GREAT ARTICLE FROM SEVERAL YEARS AGO

Courtesy of: The Panama City News Herald

Viewpoint - Our View: Mental problem

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Our View

Mental problem

Responding to hundreds of thousands of patients warehoused in psychiatric hospitals, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled four decades ago that the confined mentally ill had a right to treatment and threw open the doors. Society has failed to cope with the problem ever since, culminating in the Saturday morning wounding of Bonifay Police Department Officer Steven Lee.

Lee took a shotgun blast while protecting his community from a deranged man shooting at imaginary people in bushes.

The accused shooter, Dwight McWaters, took a volley of bullets — two to the head, according to his family — because he was exhibiting symptoms of his mental illness and had access to a gun.

Lee is thankfully on his way to recovery. McWaters most likely will die, and he won’t be the first Floridian whose lifetime of mental illness came to an end this year during a confrontation with the police.

Two weeks after being legally forced into a hospital for escalating paranoia, Shawn Paul Fisher was shot in the head on Jan. 20 by a Polk County police sharpshooter after Fisher raised his shotgun and fired at sheriff’s deputies. Fisher had stopped taking his medication for schizophrenia and dialed 9-1-1. Authorities believe he wanted to be killed by police.

Last year, police in St. Petersburg killed 52-year-old marine biologist and Eagle Scout Thomas Albert Wallace after he attacked them from inside an abandoned water tank. His paranoid schizophrenia left him homeless and living in the industrial park. His sister said he was afraid to take his medication.

Seminole County Sheriff Donald Eslinger testified July 30 before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that in the previous five years at least 176 people with mental illnesses and 29 law enforcement officers have been killed in altercations across the nation.

Dealing with the mentally ill is now an everyday occurrence for the police. In some jurisdictions around the country, psychiatric calls outnumber robberies and assaults.

Since 1955, the number of patients in psychiatric hospitals has dropped by almost 500,000. The nation’s jails and prisons now house at least 283,000 mentally ill inmates, and an estimated 770,000 of the single adult homeless population suffers from some psychiatric ailment. It doesn’t take much guesswork to determine where America now warehouses its mentally ill.

The problem has no simple answer, but more people will die until society decides the solution takes more than putting an officer’s life on the line and a bullet to the head.