Minority Mental Health and Murphy’s Law

Posted on July 18, 2015 in Advocacy Hospitals and Prisons Psych Wards

Just a note of peripheral interest here: This is National Minority Mental Health Month. (Does that mean white people here in California?) Seriously, access to mental health resources for minorities, particularly African Americans, is limited. Many end up getting their treatment in jails instead of hospitals and through private psychiatrists like white people do.

I have opposed a bill by Representative Tim Murphy because it starts us down the road to forced treatment, which eventually, I believe, will create privatized “public” mental hospitals. (Even F. Fuller Torrey opposes these, but I think he is dreaming when he calls for government run mental hospitals. The private prisons movement will not hesitate to seize the opportunity to grab this new sector of the incarceration system.) These, I think, will turn out to be another place to warehouse African Americans and other minorities while white people will be able to stay out thanks to their access to outpatient mental health care. Rest assured that privatized mental hospitals will keep patients on the sick rolls as long as they can, indefinitely if it is allowed.

African Americans and other unprivileged Americans deserve access to decent community health care centers, an idea which the likes of Torrey and his lap dog D.J. Jaffe have written off as a failure — even though these have never been properly funded since the 1963 Community Mental Health Services Act. Murphy’s Law does call for grants to start 10 pilot programs for community mental health, but there is no guarantee of follow-through after the period of experimentation is over. Murphy’s Law also puts the burden of care on overstressed families, meaning that those patients whose families don’t have the resources will continue to lack decent care. (Meaning African Americans versus European Americans.)

Any future mental health legislation needs to ensure that programs help everyone. Compelling states to fully fund community mental health clinics where the staff are not overburdened and patients can get the medication they need is essential. Then we can apply evidence-based practices.