Effective Period: Mental Health Treatment In Correctional Facilities: Position Statement

Placing prisoners with mental health conditions in institutions, especially correctional facilities, imposes special obligations on society.

These services are basic human rights of each prisoner with a mental illness or an addictive disorder.

Jails, prisons and similar correctional facilities have a duty to provide medical services, including mental health services, and to provide protection from harm. Correctional facilities must exercise special vigilance in dealing with any prisoner with a mental illness or addictive disorder as his or her ability to assert these human rights might be impaired. Usually, additionally, the nationmust acknowledge and address the forces that contribute to the disproportionately high involvement of persons from ethnic and racial minority communities in the criminal justice system. Let me tell you something. Most practitioners and their clients, however, do not have the time nor inclination to evaluate every and each health Web site they come across against dozens of criteria.

American Medical Association, for example, has published an article describing a laundry list of dozens of guidelines for helping to determine quality online health information.

Most professional guidelines focus on common areas.

There been an abundance of articles published about how to recognize sites that have high chances to contain reliable, quality information. MHA and its affiliates should work to inform members of law enforcement and correctional groups, judges and attorneys, mental health professionals and advocates, prisoners and their families, the community and the media about the excessive number of persons with mental illnesses and addictive disorders in prisons and jails and the inherent difficulties involved in providing decent and humane care to such persons in these settings and must develop and advocate for effective strategies addressing these problems. Are created, since the advent of the Web in the early 1990s.

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court decided Brown Plata, and ordering California to release since the medical services including mental health care that the State provided did not reach the minimum amount of care required under the Eighth Amendment.

The Court highlighted in its opinion that prisoners in California with serious mental illness did not receive minimal, adequate care. Whenever standing in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic, because of a shortage of treatment beds, suicidal inmates can be held for prolonged periods in telephone booth sized cages without toilets A psychiatric expert reported observing an inmate who had been held in this cage for nearly 24 hours. Ok, and now one of the most important parts. Whenever replacing the state mental hospitals with a great deal more drastic curtailment of personal liberty and preclusion of community integration and communitybased treatment, mHA is both concerned by and opposed to the increasing use of criminal sanctions and incarceration.

In the past decade, America is locking up increasing numbers of individuals with mental health conditions.

Prisoners with mental health conditions are especially vulnerable to the difficult and sometimes deplorable conditions that prevail in jails, prisons, and identical correctional facilities.

It can both increase vulnerability and exacerbate mental illnesses. Overcrowding often contributes to inadequacy of mental health services and to ineffective classification and separation of prisoner classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1a9YcujWo8

Do you know an answer to a following question. How do you recommend ‘high quality’ Web sites in mental health when there’re so many to choose from? That said, this article will describe some common qualities to look for in a site and give you some common starting points to help you find reliable and updated mental health information and support groups online. Questions about the quality of information online are also a concern, especially to mental health practitioners.