Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Frontline healthcare providers and first responders have had enough of mental health care policy rooted in ideology and utopian visions instead of the practical realities of the nature of Serious Mental Illnesses (SMI). The current system of a severe shortage of mental health beds and strict criteria for administering mental health treatment in contravention of illness-induced treatment refusals has caused the real-world preventable tragedies of mass shootings, incarceration, homelessness, victimization, and death of people suffering from untreated SMI. Innovative programs and long-established protocols have been profiled by the media and examined by scholars. Momentum is brewing. Across the country, creative minds are crafting thoughtful solutions to the human suffering produced by untreated SMI. Our current failed national mental health system that prevents lifesaving interventions by honoring a patient’s anosognosia, a symptom of SMI that causes lack of insight, is no treatment system at all. The utopian vision of deinstitutionalization was a societal copout that resulted in trans-institutionalization of our most vulnerable citizens from substandard state psychiatric hospitals to truly traumatizing and dangerous homelessness and prisons or death. This article reviews proposed solutions that bring hope to those suffering from mental illness.

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