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Wednesday, April 27, 2011
No Winners in Police Shooting
By Lori Deanda
Volunteer Coordinator, National Alliance on Mental Illness-Albuquerque affiliate
What a tragedy the Christopher Torres shooting was; for his family, for our police, for Albuquerque and for the mental health community.
Several comments have been published with suggestions to the family: taking his car away, informing police of his mental illness and having him locked up in a mental institution.
These comments illustrate the lack of knowledge the public has about mental illness and the difficulties families face in caring for a loved one suffering from it.
First of all, Christopher Torres was a 27-year-old adult, not a child. Unless his family had been appointed his legal guardian, which is rare, their options would have been extremely limited with regard to managing his affairs and medical care.
Even with guardianship, there are limitations.
Second, according to published reports, Torres had been declared incompetent to stand trial due to his mental illness and police had been called to the family home at least once during a mental health crisis prior to this tragedy, indicating that the police already knew of his mental illness.
Last, our current mental health system does not allow parents to institutionalize their children, adult or otherwise. Inpatient mental health facilities typically offer only acute crisis management and will not keep individuals once they no longer pose an imminent risk to themselves or others.
That means that if an individual voices intent to harm themselves of someone else — or worse, attempts it — he or she will likely be admitted for only 48 to 72 hours. If during that time his or her behavior and symptoms stabilize, with or without medication, and the individual asserts that he or she no longer has any thoughts of harming anyone, he or she will be released. That's regardless of how recently or frequently the individual had been admitted previously for the same behavior or how adamant a family is to keep him or her there for continued care.
If a family or other qualified individual is either unwilling or unable to take the individual home, he or she will unfortunately be referred to a homeless shelter upon release.
This cycle can repeat itself over and over.
Our only public long-term inpatient treatment facility in New Mexico is the state mental hospital in Las Vegas. A parent cannot simply take their child there and admit the child for long-term treatment. It has to be court ordered.
How do I know these things, you ask? I have lived it with my own autistic/mentally ill son.
Unless you have also lived it, you don't have a clue as to the obstacles the Torres family may have faced in their efforts to obtain treatment for their son.
Nor do very many of us have a clue what it must be like for the police officer faced with having to make a split-second decision to shoot or not and then having to live with that decision for the rest of his life.
Making snap judgments without knowing all the facts benefits no one.
We must recognize that there are no winners here. If you want to help, show some compassion, or better yet, get involved and try to improve our mental health system so these tragedies don't have to keep happening.
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