The Texas Church Gunman, Devin Kelley is an example on why mental health should be taken into a serious matter. Kelley was a former military man that had a court-martial for assaulting his wife and fracturing his baby stepson’s skull November 2012, in the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. This caused his wife to divorce him, imprisonment for a year, and the bad conduct discharge got him reduced to rank E-1. He was also suffering from mental illness and got placed in the Peak Behavioral Health Services while he was still doing time for the assault charge. Nevertheless, Kelley escaped on June 2012 and got detained by the El Paso Police, they reported he was at a bus station trying to flee away. However, the people who filed a missing person
Justice can be achieved through various processes and principles if applied correctly, similarly justice can also be denied through these same processes and principles. This is exemplified through the Andrew Mallard case (M v The Queen 2005 HCA 68), and the missing persons case of Kieffen Raggett (2007) which shows how the incorrect application of processes like police investigations and coronial inquests can lead to justice being denied. Furthermore, legal principles such as; the rights of the accused and victims, are instrumental in achieving justice as shown through the application of these principles within these cases. These processes and principles can fail due to prejudged conclusions, police corruption, human error and cultural barriers
Another case is that of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson whose death was initially ruled the result of accidental suffocation. A second autopsy produced a different conclusion, but when the second autopsy was performed, his body had been stuffed with newspaper, and his organs were missing ("Organ Trafficking, Melanin Theory & the Fountain of Youth -," n.d.). The brain, heart, lungs and liver were missing. He also discovered Johnson's death was due to blunt force trauma to the right side of his neck (Archer,
In the book Crazy in America by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, she illustrated examples of what people with mental illness endure every day in their encounters with the criminal justice system. Shayne Eggen, Peter Nadir, Alan Houseman and Joseph Maldonado are amongst those thousands or more people who are view as suspected when in reality they are psychotic who should be receiving medical assistance instead, of been thrown into prison. Their stories also show how our society has failed to provide some of its most vulnerable citizens and has allowed them to be treated as a criminals. All of these people shared a common similarity which is their experience they went through due to their illness.
Mental healthcare has a long and murky past in the United States. In the early 1900s, patients could live in institutions for many years. The treatments and conditions were, at times, inhumane. Legislation in the 1980s and 1990s created programs to protect this vulnerable population from abuse and discrimination. In the last 20 years, mental health advocacy groups and legislators have made gains in bringing attention to the disparity between physical and mental health programs. However, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses continues to be less than optimal. Mental health disparities continue to exist in all areas of the world.
Mental disorder. These are two words that people in the society fear and turn a blind eye upon. In fact, society most of the time tends to ignore mental illness rather than try to understand it. This is exactly how society treated Aaron Alexis and his mental illness. Aaron Alexis was a 34-year-old government contractor and a former Navy reservist (Fox). He is known as the gunman who went on a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16, 2013, leaving 12 men dead (Fox). Investigators later found that Alexis had psychological issues that he tried seeking help for before his outbreak. (Fox) The author of the article “An Avoidable Tragedy: Aaron Alexis and Mental Illness”, Andrew Solomon, explains some issues that could have led to the prevention of Alexis’s outbreak.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in 17 Americans suffer from a serious mental illness. That is roughly one person in an average high school classroom. These mentally ill people live a different life, and in some situations, they cannot fully comprehend what is happening around them. These people need a little more time and patience than the average person would need in any given situation. Because of this, they need to be handled differently by police officers when they come into contract. This is not happening and it is causing chaos. In “Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects,” an article featured in The New York Times on April 1, 2014, writers Fernanda Santos and Erica Goode bring attention to the treatment of mentally ill suspects when being confronted by police officers. The article starts with the emotional story of James Boyd to capture the audience’s attention and to create distaste for the police, which is reinforced throughout the article. The authors then go on to have various professionals testify that in recent years the number of incidents between mentally ill people and police officers has risen dramatically. Santos and Goode describe the process of many police departments and compare them with Albuquerque’s, showing that their procedures when handling mentally ill suspects either is not used or there are no guidelines to follow. This article portrays the ignorance some people have when handling situations with mentally ill people and how that affects the lives of the mentally ill and could potentially affect the reader’s own life. Structural, material, and characterological coherence are evident in the article to effectively shed light on how police officers need to revise...
The type of crimes that these offenders commit can either be minor or violent crimes. It has been an issue on how people think that having a mental illness leads to violent crimes, when in reality not all of them commit violent crimes. An example of an offender committing these type of crimes would be Johnnie Baxstrom. Johnnie Baxstrom was a mentally ill offender who had committed numerous crimes throughout his life like drinking and property offenses. It wasn’t until October 21, 1958 where he committed a violent act by attacking and stabbing a police officer with a knife. In essence, according to studies people with severe psychological illnesses are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than the general
Weber, Paul. “Fort Hood Gunman Sought Mental Health Treatment.” The Associated Press News Service [Texas] 3 Apr. 2014: n. pag. NewsBank Special Reports. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.
... the chemicals in their brain are being manipulated from the illness. Since the chemicals in their brain are being constantly manipulated, they are never in their right mind. People who are not mentally stable are unable to make the correct decisions because of the chemical imbalance in their brain; this is why guns need to stay out of the hands of the mentally ill. The government needs to take the initiative and put into law that when a person is trying to acquire a gun, the applicant needs to go through a criminal background check and a medical background check as well. People with mental illnesses should not have possession of guns because there is an increased risk of violence, people with mental illnesses are not mentally stable, and the United States Government does not do the correct screening and background checks that are needed in order to own a gun.
Lamb, H. R. (2004). Mentally ill persons in the criminal justice system: Some perspectives. Psychiatric Quarterly, 108-126.
What can help situations with mental health? Some cities have mental health crisis teams within law enforcement and trained to deal with people struggling with symptoms like paranoia, breaks with reality, and the mentally
Critical to understanding the extent of the problem is a clear definition of mentally ill, “a person suffering from mental illness and, owing to that illness, there are reasonable grounds for believing that care, treatment or control of the person is necessary for the person’s own protection from serious harm, or for the protection of others from serious harm” [Mental Health Act 2007 (NSW)]. Noting that the statute specifies the ‘control’ of this group which adds to the notion that people with mental health problems are inherently more dangerous members of our society. Furthermore mental health problems within the prison system (inmate population) are estimated to be three to four times higher than in the general Australian popula...
States obtain many services that fall under mental health care, and that treat the mentally ill population. These range from acute and long-term hospital treatment, to supportive housing. Other effective services utilized include crisis intervention teams, case management, Assertive Community Treatment programs, clinic services, and access to psychiatric medications (Honberg at al. 6). These services support the growing population of people living in the...
Dave Armstrong is about to graduate from Harvard Business School and is facing three career options. The decision problem that Armstrong should be considering is not which of these three jobs should he take, but rather what job will satiate his career goals. By asking this, Armstrong can gain a complete perspective of his options instead of being confined to three career options that may not be in his best interests. His objectives are not clearly outlined in the case; however, we can infer from the manner in which he is describing the jobs that he would like to have ownership in a company, enjoys thrilling non-office jobs, and wants to grow his network. Also, he has to take into consideration his wife’s objectives for him of having a job
...hear about mash gunmen having shown signs of mental disorders and instead of helping them we send them to jails where they are treated as monsters. We choose not to help before things happen but we also seem to not care about a person when they done something without full control of their senses.We have put a negative connotation on mental disorders, which people have no control over, and made it unsafe for a person to seek help before something extreme happens.