Mental Health Policy Analysis of Pfeiffer 's Report

Mary Pfeiffer through her journalistic anecdotal advocacy: Crazy in America: The hidden tragedy of our criminalized mentally ill (2007), have opened the proverbial Pandora’s box, depending on what sector of the society moral judgment is aligned with. The tragedy is no longer hidden but confronts us demanding an intervention that will disrupt its history. Critical analysis places us all in the glaring light that pans negligence, but it is the policymakers that stand in the focus of this beam while the rest of us are in its important penumbra. Policymakers are challenged to 1) restore and increase proper community mental health structures, 2) deinstitutionalize mental ill-health patients, 3) train police officers, and also personnel serving as wardens where mental health victims are likely to have a presence, to recognize and intervene appropriately is the situation morally requires, 4) provide pre-natal care for mental health patients, 5) and increase government funding for the sustainable care of mental health patients, while 6) providing more public education regarding mental health victims and treatment, and 7) finally to decriminalize drug abuse so that they may the necessary help and attention from the health system that their condition demands. The urgency of these demands is seen in the six cases Ms. Pfeiffer presented. There is only one mutilated survivor of the six, and all of the five deceased have left behind harrowing tales of wretchedness leading up to their deaths. These tales are located in public institutions, facilitated by public policies, to the full knowledge of public officials serving to carry out modern public policy. There is no throwback period of

history when the present condition was tolerable, since the 1827 Act forbade the incarceration of insane persons in prisons or houses of correction. This Act provided that mental illness was i) a curable disease of the brain, ii) that patients must totally isolated from