Mental Health Case Study

Problem Statement:
In today 's society, the treatment and abuse of alcohol and other drugs is becoming a problem for the justice system of America as well as the local hospitals. With the shortage of beds at facilities designed to handle those in the middle of a mental health crisis, many of these patients end up going to a local emergency room (Papandrea, 2011). Highlighting this is an incident that could be found around the country in varying forms. Police from Burlington NC brought in a man who had been given an involuntary commitment order from a judge, to a local emergency room to await transfer to an appropriate facility. During his 30 hours in the ER he escaped, tied up police resources while they attempted to locate him and then proceeded to discharge a firearm into his head (Papandrea, 2011). In this one incident we can see how the local hospitals and law enforcement are having many of the resources they use everyday, focused on just one individual suffering from a mental illness.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that the cost to care for just inmates suffering from mental illness is approaching 9 billion dollars (Fields, 2103). This is in addition to

Certainly during the 1980’s when the government and specifically Ronald Reagan realigned government social spending, a dramatic shift in what resources were available to our population as what could be called a ‘social safety net’ were no longer accessible (Alford, 1988). This decade changed the focus of helping the poor and ill, to focusing on business and all the wants of making our economy larger, which certainly came at the expense of those who were mentally ill (Thomas, 1998). This shift in social policy was most certainly a catalyst to the direction we are headed to