Mental Health Clinic Closures Contributing Factor In Man's Incarceration
By aaroncynic in News on Feb 22, 2013 5:40PM
When the Community Mental Health Council closed last summer, advocates argued that people displaced would suffer due to lack of adequate services. For Keith King, a man with autism from Chicago's South Side, the clinic's closure landed him in Cook County Jail.
DNAinfo reports King was sent to jail this month after he was prosecuted for felony harassment for leaving threatening messages at a local day care center. King’s family has said because of the clinic closure, he went off his medication, and his mental health rapidly declined.
King’s mother told DNAinfo, “He tried to do the right thing, and they locked him up. Keith doesn’t belong in the penitentiary surrounded by murders.” The threatening calls and visits began some months ago. According to police reports, King left voicemail messages saying he would “burn and blow the day care down, kill the owner and the kids at the day care.” Earlier this month, King was in court for a mental health probation violation after he was sentenced for violating an aggravated battery charge against a transportation employee for pinching the driver’s butt, according to his attorney, Herschel Rush.
King’s mother had him hospitalized after he informed her of the threatening phone calls. He was given medication three times stronger than the dosage he had been taking and was discharged. King’s attorney, who has represented him pro bono, and his family say that if it weren’t for the state of mental health care in Chicago, the man would be at home.
King isn’t the only person with mentally illness who has either lapsed in treatment or ended up in prison after the city closed various clinics last year due to budget cuts. In April last year, advocates for keeping the clinic open pointed out two patients had entered psychiatric hospitalization after their clinics closed. N’Dana Carter, who was arrested when demonstrators barricaded themselves in the shuttered clinic in Woodlawn, said, “There was a schizophrenic man who was part of our movement; he ended up murdering his best friend.” At a protest in June, demonstrators said the closure of the Beverly-Morgan Park Mental Health Center contributed to the death of a patient, Helen Morley.
While a crumbling mental health infrastructure might not be the direct cause of violence in the city, medical professionals believe there's a strong link between the lack of services and violence on the city streets. Keith Gilliam, a clinician at Boston Medical Center told Medill earlier this month:
“Oftentimes you have a lot of grant funding positions and sometimes those positions aren’t around the next year. So when they’re gone, people don’t even have a sense of what’s around and that’s discouraging. Community violence really makes an impact, so if services aren’t there, then numbness, hopelessness, helplessness and sort of acceptance of the situation increases, which has seemed to happen.”
It seems in the case of King and others, this lack of adequate services is a major contributing factor. Dr. Carl Bell, former director of the Community Mental Health Council told DNAinfo, “I am told by mental health providers on Chicago's Southeast and Southwest side that since [the clinic] closed, nothing has replaced the infrastructure we provided. I have seen some of my patients wandering around the community due to the lack of programs.”