The landscape and communities nationwide are being eroded by squalls that are leading away from homes and neighborhoods and raging in jails, prisons, and juvenile justice facilities. Powerful storms have erased forever the way things were in cities large and small, from the Gulf Coast of the United States ravaged by repeated hurricanes, to the Asian coasts half a world away obliterated by a powerful Katrina-scale hurricane or a Tsunami wave. Less visible but no less destructive are the effects that mental health is wreaking upon families. Their cataclysmic effects carry an enormous financial cost that is not offset by economic development strategies which propose to build prisons in places far removed from the homes of those who are incarcerated.

The official cost of untreated mental health conditions in the US workforce is estimated to be $3 billion per year. But this figure fails to account for those unable to participate in the labor force because of poor mental health. A fuller accounting of the financial costs of mental illness is obtained by tallying the numbers of individuals that we lock up both as a nation because they have undiagnosed or untreated mental illness or because they cannot access mental and social services in their communities. This may also be linked to having no health insurance or other sources of payment for needed treatment; or because they lack the social networks to sustain them. The human costs of our failure as a society to establish effective and socially just treatment programs that guarantee a right to health care that includes mental health treatment far exceed even this fuller financial tally.

 

The heaviest burdens of untreated mental disease rest solidly on the backs of poor communities of color. The treatment facility for the poor is prison, once people display socially unacceptable ways due of desperation, latent anger, depression, and hopelessness resulting from poverty, limited access to services, and overexposure to hopelessness. As a result, our jails, prisons, and juvenile justice facilities are overcrowded, literally crammed full of inmates. The Nation’s response is to build more detention–not treatment facilities.

 

If poor people of color with mental illness don’t end up in prison, they are far more likely than those without mental illness to be homeless. Could it be that we have criminalized mental health issues in African American and Latino communities? Former US Secretary of Education William Bennett, also known as President George H.W. Bush’s “Drug Czar,” famously suggested that abortion was a way to reduce crime. He failed to suggest treatment for mental health issues. What health policies are we enacting today?

 

Dollars and cents may appeal to some if human misery and the loss of human dignity fail to register. Regardless, there is money to be made by capitalizing on mental illness that has its roots in social injustice. Today many companies in the US make a profit by managing prisons. What would be the cost to taxpayers of funding treatment programs rather than prison systems? Are the portfolios of the privileged swelling based on the plight of the mentally ill, both poor and not so poor?

 

I am a realist. I know that some people without mental illness commit crimes. And I believe that everyone who commits a crime ought to make a legitimate form of restitution. But those who are mentally ill deserve treatment, and they will never heal unless we find a way to deliver community-based mental health services to everyone in need regardless of their ability to pay the costs of treatment.

 

The storm clouds are growing darker. The winds are threatening to engulf more and more people who could make substantial contributions with their lives given appropriate attention to mental health issues. Once imprisoned, the likelihood of being imprisoned again absent meaningful intervention is impossibly high. Was former Secretary Bennett capturing the reality of the way things are playing out in our society when he made his statement about ending the lives of African American males yet in their mothers’ wombs? The Community Voices Initiative at the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School Of Medicine is appealing directly to you--the people of the United States of America--for your needed voices and support.  We must begin to shelter the nation and its vulnerable people from this relentless silent storm.