(Feb. 10, 2016) An outrageous new bill would allow Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services to send people with mental illness to a prison unit instead of a psychiatric hospital (“Advocates: Bill punishes mentally ill found not guilty of crimes,” MPBN, Feb. 1).
“This particular bill is focused on a very small percentage of forensic patients that exceeds the hospital’s ability to treat them,” said DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew, in defense of the proposal.
Mayhew believes the more difficult patients would be better served at a 32-bed mental health unit within the Maine State Prison. Such patients often require an immense amount of resources to manage and treat, which comes at the expense of other patients, she said.
But advocates for people with mental illness are outraged by the proposal, arguing that it criminalizes mental illness and punishes people who have done nothing wrong.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine says the bill goes against everything the justice system stands for -- Maine is “treating” mental illness through incarceration.
We couldn’t agree more. This is an area of civil-rights we have gone completely backwards on.
What is the real solution?
We need to restore public psychiatric beds.
Maine maintains a shockingly insufficient number of public psychiatric beds. The state eliminated 17 percent of its psych beds between 2005 and 2010, according to a 2012 Treatment Advocacy Center report, leaving just 10.3 beds per 100,000 people – far below the 50-bed standard considered necessary to provide minimally adequate mental health treatment.
Maine’s mental health system is in trouble, but the answer is not to imprison our most severely ill. We would never consider doing this to someone suffering with cancer; why do it to someone suffering with a brain disease?
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