I recently received this message from a nurse:

I understand your goal of wanting everyone to have access to psychiatric evaluation/care, and to a large extent, I agree with you! But there are laws by which police and hospitals MUST abide, in order to protect every citizen.

In order to be admitted to a psychiatric unit a patient must be “pink slipped” by a physician. This is a document where the doctor describes the behavior that is being observed, and how that behavior shows the patient is a danger to himself or others.

We can’t just place people in the hospital because we think they need help. As well-intentioned as that may be, if the individual does not WANT to be in the hospital, they have a right to refuse hospitalization.

My response:

I believe that if I had been seen by a psychiatrist for a few minutes in March or April of 2006, I would have been committed. My voices became louder every day until I was flagrantly psychotic, but no one noticed for months. In October of 2006, the voices were so bad that I completely lost control of myself. I used to be an honor student at my university, and I knew the university was always open to the public. The reason I was picked up for trespassing there was because I was dirty and confused.

After taking a glance at me, police should have seen that I was severely psychotic and needed to be evaluated. Had I been having a heart attack, I would have been taken to a hospital. That day, when I was incarcerated, I fell right through the cracks of a broken system of care.

I do not know the answer to this problem. I do know that there are individuals who are paranoid, hallucinating and dirty wandering around the streets of big cities. It is impossible to help some of them because they are not considered dangerous. For one year, from 2006-2007, I was one of these people.

Many police officers have the basic training necessary to identify medical problems such as heart attacks and strokes, and to recognize when people need to be taken to a hospital for other reasons. I believe that police should also have training enabling them to recognize some very obvious types of psychotic behavior.