When I started 22 years ago we had a mental health hospital a half hour away and a complete mental health wing at the local hospital. Both are gone now. Nothing took their place.
When I started 22 years ago we had a mental health hospital a half hour away and a complete mental health wing at the local hospital. Both are gone now. Nothing took their place.
Formerly known as xpd54.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect the opinions or policies of my employer.
www.gunsnobbery.wordpress.com
Daily
Formerly known as xpd54.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect the opinions or policies of my employer.
www.gunsnobbery.wordpress.com
Yup. They were likely largely state subsidized, too. The public appetite for this sort of program is gone, for whatever reason. The problem has been largely made to "go away" ... from the public eye. Unless you're a first responder or work in healthcare or the legal system.
Not that they were good places, but you can thank geraldo rivera for a part of it. One word...Willowbrook.
edit: The willowbrook piece is worth rewatching.
Last edited by Nephrology; 10-19-2017 at 11:19 PM.
Rereading the thread has convinced me that having to deal with/interact with mentally ill persons on a daily basis is a burnout factor(one among many). Revolving doors where so many offenders and disturbed persons enter and leave jails and mental facilities certainly must make many l.e. guys think that they themselves are ineffective cogs in a f'ed up system. Of course, this conclusion drawn out of frustration is not valid. Yes, the system may be broke but the rest of the statement is not true.
God Bless you folks in LE and EMS. Thanks for your stories and perspectives.
I can't speak to LE, but one of the biggest burnout factors in medicine is Stupid Admin Bullshit, mostly in the form of excessive charting requirements for legal/billing purposes.
I think most people are good at accepting that life is imperfect than that some people will fall down over and over again, and that we will be there to pick them up each time. It is much harder to accept someone making this already deeply challenging task into an infuriatingly tedious and exhausting one.
Last edited by Nephrology; 10-21-2017 at 10:27 AM.
I agree with Nephrology's statement about stupid admin shit. We all have known supervisors who were petty and ocd driven, and once promoted, their brains had turned to mush. Lack of common sense with these folks has been my biggest complaint in school and government work. I'm convinced that much chickenshit behavior can be traced back to personality disorders mentioned in mental illness literature. So when you said that your supervisor was crazy, you may have been right.
If I only count dispatched calls, I may not encounter mentally ill folks for several shifts in a row, and then encounter several in one night. Random.
If I self-initiate encounters with suspiciously-behaving folks, well, the mental illness factor goes way up; they are everywhere. If we had better staffing, enabling me to concentrate on the mentally ill, I could stay busy, making a career out of it.
We have a Mental Health Division, so I could, when an opening is available, transfer, and actually make a living at it, being a 66M unit, city-wide, normally accompanied by a civilian clinician. (Crisis Intervention Response Team, Houston PD.)
Last edited by Rex G; 10-22-2017 at 07:31 AM.