School of , Liberty University
Title: Serious Mental Illness
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The abstract
This essay will be talking about journal article review about serious mental illness offenders in correction. It will also talk about the premise of the journal article with its supports. It will talk about various areas which have been highly affected by the SMI hand the challenges which are being faced towards offering effective treatment to the people with SMI. And finally it will talk about proposed alternatives of dealing with the individuals with SMI according to the journal article.
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Serious Mental Illness
Different articles are used to deliver different information to the targeted audience. Some are written to challenge the wrong things which are happening in society while others are written to solve various challenges the society many be facing. The current world is facing different types of illnesses. Various types of illnesses require different forms of treatment and care. The treatment and the process of taking care of some people with a certain illness are more expensive than others. That depends on the requirements of the ill-treatment and also the level of the illness in a person. According to the managing the seriously mentally ill in corrections article, serious mental illness is addressed in different dimensions. Serious mental illness is said to be a behavioral, mental, or emotional form of the disorder that led to effective functional impairment which may cause greater limits in one’s life activities. This is said to be one of the worse types of illness because it affects the individual mind. That is because the mind of a person is said to be the center of every function one can do. That kind of illness has been associated with various crimes. Due to that every suspect who does who is involved in a serious crime should undergo a mental illness test to determine if he or she did it intentionally or as a result of serious mental illness. According to the article, the United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis. The majority of adults living with that kind of illness are said to lack the necessary treatment. Even according to the bible, in both old and new testament mental illness has been spoken about in different ways. Like in the Old Testament in the book of Jeremiah 51:7 were it says that the Babylon was a gold cup in the hand of the Lord but she made the entire world drunk via wine and through that, they have done mad. Then the madness which is being talked about is due to mental illness caused my use of wine. But also according to the article, not every serious crime is due to serious mental illness (Bota, Fraser & Groysman, 2017).
The article has explained different various areas in which the illness has affected and how the treatment has is hard to deliver in those areas. It has also talked about the needs which are required in those areas to deliver the required form of treatment. The article has talked about various issues and problems related to each area’s treatment services and its needs. The major areas which the article has talked about are community-based treatment, policing and public safety, institutional programming, data accountability, and overarching needs, and finally reentry coordination and relapse prevention. The first one is the community-based treatment. According to the article, the majority of the people with SMI do not get enough care and treatment within the community due to various reasons. Some of the reasons are, some individuals are usually not interested in engaging in treatment, others do not even recognize when they have the illness. According to the article, there are various challenges and opportunities which are related to community-based treatment services. And every challenge or opportunity includes a certain need that is associated with it. The first problem is that there are inadequate mental health services such as beds that are supposed to serve the affected individuals by the SMI. The need which is associated with that challenge according to the article is research to be conducted to determine the number of beds that are needed. But according to the article, it is difficult to quantify that kind of need. The next problem is that the existing mental health services within the community are not fully funded as required. Due to that they should be fully resourced and made suitable to be effective in terms of performance and accountability. The next challenge is how people with SMI can be treated before getting involved in criminal justice. That can help the community to lowercases of crimes and also avoid inconvenienced in a court of law. The need which is associated with that kind of problem is to assess the effect of inadequate community resources for the people with SMI within the correction system and then researching to assess the impact of the inadequate resource. There is also the problem of various individuals with SMI have been struggling with different issues that are not directly related to their illness. According to the article, that challenge is associated with the need for assessment of the benefits of the intensive case management program which are used to address the person apart from the illness he or she is undergoing. There is also the problem of stigmatization towards individuals with mental illness. Due to that, research is needed to grasp the origin of stigmatization within the community. Then a creative strategy is to be used to lower the level of stigmatization such as mobilizing and educating people about the illness and the negative effect of the stigmatization towards anyone in the community. There is also a lack of motivation towards the treatment of the illness in the community. That needs an assessment of both the cost and benefits of the FAD training of mental health. Then a suitable mechanism is to be provided to mandate care for the SMI individual who is at high risk. The article also talks about various barriers to the treatment of serious mental illness. According to the article, research should be conducted to identify every possible barrio. Then a creative solution is to be brought up by the professionals to deal with the challenge completely. Some of the barrios need the government to solve such as funding, while others require expertise such as assessment of the level of illness and effective treatment and finally, other barrios can be solved via social education to the community such as stigmatization, awareness, and going for a test for the serious mental illness. Then after such barrios have been combated with, there is the improvement of the care. The individual with SMI usually require special care from the health practitioners and also the community around them. That is because with improved care many of the can easily recover and go back to their normal lives unlike with a poor care majority may become worse and cause various crimes as well as damages. Just like in the bible ,the community should love each other and take care of the mental illness people. That is because the bible says in the book of 1st John 4:8, that whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. So the people with serious mental illness should be shown love and taken care of effectively (Mizock & Russinova, 2016).
The next area is the policing and public safety. According to the article, around ten percent of the people with SMI are usually involved in all calls for police service. And they have the high possibility of being arrested compared to the other normal people. But most crimes are due to minor offenses and not necessarily related directly to the mental illness. The article also talks about specialized training are the needs of the workshop participants. It argues that since the police are the common department which is usually involved in a different crisis, they should be offered special training for them to be able to deal with the SMI individual. They should also be collaborating and coordinating with the mental health providers like the crisis intervention team. There are also various challenges and needs which are related to policing and public safety. One of the greatest challenges is that majority of law enforcement officers have inadequate comprehensive training towards serious mental illness. Then the need which is associated with it is an assessment of the benefits and the cost of conducting CIT training to the law enforcement officers. Then conducting serious training to the officers because most of the time members of the public tend to call the police officers at first as they look for assistance. The next problem is that majority of the law enforcement agencies lack the necessary resources or professionals who can help them to assess the requirement and the benefits of CIT training. The need which is associated with it according to the article is to establish the department in a manner that can conduct a self-assessment without depending on outside resources for the assessment. That is because of an internal assessment with being able to save both time and money as well as maintain their secret as a law enforcement department. Then the article also argues about an alternative to jail for individuals with SMI. That is because according to the majority of the crimes in which individuals associated with SMI can always lead them to jail. But according to the expertise, the jail is not the best place for them. Due to that various alternatives such as hospitals, crisis restoration centers are said to be the best to keep individuals with SMI and they have been involved in various crimes. That is because in such alternative centers they can be taken care of in an effective manner unlike in jail. Just like the bible say in the book of Mathew 4:24, that news went out all over the Syria and various people with different forms of sickness such as ,severe pain, paralyzed demon possessed which lead to mental illness were healed. That shows that with alternative strategy apart from taking them to jail ,such people can be taken care of treated and come back to normal (Volpp, & Runnels, 2017).
The next one is the specialty courts and jails. According to the article, individuals with SMI and have to get involved in any crime should be taken to special courts and jails and not general courts and jails like the normal people. That should be done to avoid more crimes and also advance the care among them. One of the problems which are faced in that area is the lack of broadly utilization and capacity to meet the demand. That needs an assessment of the amount of the resources required to enable the mental health courts to function effectively. According to the article, all the other areas depend mostly on community-based services, specialty, and jail, and finally policing and public safety. But due to the ideology of specialty and jails, the bible also supports it because the reason behind the specialty and jail is to help those with mental illness and give them their rights. As the bible says in Philippians 1:6, that we should be confident in every good thing we do because whoever began the good work in us will carry it on up to its completion until the day of Jesus Christ, thus showing use if we start helping such people we should do it until we succeed (Lepore, 2015).
References
Bota, P. G., Fraser, S., & Groysman, R. (2017). Beyond schizophrenia: Living and working with a serious mental illness. Mental Illness, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/mi.2017.6782
Lepore, M. (2015). undefined. European Psychiatry, 30, 1429. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0924-9338(15)31104-4
Mizock, L., & Russinova, Z. (2016). The history of the treatment of mental illness. Acceptance of Mental Illness, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780190204273.003.0001
Montgomery, A. E., Metraux, S., & Culhane, D. (2013). undefined. Social Issues and Policy Review, 7(1), 58-82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-2409.2012.01043.x
Volpp, S. Y., & Runnels, P. (2017). undefined. Oxford Medicine Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190610999.003.0013
