Nancy White

Don’t we all have those days when we feel overwhelmed by paperwork! Consumers need assistance whether in jail or having just re-entered the community and we are bogged down by paperwork. Sometimes it even feels like nobody cares how well the consumer is functioning; they just care how well we document the records.

Almost twelve years ago I was given the opportunity to participate in planning the City of Kansas City, Missouri’s mental health court. It was originally designed for the mentally ill, who had been charged with city ordinance violations in Kansas City, Missouri. The program has expanded to include low level felonies from Jackson County Drug Court, and city ordinance violations in Lee’s Summit Municipal Court, Raytown Municipal Court, Grandview Municipal Court, and Blue Springs Municipal Court, all Jackson County, Missouri cities that are suburbs to Kansas City, Mo.

Well, I am home from my “trip of a lifetime to Israel.” The trip did not include tours of jails or mental health facilities but two days after I arrived, Haaretz, Israel’s Leading Daily Newspaper, in English, had a front page article. The title, Tel Aviv police backtrack, will investigate alleged gang rape on public beach. The article has some very strange twists and turns but the alleged victim of the gang rape has reportedly “received psychiatric care in the past, is reportedly in a difficult mental state, and had recently started drinking again.”

I always do this before I go on vacation. I wonder if everything is complete. Have I finished all my work? Can I leave work behind and just have a good time? Oh, I know work will be there when I get back but….

If you began working in your local city jail when I did you probably worked with men with alcohol problems. Over the years the population of our city/county jails has changed. In 1998, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported there were an estimated 283,000 prison and jail inmates who suffered from mental health problems. That number is now estimated to be over 1.25 million. The rate of reported mental health disorders in the state prison population is five times greater (56.2 percent) than in the general adult population (11 percent). Women prisoners have an even higher rate of mental health problems than men: almost three quarters (73 percent) of all women in state prison have mental health problems, compared to 55 percent of men.