A clip from this story on jails and mental health reads: Last year, a man sentenced for stealing a rifle stayed in that cell 129 days. He was waiting for a spot to open at Montana’s only state-run psychiatric hospital after a mental health evaluator deemed he needed care, according to court records. A man in the next cell around the same time was on the same waitlist roughly five months. He faced near-daily stints in the jail’s emergency restraint chair — a steel contraption wrapped in foam with straps for his shoulders, arms, and legs. He regularly saw the jail’s mental health doctor. Still, Joel Shearer, a Lake County detention commander, said the man routinely experienced psychotic episodes and asked to be locked in the chair when he felt one coming on and stayed there until his screams subsided. “Somebody who’s having a mental health crisis — they don’t belong here,” Lapotka said. “We don’t have anywhere else.”
Jails have become de facto psychiatric hospitals, and they are very much not equipped for it.
Important & chilling story by Katheryn Houghton @kffhealthnews.org kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
