Without the need to elaborate, Mental Health Awareness Month included a day which will be seared into history as a pivotal moment in Black Lives Matter. May 25th, 2020 was a day when nearly the entire planet witnessed virtually a sickening and unnecessary death of a human being at the hands of excessive police force.

So why would I want to send a virtual letter of gratitude to law enforcement, aside from the fact that U.S. police officers are mostly good people, trying to perform a dangerous and thankless job?  It’s because of my personal experience with law enforcement, which I also share with many thousands of other parents of seriously mentally ill sons or daughters.

Perhaps using mental illness and law enforcement in the same sentence conjures up only one disturbing image.  We have heard too many times about police injuring or even killing a person with mental illness during an altercation. Each of those incidents is truly tragic and heart-breaking. But here me out because I have something significant to share with the general public.

My son, with schizophrenia, has to date, been hospitalized nine times.  And in most of those cases, certainly the most serious ones, it was because of a police officer who understood that my son needed to be hospitalized and not taken to jail. The police officer recognized that it was a mental illness situation, either through innate understanding or through C.I.T. (Crisis Intervention Training).

What each parent or family member knows all too well is that hospitalizations alone do not provide a cure for our loved one.  And yet, each hospitalization also “builds a case” on behalf of our ill family member, which we can leverage against our critically broken mental health care system. We can provide the doctors, social workers and Public Guardian the concrete proof that our family member needs a higher level of care. We can eventually shame the mental health care providers into action.

And in our personal case, it has been police officers who brought my son to the hospital most of the time. Sadly, it was not the social workers, the Board and Care operators, therapists or doctors involved with my son. In fact, many times the mental health care providers would only ask my son a few perfunctory questions about his state of mind (as if he could be counted on to self-diagnose) and somehow miss the fact that he was clearly psychotic, gravely ill, or a potential danger to self and others.

The mental health care system is so invested in preserving a person’s “right” to be psychotic, and not taken against their will for psychiatric care, that this heavy burden is now often carried out by law enforcement.  With all the chatter about replacing police with social workers, I have to say that law enforcement has been doing the job of social workers for many years now.  And with C.I.T. training, they are getting better at it. 

Even though a seriously mentally ill person should be protected from ever getting involved in crime or resorting to violence, the dysfunctional mental health care system and our current laws are directly responsible for mental illness being criminalized.  By default, police officers have become “First Responders” instead of competent social workers and doctors being more available and assertive in their power to intervene.

I can say without hyperbole that my son’s last hospitalization, escorted by police, with California legal code 5150, saved his life. It finally set in motion a higher level of care, Conservatorship, and the right for a parent to be more involved and part of the recovery team.