title
PROPOSED RESOLUTION
CALLING FOR A COOK COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH PUBLIC HEARING
WHEREAS, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), nearly 60 million Americans experience a mental health condition every year; regardless of race, age, religion or economic status, mental illness impacts the lives of at least one in four adults and 1 in 10 children across the United States; and
WHEREAS, deinstitutionalization, the name given to the policy of moving severely mentally ill people out of large state institutions and then closing part or all of those institutions began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of chlorpromazine, commonly known as Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medication, and received a major impetus 10 years later with the enactment of federal Medicaid and Medicare; and
WHEREAS, deinstitutionalization has inadvertently helped create the mental illness crisis by discharging people from public psychiatric hospitals without ensuring that they received the medication and rehabilitation services necessary for them to live successfully in the community; and
WHEREAS, this policy further exacerbated the situation as once the public psychiatric beds had been closed, they were not available for people who later became mentally ill, a situation that continues to this day; and
WHEREAS, in addition, over the past decade, states have cut billions from their mental health budgets, shuttering clinics across the country including here in Illinois and Cook County; resulting in thousands of mentally ill people funneling in and out of the nation's jails that are ill-equipped to handle them, effectively criminalizing mental illness; and
WHEREAS, according to the most recent national study conducted by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2006, more than half of all prison and jail inmates, including 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners and 64 percent of local jail inmates, we...
Click here for full text