“Bedlam”: Film Shows How Decades of Healthcare Underfunding Made Jails “De Facto Mental Asylums”

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Excerpt:

“Bedlam”: Film Shows How Decades of Healthcare Underfunding Made Jails “De Facto Mental Asylums”
December 27, 2019

Are prisons and jails America’s “new asylums”? A new documentary looks at how a disproportionate number of underserved people facing mental health challenges have been swept into the criminal justice system, where they lack adequate treatment. Nearly 15% of men and more than 30% of women in jails have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder. For many of them, jail is their first point of entry into mental health treatment. The documentary “Bedlam” was filmed over five years in Los Angeles County’s overwhelmed and vastly under-resourced Emergency Psychiatry Services, a jail warehousing thousands of psychiatric patients, and the homes — and homeless encampments — of people who are living with severe mental illness. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on PBS “Independent Lens” this April. The film features many people, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who share their personal experiences with family members’ chronic psychiatric conditions that have pushed them into the path of police officers, ER doctors and nurses, lawyers and prison guards. We speak with Cullors, who shares her experience with seeking help for her brother Monte, who has lived with schizoaffective disorder since he was a teenager, and director Ken Rosenberg, an addiction psychiatrist affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City whose own sister struggled with schizophrenia.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Are prisons and jails America’s “new asylums”? Today we spend the hour looking at how a disproportionate people facing mental health challenges have been swept into the criminal justice system, where they lack adequate treatment. At least 15% of men and more than 30% of women in jails have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder. This is the focus of an incredible documentary by filmmaker and psychiatrist Ken Rosenberg. The film is called Bedlam.

Read more at: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/27/bedlam_documentary_mental_health_criminal_justice

Despite the "reputation" of Democracy Now, some of their reporting is good. You have to separate it, the bias,  out.  I thought this was pretty good.