Who Will Help People with Mental Illness?

Published in

Homeland Security

3 min readFeb 7, 2016

Patrick Hensley

Every day people suffering from mental illness wander our streets with no one and no where to turn to for help. They sleep on buses, trains, inside doorways, and other places most of us aren’t even aware of. They beg for food and money outside of restaurants and businesses. They have no access to the comforts we take for granted, such as bathrooms and a place to keep their belongings safe. These behaviors most often lead to a phone call to the police for help who don’t have the training or time to deal with the challenges of mental illness.

Police officers will tell you — dealing with criminals? Enthusiastically yes! Assisting victims? That’s why we’re here. Interviewing witnesses? Of course. Despite what the media tells you, the police are not trained to effectively help those suffering from mental illness. The limited training they do receive (40 hours of Crisis Intervention Training) only teaches them to recognize mental illness and strategies to help them at that moment of crisis. That limited training is a far cry from the training mental health professionals receive and those suffering deserve.

The options available to the police are very limited, and many times they are forced to commit people suffering from mental illness to the hospital on a non-voluntary basis. This course of action usually results in a few hours at the hospital, maybe some medication, and then again being released to wander the streets with nowhere to go and facing the same unresolved issues. The only options available to the police are even less helpful to include either moving them along (no help) or taking them to jail (really no help).

The police are not prepared to care for people with mental illness. They have neither the training nor the time to provide the services this increasing population needs. Depending on which report you read anywhere between 25–50% of police shootings involve a person suffering from a form of mental illness. This has to end. It’s time we recognize the gap between what the police can offer and what people suffering from mental illness need and dedicate the necessary resources to get them the long-term care they deserve.

Patrick has been a police officer for 21 years and currently occupies a command position with a mid-sized police department in the Bay Area. He is also a graduate student attending the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Homeland XYZ was developed in collaboration with members of his cohort to introduce a writing platform for students to publish and for crowd-sourcing answers to difficult Homeland Security questions.

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Who Will Help People with Mental Illness?

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