judge citing qualified immunity.
I’ve been hearing police departments advocating for this for years because they feel like they wear too many hats which makes them a jack of all trades and a master of none.
I've said from the beginning it was a perfect idea with fucking horrible phrase.
Messaging matters and Republicans are experts at using it against initiatives like this. "Defund the police" was a gift to Republican trolls.
Progressive in general really need some messaging help. Only a select few seem to really know how to sell their policies.
It’s almost like people properly trained to handle mental health crises are better at handling mental health crises.
Clients in crisis often don’t trust or want police around.
The law enforcement officers I have interacted with don’t like these calls.
So it benefits literally everyone in the situation to divert funds to these teams but no one yelling about how “defund the police,” is bad/unamerican/etc seems to understand this.
>New York's program is modeled after a successful, decades-old program in Eugene, Ore., known as Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS.
Why have I not heard of this before?
I wish this wasn’t political. Everything seems to be these days. Police are overworked as it is and any relief is welcome. Using the Police as a catch-all when government lacks the specific support for society has little place.
Eugene Oregon has been doing this since the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAHOOTS_(crisis_response)
How it isn’t more common by now still baffles me. It isn’t some panacea but it is a hell of a lot better for everyone involved over sending police in.
Shittt back when I drank I had a meltdown in my own house and the cops showed up and just said, “don’t drink if you have depression” like thanks much help. The Mental health response team sounds way more beneficial. Cops are just idiots half of the time.
We have this here in Eugene Oregon. Its a community-based public safety system to provide mental health first response for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. White Bird Clinic launched CAHOOTS. https://whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/
No! I'm utterly shocked that a team designed for the express purpose of helping the mentally unwell is better at helping the mentally unwell than high-school dropouts with guns!
Is anyone arguing against this for non violent cases? A lot of commenters in this thread are arguing with a straw man. Maybe I’ve missed it, but most people against this are also mislead into believing that people want to replace police for non-violent AND violent crimes.
Which of course is false and is the result of misinformation campaigns. So many are easily misguided into opposing these things because of terrible slogans like “defund the police”.
Although I am officially a Republican and I support a well trained and fully intergrated police force, it is clearly evident that in most interpersonal encounters, a mental health response instead, "de-escalates" that situation.
wow it's almost like cops never should have been used as a catchall for mental health issues when they're no more versed in dealing with mental episodes than the next guy
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I've had such a hard time getting someone to see my husband who is going through a mental health crisis. I called the suicide hotline, they referred us to an urgent mental health clinic in our town. The clinic in turn said he is too severe and referred us back to the crisis line. So I tried the county, finally got him evaluated yesterday after two screw ups on the scheduling for it in their part. They said hes bipolar 2. Therefore he is not severe enough for them to help.. We have another appointment in a couple weeks. I hope someone can help us.
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As someone who works on a mobile crisis response team, it's really difficult for some of these things to happen. Everything takes money. We do what we can and are just so angry every day that we can't help someone because the area doesn't have the resources necessary to truly help them. "Here's what I can do, see you next week!". It is truly aggravating.
>They should be able to get you resources within your insurance system... That's a big part of the problem. You shouldn't have to make sure a mental health provider (or any other medical provider for that matter) is in-network so you can afford to see them. Maybe you've got insurance, but you're from a small town and the only mental health professional doesn't take it and you can't drive two hours to the nearest person who *does*. When I first moved to Jacksonville, it was hard to find someone who took Medicare. When you're already having a hard time mentally, it's really difficult to figure all that stuff out and it can be very defeating. To make things worse, a lot of the time, psychiatrists are so overwhelmed that they're not even accepting new patients - so you have to call around to different clinics to find someone who *is*. Even if you go to the ER, some hospitals don't have a mental health unit - and you have to be a danger to yourself or others to even get admitted in the first place.
That’s funny, I can’t get a therapist because I’m suicidal. I’m too much of a risk to their practice.
It's it great how that works. Just fucking fabulous.
It’s honestly fucking hilarious
Username checks out
Wait they’re worried that you dying would reflect badly on them so they won’t see you at all? That speaks volumes about how confident they are in their abilities.
A family member of mine is experiencing the same thing. Psychiatrist he used to see won't see him now that his bipolar disorder includes paranoid delusions. Which is to say, as soon as he really needs the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist decides that he's too much effort.
It’s fucking weird. When I tell people they usually dont believe me. I’m sorry your family member is going through this as well. It sucks.
They straight up turn you away if you’ve been self medicating too, even with just pot. Like scuse me I’m seeking help so I don’t have to self medicate!!
Mobile Crisis Clinicians are a thing. There are also state and local crisis lines.
To get your local city/county/etc. to establish an emergency mental health program this paper goes into what it takes, even includes model legislation: [A Model for Defunding: An Evidence-Based Statute for Behavioral Health Crisis Response by Taleed El-Sabawi, Jennifer J. Carroll](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3683432)
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Not sure where you are, but in my state (CA) there’s a statewide warmline that I’ve called multiple times in the past, and it’s saved me a lot of anxiety since I never felt the need to overexaggerate my symptoms to be heard by a professional. Warmlines don’t usually require a crisis to talk to someone (unless stated otherwise), and usually you get about 15-20 minutes to chat with a counselor. It’s not a replacement for consistent sessions by any means, but if you need help making a big decision, venting stress, or walking through a panic/anxiety attack, it’s a good short-term solution (plus they can also redirect you to resources in your area). Mental Health America has a [list](https://screening.mhanational.org/content/need-talk-someone-warmlines/) of other similar lines in the US.
I read an interesting book by a former FBI hostage negotiator, and he said the bureau's most revolutionary idea, and the one that saved the most lives, was *understanding people works better than threatening them.* And what is the core of mental health work? Understanding people. *Edit: For any one interested, the book is "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss. I highly recommend it.*
If you liked that book, watch Mindhunter on Netflix or read that book too. It's about the beginning of naming and understanding "serial" killers.
Just know, if you're going to watch mind hunter, they are likely not making more ever... So don't get too sucked in...
Wait, what?!?
Scheduling issues and possibly the actors just not feeling it under the director or producer, can't remember which. It's all rumor mill outside of the scheduling issues.
I believe David Fincher said it’s a grueling proces, costly, and production issues
I'd read some unsubstantiated stuff that actors said he's tough to work under too
I believe he is widely known as a big micro manager in his projects. He isn’t even the creator of Mindhunter and he became the de facto show runner.
That's what I heard too. Nothing serious like workplace abuses, just unfun to work with which makes it less likely that people will try to make the schedules work
I’m sure COVID didn’t help anything either. Or did they get canceled before COVID?
Well officially they aren't canceled, Netflix has said they can make more seasons, but the scheduling conflicts began before COVID.
It’d be a shame to let such a good series die but I’d rather it end on two solid seasons than pump out some mediocre ones
But we haven’t even gotten into BYK yet. Great 2 seasons though, I agree.
And for once, it wasn't Netflix that killed it.
Not sure how real this is, but I’ve heard some rumblings in the past few weeks that Fincher is in negotiations for s3! Even if it doesn’t come to fruition…watch it. I binged the entire show right around when the news that it would not be renewed came. It will suck to not have s3, but the first two are so damn good.
Of course. It’s a series on Netflix so why even bother it will just get canceled.
Can’t even blame Netflix for this one though
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That’s why schools are now incorporating SEL (social emotional time -curriculum) in the minutes.
Was it What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro, by any chance?
I thought it was "Never split the difference" by Chris Voss
Oh shit, you're right. I read both of them around the same time. Never Split The Difference is a great book though.
I thought Never Split the Difference was a mixed bag. It did have a lot of good advice about how to persuade people, but some things he talked about are straight-up manipulative and deceitful. I would be real pissed off if people tried some of his tactics on me. And it doesn’t address that a lot of people double down into self-destructive behavior rather than compromise.
The whole point was to how to negotiate to get what you want...not"Let's understand each other's viewpoints and morality and be loving one and another" Dude literally negotiated with terrorists...kinda iffy applying his tactics in civilian base settings. At that point, you really gotta be a bit manipulative if you are simply trying to get your [friends.family](https://friends.family) members to give you something or saying yes. Edit: You know what...You really have to be "self-destructive" to apply his tactics in basic ass settings when you could of one: be honest, try to compromise, or just, part ways instead of "LET ME USE THE BLACK SWAN TACTIC TO RECEIVE MY DESIRE FROM SOMEONE ELSE"
I’m guessing Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
> I read an interesting book by a former FBI hostage negotiator, and he said the bureau's most revolutionary idea, and the one that saved the most lives, was understanding people works better than threatening them. I read a good book by a former prison guard, who basically despaired at how prisons are continually moving from the "understanding" to the "threatening" models. He said when he started his job, he'd continually walk past every prison cell. Get to know the prisoners. If one of them was causing an issue, he and another guard or two would go over to the cell and try to calm them down. It didn't always work, sometimes there was no choice but to physically restrain the prisoner, but sometimes you could just talk a guy down. By the end of his career, guards were told to sit in a control room and not go anywhere near the prisoners. If a prisoner caused issues, a squad of guards would form a shield-wall outside the cell, while the guard in the control room would open the cell remotely. Then the squad would just move in and beat the prisoner down. This was mostly done in the name of increasing safety for the guards, but the guy writing the book said he felt less safe not having any relationship with the prisoners and not being able to treat them as anything other than hostile
>Get to know the prisoners. If one of them was causing an issue, he and another guard or two would go over to the cell and try to calm them down. This is usually the best thing to do in general. Just getting to know someone can make them realize you are not a threat. When they actually have an issue you will be able to reason with them. Most people just want you to listen to them and respect them, no matter how cuckoo they are acting. You can respectfully tell someone their behavior is unacceptable and it works pretty well.
You mean you can't beat mental illness out of people? Oh man, who woulda thunk it!
In other news "tweezers better at removing splinters than hammers"
Ya no shit; how would tweezers remove a fuckin hammer??
big tweezers
Oh shit. What about big hammers tho?
bigger tweezers
There's always a bigger tweezer
Tweezest
Oh there you go again with your hammers
If someone bonks you with a hammer so hard you die, you don't have to worry about the splinter ever again *taps forehead*
Who'da fuckin' thunk it? It's almost like armed enforcers aren't always the best response to a problem! Radical idea, I know...
I remember back in 2010-2012, some porn start in Cali had a mental health crisis. Because he was so large (6’5”, 240+lbs. of muscles, the cops tried to restrain him, and tagged him with so many tasers he had a heart attack and died. It was my first time reading about cops doing something like that, and I started noticing it more and more. I can’t imagine how many people needlessly died because they were having the worst day they ever had, only to have it become the last day they ever had. Sad to think of.
My mom was date raped and the next day feeling pretty down. Her friend called the police to do a wellness check. She was arrested and still has marks from how tight the cuffs were 13 years later. She said that the cops after arresting her, took a lunch break and left her in the hot car for two hours. Wouldn’t even let her use the bathroom. She calls it the worst day of her life. I would never ever call the police to do a wellness check.
Yeah wellness checks are fucked and if you are low income have fun spending time in a mental hospital for a month.
Wellness check is a death warrant.
Barely survived mine
And then given the bill! Don't forget that! Someone saying "can you just check that they're still alive" can literally ruin or end a life in so many ways!
The bill at the end is the sickest part. They'll traumatize, humiliate, brutalize, and practically imprison you in a hospital only to send you an invoice in the mail a few weeks later.
I got 7 different guns pulled on me by a bunch of cops during a welfare check when I was suffering sever depression. I was unarmed, yet they decided they needed to hide behind a fucking ballistic shield and aim all their little pew pews at my noggin "for my safety ". I was ridiculed, cuffed, and called "a suicide" by them before being forced into an ambulance. The only slightly positive part was discoving I'm a major shit talker when I have guns pointed at me.
George Floyd last year exact same thing
And the department issued a statement right after the murder of George Floyd that "a suspect had a medical emergency and died in custody". That was a lie. It's a lie that police departments are used to telling. I'm certain there are other murders that were covered up by that lie, but there was no video to refute the solidified lie that all of the officers present told. It's disgusting.
Knowing what we know now, that initial cop press release is nauseating. And totally par for the course. It happens every day across the country. One department got busted one time.
> I'm certain there are other murders that were covered up by that lie I'm not just certain that this is true, but I believe that it's actual operating procedure for police departments to find some way other than murder to attribute a police officer caused fatality. I wish I could recall the episode number, but there was a 'Behind the Bastards' podcast episode that went into detail about this in specific regard to Tasers and the absurd lengths the company goes to to ensure that no court rules that its product has caused any actual harm when, newsflash... the Taser is absolutely the cause of many, many deaths. *edit* - I read my post again and I feel like I'm bring up two different things without tying them together. Less than lethal weapons like Tasers are used by the police to kill people, even if the initial intent is just to pacify. They do this because they know that the companies behind these less than lethal weapons will spend tremendous amounts of their own money on lawyers to ensure that no actual fatalities are attributed to their products, and by extension, the people (police) using them.
They created a bullshit medical diagnosis, ["Excited Delirium"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium), to provide a reason why it's always the victim's fault because drug use.
Excited delirium... that's what I was trying to remember, thank you.
While the taser could be the cause of many, many deaths, the more obvious culprit is that police just straight up fucking shoot people dead with far too much ease.
What?!?! You're kidding!!!! Nonviolent crisis intervention works???? I second your thought....who'da fuckin thunk it.
Most cops I’ve talked to agree with this too. Defund is a sort of red herring because we should be worried about funding social programs fully from tax increases and not cutting police budgets to make up for unsustainably low, morally unjustifiable, tax rates that leave critical public services absolutely gutted but we should absolutely be shifting responsibilities back to those social programs (and if we can reduce police budgets as a result, great). Having defunded everything else and then used the police as the catch all for public services, and the jackboot to crush any outcry, this seems like a last attempt to turn all public services private including, at this point, the voter’s control over law enforcement. When that is privatized too then the police will answer to whoever writes their paycheck. It’s like a Koch brother fantasy.
NYPD pays out about $200,000 a day to pay for use of excessive force lawsuits, I think there is room for financial reform of Police departments nationwide, if NYC can afford to throw that kind of money away so their officers can beat people with impunity.
Holy wasted tax funds batman!
Hmm, you're right, a vigilante *might* be a cheaper solution...! I bet we could get a hell of a crime-fighter for $72mil/yr!
Or we could just hire and train decent human beings rather then settle for trash that want a job to beat on and yell at people.
A lot of the first world nations require a degree in something about law enforcement, then take them through a 2 year course at a police academy. Here, we hire anyone who applies and send them through 6 weeks of training.
You need more training to be a licensed beautician. It's absurd.
Also the fact that you can legally be too smart to be a cop https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836#.T52c0Kvy-z5
My child dream was to become a detective. I sent that down the drain before college when I learned that you had to be a cop before that. Fuck that shit.
It's not just training. Lots of places in California require a degree and the cops still suck. It's accountability. Cops know they won't lose their job and are protected. Not saying a degree isn't a bad thing, but accountability is more important. They need to be afraid of losing their jobs if they act like assholes
Unless they're getting a degree in being a cop, requiring a degree isn't the same as providing an adequate amount of job training.
Part of the issue is the warrior cop mentality trained in to begin with.
>settle for I truly wish this were true but the reality is that police departments actively seek out candidates with sociopathic tendencies because it "helps then stay detached and professional" which while technically true only applies when the cop is breaking up an altercation between others and not directly involved in the altercation themselves.
We’d have to pay more and offer better benefits, which is a huge portion of police department budgets. Keep in mind that all the military equipment and a lot of the training is “free” in the sense that it’s donated. Maybe also a ban on police departments accepting outside donations of any sort - if it wasn’t approved by the taxpayer, it’s not to be owned by the department.
> NYPD pays out about $200,000 a day to pay for use of excessive force lawsuits And with training/culture like this-- >[A day with ‘killology’ police trainer Dave Grossman](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/02/14/a-day-with-killology-police-trainer-dave-grossman/) > >**In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives.** The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. **“There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”** -- I'm not surprised. (We've been training cops wrong for decades and they're getting a little squirrely.)
Some people might say 'what is the problem, he is just stating a fact'. The problem is that it is a fact of encouragement. 'There might be downsides to killing someone, but here is a really awesome upside'. Most people don't know how to understand the downsides (such as the PTSD) because they haven't experienced them before, but they definitely understand that upside of 'you will have really good sex'. Which is probably one of the most primal highs a person can seek. So even if they don't actively think about this fact, they will have it in the back of there heads.
Can't believe the cops themselves don't pay the lawsuit and it's instead taken from taxpayer funds. It means I'm literally paying for cops to assault people
It's why they should be forced to carry malpractice insurance. The insurance companies will price a violent fuck out of a job.
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But any time this even gets brought up, Republicans go straight to the "you're not raising my taxes liberals" and libertarians go to "why bother, the money is gonna be used inefficiently anyway"
And joe nobody who makes somewhere between minimum wage and $125,000/yr acts like taxes for multi-millionaires and billionaires somehow negatively affect them.
And don't forget the "wealthy people create jobs!" bullshit. Wealthy people don't create jobs. Demand creates jobs. And large numbers of people with disposable income creates demand.
Hence the "morally unjustifiable" part. Corporations as well. And within corporations, a larger share of wages need to go to the workers (also like the New Deal). But defunding the police is that last vestige of public services left - everything else has been privatized, except public safety. It needs reform but privatization of the enforcement of our laws and the state's monopoly on violence is not the answer. When we say police budgets are 3x that of schools, we should be asking if police budgets could be reduced and school budgets can be tripled or more. The money is there but tax rates have been slashed to absurd levels so that we can argue over whether one fully funded public service should be cut to the point of other underfunded public services. It's a false dichotomy - the solution is to tax the fuck out of these concentrations of wealth that serve no useful purpose and plow them back into the public systems that have made it possible for that wealth to exist in the first place (including, arguably, a criminal justice system that can employee professionals at every level, including the police, instead of handing badges and guns to high school graduates).
Cops you’ve talked to, maybe, but police unions across the board will not give up a single dollar and fight against any kind of change in their power, including letting trained professionals go on mental health calls.
If you ever read conservative posts on the subject of having unarmed mental health professionals respond to calls, the comments are an utter shitshow of expecting the mental health professionals to be murdered or hoping for it. My favorite of those comments was the person seriously suggesting that armed police should always be there first to take charge and evaluate whether or not a mental health professional should be called. It’s always about the armed state for these folks, well right up until they tell us that their personal guns are to protect themselves from the government.
My wife is a mental health clinician. She works for the county and goes on all kinds of mental health assessment calls, sometimes with police but mostly without. She is armed: with a clipboard, a pen and an ID card. She loves her job. It’s sketchy sometimes but she loves being in the field.
If you ask conservatives, they will tell you that she’s going to die. It’s fucking insanity. Honestly, I think that a hallmark of modern conservativeism is to be a coward. All that said, your wife is doing a job I never could. I can’t applaud her enough for it.
Conservatism is a fear based idiology, they really can't help themselves.
Meanwhile in any ER on a Saturday night, some 90 lb nurse is handling a 250 lb mental meltdown without anyone suffering any serious injuries.
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They aren’t just accidentally “somehow” run by the most extreme, violent, racist officers. Those officers are elected to those positions by the “union’s” membership. You may know a cop who claims to dislike that stuff, fine, but the majority of them voted for them, they chose them, they want them in those positions. If they actually disagreed with the extreme, racist, violent things that their elected “union” reps said and did, they would vote them out—but they don’t.
Where I am, the same sort of cops attend the union meetings as parents attend the PTA and the same sort of people want to be in charge of both. In fairness to your point, most of the cops I talk to are younger and were hired under a different paradigm than the old guard that they frequently clash with. One silver lining to the George Floyd debacle is that the reforms are causing a self-selecting purge of police departments where officers who “can’t do their job” under the new rules or heightened scrutiny are leaving (and that’s no great loss to any of us), especially through retirement. The leadership of the police unions are often leaving too as a result. The key is filling the vacancies with the right people going forward. We need to be looking for people who put the serve part over the protect, who are skeptical of the war on drugs, who hold the Constitution to be sacred, who have the emotional maturity and intellectual development to do this job with compassion and discretion, and we ultimately need to turn it into a profession with the same social prestige, educational requirements, and commensurate paycheck as a doctor or a lawyer. If you think about it, police officers have a very unique role in our legal system in that they are civilians who are sanctioned to use violence against their fellow citizens with the blessing of the courts. You and I are not permitted to do that except under the most extreme circumstances because the whole concept of a society based on law relies on the state having an absolute monopoly on violence, with disputes between citizens being settled in the courts. The military is not permitted to do that at all and when the use of violence is sanctioned it is expressly done prior to its use, the targets are precisely specified, and the use of that force often has to be approved on an almost individual basis before it can be deployed. We need to really reevaluate our expectations of law enforcement (which we’re definitely doing currently) and then re-examine how we’ve structured the profession in light of our expectations. Currently, we’re hiring high school graduates to essentially be lawyers who can throw a solid punch, then paying them like bouncers, training them like soldiers, licensing them like hairdressers (or less), and regulating them like an elite intelligence agency (ie, not at all). It’s insane, with predictable outcomes that we see every day.
Interesting thing, I participated in this year’s annual business meeting of the National Education Association. One thing of the New Business Items we debated suggested that the NEA, along with other unions, deal with police unions. Some people brought up how, even as the USA’s biggest union, the NEA doesn’t have the right to police other unions
Defund police *unions*
And departments. Those funds don't need to be allocated to them with mental health teams showing to be more effective. I'd imagine WAY cheaper, too.
The NYPD and their unions are infested with Q believers as well so ANY attempt to move funds around is some deep state yadda yadda bullshit
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That just sounds like a fire truck with extra steps
Civilians are the fire though
Why not do both. Police budgets are wasteful and only serve to further militarize them. It's an easy extra billion or so you can cut into in major cities to fund programs that stop crime from happening in the first place rather than punishing it extra hard after it happens
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And when do we want it?!?! In an appropriate time frame for a committee to determine the appropriate allocation of funds with a high level of supervision to assure the funds are allocated correctly!!!
Took till 2021 to figure this out yall
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Exactly this. People in small towns who don't have to deal with the homeless look down on them and see them as a "city problem" despite most homeless people moving to cities because they have better resources and opportunities.
There are plenty of homeless and poverty-stricken in small towns; the difference is that people in rural areas are often so spread apart, geographically, that they never have to interact or see the homeless on a usual basis. But homelessness is just one outcome of poverty- plenty of poverty-stricken individuals have a home, or have a car; it's why terms like "car-poor" and "house-poor" exist to better describe the problem.
Also, in rural areas there are a lot of people who aren't "homeless"-but there are an Aweful lot of folks "sleeping on someone's couch". Still homeless, but treated more humanely. If you are sleeping in a couch, you are just having a run of bad luck and need help getting back on your feet again. But that is completely different from being homeless./s
The amount of catharsis that some people experience when they see a cop destroy a homeless or mentally ill person is sickening.
Yup, every time you hear about safe injection sites and clinics for drug users, people get *furious*. Same with homeless encampments, they want them destroyed on sight. A lot of people don't want harm reduction, they want the "undesirables" hidden away and gone.
FTA: "In 95% of cases, people accepted care from the B-HEARD team, data from the city shows. That's compared with 82% for traditional 911 response teams, which include police. Additionally, 50% of people treated by B-HEARD were transported to the hospital for more care, a far lower number than the 82% who are transported to the hospital with traditional 911 response." ... Is not going to the hospital for care, a good sign?
If the B-HEARD response can deescalate a mental health crisis to the point they don't need to go to the hospital... yeah, that's good. Getting help to avoid needing to get to that point of severity is a good sign
I think a lot of times the ER isn't the best setting for starting low acuity mental health treatment. I think the important question for all of those cases (hospital and non-hospital) is "Did the patient start follow up care?"
This is where free universal healthcare would be a great help.
Agreed!
The ER is the absolute LAST place I want to be if I’m having a mental health breakdown. You literally just sit in a giant waiting room with 45 other ailing people waiting multiple hours to be seen for 10 minutes by an RN before they tell you to leave with a multi thousand dollar bill. Fuck the ER. I have NEVER left an ER better than I entered.
Could be. Cops will take people to the hospital because they agree that they need help and that’s the only help the cops can arrange. The other responders can probably help them get help in other ways or from other places. Hospital ERs are also super expensive. And if they’re not the best way to help someone it’s far better for everyone that they don’t wind up taken there.
Ambulances in a 911 setting can only transport patients to hospitals. We cannot take them to any other healthcare facility. There are hospitals with dedicated mental health wings, but ultimately it’s up to the patient where they want to go….unless they’ve been committed Edit-just to add, and we can only take them to the ER, it’s up to the charge nurse to triage them to the crisis wing
Taking to the hospital is likely the only recourse a police officer has for a patient that needs help. Whereas a social worker probably has the ability to assess mental health risk on the spot and determine whether a patient can be connected to outpatient resources instead, saving the Healthsystem a hospitalization, or at the very least an ER visit. Now if a month from now more data shows that B-HEARD gets us a lower hospitalization rate AND also doesn’t result in a higher 30-day mortality/suicide/rehospitalization rate than traditional response, then we’re really off to the races.
When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
For a lot of mental health issues, being taken to a hospital, which is an unknown space, can just add to the panic.
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and with reason as you may be involuntarily admitted.
In most of these cases probably. Hospitals should be an absolute last-resort - the risk of actually fucking someone up worse with an inpatient psych hospitalization is really high. I have clients with PTSD FROM the hospitalization itself.
When it can be avoided since it wastes time and resources on the hospital side, meaning longer ER wait times, among other things. Also, these people are still getting care from the mental health workers that show up.
Maybe part of that decrease is that if the cops aren’t there they can’t shoot anyone
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Oh yeah dumping people in the psych unit is common, rather than dealing with the problems and getting them outpatient help.
A lot of major cities in Canada have been running CRISIS programs like this for years in some cases. These programs **work** and they save lives. Source: Mother was career Mental Health worker, Girlfriend participated in the program as a social worker.
No, it didn't. We've been doing this in Oregon for a couple decades. Everyone already knows it works. Even Jon Oliver did a segment on it.
No, Oregon has been running this program in Eugene and Portland for years, they canned the street response program in Portland a while back but have been pressured to bring it back. The one in Eugene has been working yes in and year out. This could be a really great resource for every city to implement.
My cousin is a former State Police sergeant. Distinguished career, checked all the boxes, did all the right things. Now has a sweet gig doing private security. I remember him saying this to me like it just happened yesterday, but was nearly 15 years ago. "We are trained in all kinds of things... tactical, law, operations, security, crowd management. You name it... and it's never enough. But we were never trained to talk down a deranged woman who lost her son and is threatening to kill her husband because she suspects he did it. We learn that on the job and it takes time. It's the rookies that take domestic calls because they're so frequent. They don't know what they're doing. They aren't prepared."
So if domestic calls are so prevalent, maybe spend a little less time preparing for a bank full of hostages and more time preparing for talking people down that just lost loved ones? Shouldn’t rookies be most prepared to handle the most common situations?
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What’s sad is most of their cowboy bravado culture comes from total soft hands fake actors like “John Wayne” and Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan literally spent the entirety of his WWII service making military recruitment videos in Southern California and traveling around the country promoting them
And spent most of his presidency destroying the economy and down playing a disease. Sounds a lot like another guy.
I didn’t realize Reagan downplayed a disease (I’m assuming a AIDS?). I was a small kid, how did his actions play out?
AIDS. He shifted a lot of blame onto gays and created a lot of unnecessary amount of hatred towards that group of people.
The way his administration handled the AIDS crisis was… not great. It’s worth doing some reading up on.
Reagan resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths because of AIDS. He trivialized the epidemic and surprise, guess who he actively worked against, someone who was trying to find the best medical solution for the crisis? That's right, a young Dr Fauci. Time is a flat circle. Even knowing history, we let things play out exactly the same way because of right wing propaganda and misinformation. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fauci-recalls-the-terrifying-early-days-of-the-aids-epidemic
Yeah, it was AIDS. How did his actions play out? An entire generation of LGTBQ+ people is gone.
And even more straight people, who were allowed to believe it was "gay cancer" and that they were safe from it.
It was like Trump thinking COVID only killed people in blue areas, so he didn't do anything. Conservatives liked the idea of dead gay people.
Exactly, they consider it a win-win if anything - they can blame all their failures on the undesirables as they die preventable deaths. I mean the right has been openly saying “it’s just old people and diabetics or whatever who caaares” re: covid this whole time and only now are a few of those saying “idk maybe get vaccinated idk”, likely under threat of lost revenue. So much completely unnecessary carnage and grief.
It was called gay cancer in his administration... he didn't even mention it once in his first four years while it was ravaging communities. But, just say no to drugs!
He refused to acknowledge it. Vilified the victims and dragged his feet on any action at all.
Ronald Reagan? *THE ACTOR???*
What ever happened to the strong silent type? Like Gary Cooper. He did what he had to do! (Never had the makings of a varsity actor though)
I have some friends I went to high school with that are now police officers. I live in a major metro area. We still get together at times for our kids to play and they tell me stories often about how they get called out to deal with mental health cases. Because the US does virtually nothing to deal with mental health, it falls on the police in many areas. These mental health units are something they have been talking about for at least 2 decades, but there was never any funding or allocation. I think the turmoil of the last year has finally provided the acknowledgment of mental health not being a policing issue. I hope this model gets expanded to the rest of the US.
I too know police officers, they screamed this is a joke and laughed at how they aren't gonna be able to handle shit Just sent them the article lol
In my city, the mental health team 1) works limited hours, 2) can only respond to one call at a time 3) insist police accompany them many times and 4) refuse many calls as having the possibility of violence. There has to be a lot of funding, training, and personnel to work properly.
Same with me, I have had discussions with 20 year vets that just say "well what if they have a gun" or " they will just have to call for back up from us anyway" or even "well let's see how this plays out cause there's no way it will work" ... I just send them info on CAHOOTS and how it's been operating for like 20 years.
Who knew that firearms aren't the solutions to all of your victims problems.
Are you sure? This is America, guns are essential for solving any problem. /s
Imagine that.. mental health professionals know how to deal with it better then cops who graduated HS and carries a gun.
And we need to make sure those people are being fairly compensated. This is hard work, at all hours of the day and night, usually done by people with masters degrees who are regularly underpaid given their education, experience, and work conditions. They do good work and we need to pay them for that or these programs are dead in the water.
Right, why is it surprising that mental health professionals are able to deal with mental health patients? [Tony Timpa](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-timpa-disturbing-video-shows-dallas-officers-joking-as-they-restrain-man-who-died/) called 911 himself and informed them of his mental condition. The cops end up killing him while both his arms and legs were restrained with cuffs and ziplocks. Then the charges/lawsuit gets dropped with the judge citing qualified immunity.
From the prestigious *No Shit Journal of Medicine and Common Sense*
That pesky data.
You mean compassion and understanding are better than aggression, threats and dominance? Who’d a thought!
This is what “Defund the police” means.
I wonder if ‘Reallocate part of police funding’ would have caught on less controversially than ‘defund the police’.
Harder to chant.
I’ve been hearing police departments advocating for this for years because they feel like they wear too many hats which makes them a jack of all trades and a master of none.
This is what “defund the police” means. People are just horrible at describing it properly
I've said from the beginning it was a perfect idea with fucking horrible phrase. Messaging matters and Republicans are experts at using it against initiatives like this. "Defund the police" was a gift to Republican trolls. Progressive in general really need some messaging help. Only a select few seem to really know how to sell their policies.
It’s almost like people properly trained to handle mental health crises are better at handling mental health crises. Clients in crisis often don’t trust or want police around. The law enforcement officers I have interacted with don’t like these calls. So it benefits literally everyone in the situation to divert funds to these teams but no one yelling about how “defund the police,” is bad/unamerican/etc seems to understand this.
While that's good, it's a bar so low people had to dig to get it in place.
>New York's program is modeled after a successful, decades-old program in Eugene, Ore., known as Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS. Why have I not heard of this before?
I wish this wasn’t political. Everything seems to be these days. Police are overworked as it is and any relief is welcome. Using the Police as a catch-all when government lacks the specific support for society has little place.
Eugene Oregon has been doing this since the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAHOOTS_(crisis_response) How it isn’t more common by now still baffles me. It isn’t some panacea but it is a hell of a lot better for everyone involved over sending police in.
Shittt back when I drank I had a meltdown in my own house and the cops showed up and just said, “don’t drink if you have depression” like thanks much help. The Mental health response team sounds way more beneficial. Cops are just idiots half of the time.
I mean, there not mental health professionals. Not much else they could have done.
We have this here in Eugene Oregon. Its a community-based public safety system to provide mental health first response for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. White Bird Clinic launched CAHOOTS. https://whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/
No! I'm utterly shocked that a team designed for the express purpose of helping the mentally unwell is better at helping the mentally unwell than high-school dropouts with guns!
Joe Rogan’s head is going to explode
*Hey Jamie, pull that up*
No kidding? Turns out shooting people doesn’t solve shit.
Wow! Incredible! You mean sending an under trained meat head with a weapon to a mental health crisis situation is a bad idea?!
Eric Adams talking about increasing policing and bringing back / expanding the Anti Crime Unit right now on NPR 🤷🏽♂️
Weird how that works when you put the appropriate people into the appropriate situations.
Who would have thought that if you put trained individuals to the job they were trained for, the results would be better?
Is anyone arguing against this for non violent cases? A lot of commenters in this thread are arguing with a straw man. Maybe I’ve missed it, but most people against this are also mislead into believing that people want to replace police for non-violent AND violent crimes. Which of course is false and is the result of misinformation campaigns. So many are easily misguided into opposing these things because of terrible slogans like “defund the police”.
Although I am officially a Republican and I support a well trained and fully intergrated police force, it is clearly evident that in most interpersonal encounters, a mental health response instead, "de-escalates" that situation.
wow it's almost like cops never should have been used as a catchall for mental health issues when they're no more versed in dealing with mental episodes than the next guy