Psych Relief Finally On Its Way for Vets

The NYTimes reported today that (finally!) regulations may be changing for veterans in need of psychiatric care. Thus far, soldiers and former soldiers have had to "prove" their need for such care through documentation of their experiences in combat, which is (needless to say) ridiculous and with a marked LACK of understanding about what exactly mental illness is. For the full article read here. One fascinating report indicates that as many as 20% of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from PTSD.

The problems surrounding soldiers and their psychological states are myriad. This article on what happens to soldiers gone AWOL, from TomDispatch a while back (now linked through Common Dreams), talks about the conditions under which AWOL soldiers are imprisoned. Military industrial complex and prison industrial complex collapse and become one. Almost poetic. Mostly just frustrating and upsetting. It makes me wonder if everyone doesn't see these connections, too, and why the masses aren't demanding CHANGE right now!!!!! Or if they are, how the dominant patriarchy manages to keep it stifled and hidden...I know that millions of Americans are affected by these situations far more than I am, in my little bubble of privilege... AH

In related news, all of the Hawaiian female inmates in a Kentucky prison are being removed from the Otter Creek Correctional Center after widespread documentation of serious sexual abuse. Kentucky is one of the only states in which sex between a prison guard and an inmate is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and at least five correctional officers (including one chaplain) has been proven, at this point, to have had sex with the women at Otter Creek. (For the full NYTimes article read here.)

Interestingly, the discourse in the NYTimes article and how officials are explaining this absurd abuse of power is how problematic private, for-profit prisons are and how they lack transparency... as if government run prisons are these oases of justice and rehabilitation. And while the article explains WHY Hawaiian women are in Kentucky prisons (lack of adequate funding and beds in HI, for example) they don't really even begin to talk about the tensions that can emerge and how the rape of Hawaiian imprisoned women fits into a history of violence and repression (sexual and otherwise) against indigenous women in the Americas. I guess that would be expecting too much from the NYTimes... but it's disturbing in the implication that your average privileged Times reader is not encouraged to examine this as anything more than a glitch in the system rather than an example of what the system requires.

(Note: While the article doesn't specify that the women are indigenous Hawaiians, I have to assume that some of the victims are, considering the disproportionate numbers of native Hawaiians who are locked up in the U.S. today.)

Why Our Criminal Justice System OBVIOUSLY Has Nothing to do with Justice

The irony and counter-intuitiveness of our prison industrial complex and criminal processing system is overwhelming now, more than ever. And now, more than ever, I am convinced that the only way we will ever escape the demons we are creating and learn to look each other in the eye and treat each other like HUMAN BEINGS is complete and total prison abolition. A new start, a new way of understanding ourselves, understanding the word 'community' and understanding how to love and respect one another.

Today, hundreds of California inmates rioted (for ELEVEN HOURS) in the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino. No one was killed but hundreds were wounded and those wounded were disproportionately Black and Latino. Guess what our government is gonna do? CHARGE THEM WITH ADDITIONAL CRIMES... lengthen their sentences. Yea, that makes sense... how??? Read the full NYTimes article here (Of course, it isn't easy getting out either with unemployment being what it is - the latest on unemployment from Racewire here.)

Another article that made me cry was about a sixteen-year-old mentally ill boy named Donald, who has been locked up for two years because of a breaking-and-entering charge despite his diagnosis of several serious mental health disorders. They put him in juvie because they thought he'd get the best treatment there, but have KEPT him there because of violence he has inflicted on himself, on animals, and his attempt to fight a guard. Can anyone not understand that these are clear indications that a violent padded cell is SO CLEARLY not working for this ill PERSON?!? Sorry for the caps but it is just so obvious... and frustrating. And disappointing. And typical. The NYTimes reports:

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

In California’s state system, one of the most violent and poorly managed juvenile systems in the country, according to federal investigators, three dozen youth offenders seriously injured themselves or attempted suicide in the last year — a sign, state juvenile justice experts say, of neglect and poor safety protocols.

In Ohio, where Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, approved a 34 percent reduction in community-based mental health services to reduce a budget deficit, Thomas J. Stickrath, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said continuing cuts would swell his youth offender population.

“I’m hearing from a lot of judges saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m sending so-and-so to you, but at least I know that he’ll get the treatment he can’t get in his community,’ ” Mr. Stickrath said.

But youths are often subjected to neglect and violence in juvenile prisons, and studies show that mental illnesses can become worse there.

This trap that we're put into - this epistemological resignation, leads us to think that more legislation and more criminalization are the only way. Racewire recently did a great writeup of how hate crime legislation does not effectively counter hate crimes at all and rather contributes to the expansion of the prison and police systems. We need something else. And we need it now.

Mistreating Our Soldiers/Vets

There has been increasing coverage of our collective failure to provide for soldier and veteran needs, physical and psychological. As Obama steps up the war in Afghanistan and begins one in Pakistan, it also appears to some (or at least this article in Commondreams) that he is adopting or continuing a colonialist strategy in Iraq. It baffles my mind that as our leaders repeatedly commit soldier-power to more and more troubled regions of the world that don't want us there, they don't think it necessary to also provide for the impact of those violent situations in any way. One major oversight is how soldiers and veterans are treated. How are we surprised about the atrocities at Bagram, at Abu-Ghraib, etc etc etc on and on and on (in all armies, everywhere!) when young, un- or under-trained and un- or under-equipped men and women are put in frightening situations where they are taught to dehumanize the enemy, shoot anything that moves, and they see their friends and comrades dying around them. It is so disgraceful and honestly, every time I read one of these articles I just want to cry.

Recently, there are reports of US soldiers being exposed to extremely dangerous chemicals (remember Erin Brokovich? Yep, that same thing) in Iraq and then being told that their health complaints are the normal reactions of their bodies to being in the deserts. The AP reported (in this article I found on Commondreams) on ill, dying, and dead soldiers that were protecting workers in one specific region of the desert:

The area, as it turned out, was contaminated with hexavalent chromium, a potent, sometimes deadly chemical linked to cancer and other devastating diseases. No one disputes that, but that's where the agreement ends. Among the issues now rippling from the courthouse to Capitol Hill are whether the chemical made people sick, when KBR knew it was there and how the company responded.

The case has raised broader questions about private contractors and health risks in war zones, says Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who plans hearings on the matter: "How should we treat exposure to potentially hazardous chemicals as a threat to our soldiers? How seriously should that threat be taken? What is the role of private contractors? What about the potential conflict between their profit motives and taking all steps necessary to protect our soldiers?"

Dozens of National Guard veterans have sued KBR and two subsidiaries, accusing them of minimizing and concealing the chemical's dangers, then downplaying nosebleeds and breathing problems as nothing more than sand allergies or a reaction to desert air.

The AP also reported yesterday that the violent actions of GIs when they get home is tied to experiences in combat. NO WAY.. really?? These young men and women are not getting the help they need, indeed they are sometimes discouraged from seeking psychological treatment, and then SHOCKER they can't readjust to society. WHY ARE WE SURPRISED? Why, the bigger question remains, are we not providing for them? How are these soldiers serving life sentences for committing murder upon their return, when the government goes unpunished?

The NYTimes published a really good piece a couple of weeks ago reporting on the shocking depth of these inadequacies. Worth reading.

Sorry for ranting. Peace.

Reversing Criminalization from the American Journal of Psychiatry

January 2009

"As of June 2007, there were at least 360,000 persons with major psychiatric disorders, and perhaps as many as half a million, in our jails and prisons. With such huge numbers, can we really say that deinstitutionalization has taken place? There numbers underscore a pressing need for reliable hard data about these severely mentally ill persons who have been criminalized. In an article in this issue, Baillargeon et al. provide valuable hard data. They found that inmates with major psychiatric disorders, and especially those with bipolar disorders, had a substantially increased risk of multiple incarceration. Clearly, this study tells us that criminalization is not being reversed... Incarceration poses a number of important problems and obstacles to treatment and rehabilitation. Even when quality psychiatric care is provided, the inmate/patient still has been doubly stigmatized - as both a mentally ill person and a criminal... The correctional facility's overriding need to maintain order and security; as well as its mandate to implement society's priorities of punishment and social control, greatly restricts the facility's ability to establish a therapeutic milieu and provide the necessary interventions for treating mental illness successfully...
"The community treatment of persons with severe mental illness who are or may become offenders has become an increasingly important and urgent issue. Diversion is of little value unless there are community treatment resources to which mentally ill offenders can be diverted. We need a vast expansion of modalities such as assertive community treatment - community-based, sometimes court-ordered, mobile mental health treatment teams that provide an array of treatment, rehabilitation, and housing services that are available 24 hours a day: intensive case management; the ready availability of psychiatric medicines; adequately and appropriately structured and supportive therapeutic housing arrangements; treatment of co-occurring disorders; vocational rehabilitation; and close working relationships between mental health and criminal justice professionals - to name but a few of these needed resources...
"It is essential to facilitate access to psychiatric hospital care for patients who need it. It is important to acknowledge that the community is not necessarily the most benign treatment setting for all mentally ill people at all times. Success in reducing criminalization in this population will require access to hospital care for those who need it, for as long as they need it.
"Currently, a large number of people with severe mental illness receive their acute psychiatric inpatient treatment in the criminal justice system rather than in the mental health system. Clearly, if there were not a shortage of acute inpatient beds in the mental health system, many acutely psychotic persons might not come first to the attention of law enforcement officers, or if they did, they could be transported to acute psychiatric facilities rather than arrested. In most cases, acute psychiatric inpatient treatment should be the responsibility of the mental health system. As Baillargeon et al. point out in their article, acute inpatient beds should be a high priority in community mental health, and lengths of stay should not be unreasonably short.
"Another important resource that can help preevent criminalization is assisted outpatient treatment. Assisted outpatient treatment is court-ordered civil committment that is initiated by the mental health system to ensure that persons with metnal illness and a history of hospitalizations and/or violence participate in services to the community; it is for those who are capable of living in the community with the help of family, frriends, and mental health professionals, but are resistant to psychiatric treatment, including medication. Without such treatment they may relapse and require hospitalization or be arrested, incarcerated, and criinalized. Such at-risk individuals are ordered to participate in outpatient psychiatric treatment with their progress closely monitored by the court..."