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LOST JUSTICE
Mental Health Courts
Mental health courts are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors
or non-violent felonies. Rather than allowing the guilty parties to take responsibility
for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric t reatment center on the
premise that they suffer from �mental illness� which will respond positively
to antipsychotic drugs. It is another form of coercive �community mental health
treatment.�
Nancy Wolff, Ph.D., director of the Center for Mental Health Services and Criminal
Justice Research, reports, �� there is no evidence to show that mental illness
per se is the principal or proximate cause of offending behavior. � Although
believing in treatment as a protective shield is appealing � most clients who
were actively involved in assertive community � treatment programs continued
to have frequent contacts with the criminal jus tice system � those clients
who were the most criminally active were receiving the most expensive set of
services.�
Wolff says further: �This type of special status for offenders who have mental
illness holds the illness responsible for the behavior, not the individual,
and, as such, opens the opportuni ty for individuals to use illness to excuse
behavior.�
In a review of 20 mental health courts, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health
Law found that these courts �may function as a coercive agent�in many ways similar
to the controversial intervention, outpatient commitment�compelling an individual
to participate in treatment under threat of court sanctions. However, the services
available to the individual may be only those offered by a system that has already
failed to he lp. Too many public mental health systems offer little more than
medication.�
In summary, there are clear indicators that governments� endorsement of mental
health courts and �community policing� (as it is referred to in some European
countries) will see more patients forced into a life of mentally and physically
dangerous drug consumption and dependence, with no hope of a cure.
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