Enhancing Police Response to Persons in Mental Health Crisis

The public and its institutions continue to demand that law enforcement intervene with persons considered mentally ill by the mental health profession. The laws enacted have proven to be temporary solutions, unable to address the deeper philosophic and political controversies within the mental health profession regarding the reality of mental illness, its diagnosis, or its treatment. This book is written to address these issues, and law enforcement officers need a sense of appropriateness when assessing the behavior of someone deemed to be in mental health crisis. This sense of appropriateness needs to be grounded in a philosophical outlook that not only makes sense, but fits today’s pluralistic outlook on life and the nation’s historical premise of the preciousness of civil liberty. Part I discusses the clinical issues, what it means to be mentally ill, the legal definition of mental illness, signs, causes, medications, examples of mental illness, crisis intervention, suicide intervention, and special needs of special populations. Part II explores mental health from a nonclinical perspective and includes the definition of mental disorder in the DSM-IV, “fasting” for mental illness, the ethics of commitment, involuntary commitment, the ethical dilemmas posed by mental health codes, and the principles of self-realization psychology. Part III examines the national experience in legal terms which includes a checklist of states in relation to nonpeace officer detention, definitions of mental illness in the United States, and an index of states provisions for emergency detention. This book is an excellent resource for the training of police as mental health deputy specialists.