Mental Health Courts

�I cannot imagine a more dangerous branch than an unrestrained judiciary full of amateur psychiatrists poised to �do good� rather than to apply the law,� said Judge Morris B. Hoffman of the District Court, Denver, Colorado.

�Mental health courts� are facilities esta lished to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than punishing individuals or allowing them to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from �mental illness.�

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 justice system � those clients who were the most criminally active were receiving the most expensive set of services.�

Wolff states 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 opportunity 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 help. 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. Only an independent and critical assessment of psychiatric programs such as the Community Mental Health plan will uncover their actual costs to governments and communities, in dollars and in social blight.

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