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Indybay Feature

Homeless and Mentally Ill = Criminal?

by ch@nce (streetsheet [at] sf-homeless-coalition.org)
At 2pm on December 12, the Coalition on Homelessness will be holding an action at Civic Center Plaza protesting the criminalization of mental illness in San Francisco.
Homeless and Mentally Ill = Criminal?

Picture yourself poor or homeless and in need of mental health treatment, which most researchers agree about one-third of all homeless people need. You go to a health clinic or emergency room to get help and are told "Sorry, we can’t help you," or, if you’re lucky, you’re offered an appointment scheduled two months into an uncertain future.

If you were living on the sidewalk, and were depressed, suicidal, or hallucinating, wouldn’t you still know you needed help?

How would you feel if you couldn’t get any help?

Now just imagine after you’ve been denied the help that you’ve voluntarily sought, you are arrested because of your behavior. What if the police took you to a hospital where you were strapped down –- wrists, ankles and head -- to a table, and injected with dangerous drugs? Or imagine that you were arrested, and after you were booked, the sheriff’s deputies put you in a "safety cell"-- stripped you naked, and humiliated you with 24-hour scrutiny.

As awful as these all-too-common dramas are for homeless people with mental illnesses, the dramatic can turn tragic in a heartbeat. What if the police felt threatened by your actions and used deadly force against you?

You would gasp your life out on cold pavement knowing all of this happened because you couldn’t get the treatment you sought.

The stigmatization and criminalization of mental illness endangers many lives every year. How many more deaths can we tolerate? The Coalition on Homelessness tried to address this problem by advocating funding for police crisis intervention training—training to instruct officers on how to humanely and non-violently treat people with mental illnesses—yet the police department has yet to implement this training and its procedures.

We demand that the police fully implement these procedures so that the lives of mentally ill people are not put in danger by the poor training of so-called peace officers.

We demand that the civil and human rights of homeless people be protected.

We oppose involuntary outpatient treatment and commitment.

We require that voluntary consumer-directed mental health treatment be made available on demand. People know what they need, but this only matters if their voices are heard.

Voluntary mental health treatment on demand will save the city money. It is far cheaper to treat someone in a clinic, rather than with the expensive emergency psychiatric services required when someone is neglected until they’re in crisis.

At 2pm on December 12, the Coalition on Homelessness will be holding an action at Civic Center Plaza protesting the criminalization of mental illness in San Francisco. Nearly 50,000 Californians with untreated mental illnesses are homeless. The City and County of San Francisco must take notice of our demands in the name of humane treatment of persons who are mentally ill, homeless, or both.

We seek community participation in this action and support for these demands. We aim to get the attention of city agencies that can do something to end this needless suffering and risk. We need to convince the Mayor and the Department of Public Health that so long as these issues remain, so will we. There are so many homeless and poor people in this city that are in need of these services, yet there aren’t enough to go around.

In such a wealthy city in a time of economic growth, this is unconscionable and utterly unacceptable. We must all be outraged at the lack of caring exhibited by this failure. We must be willing to support the most fragile members of our community by making available the voluntary treatment that they so desperately need.
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