A new study finds a lack of the required clinical examinations, missing information, and a stark racial disparity in involuntary hospitalization applications submitted to the Boston police department in 2021-2022.
“The data suggested that systemic biases may contribute to mental health service inequities,” the researchers write.
The study focused on Section 12(a) applications submitted to the police by third parties (medical or mental health professionals), so it did not include involuntary hospitalization forms begun directly by the police.
These forms are supposed to include an in-person clinical examination by the clinician who is submitting it. However, 87% of the involuntary hospitalization applications did not include such an examination, and none of them explained why not.
In terms of race, the researchers found that Black people were most likely to be involuntarily hospitalized (41% of the forms), despite making up less than a quarter of Boston’s population. Another 21% of the applications were missing the information on race/ethnicity, so the racial disparity could be even greater.
“The involvement of police in executing Section 12(a) applications, particularly given the potential for the use of physical restraint or force, underscores the urgent need to reevaluate the involuntary hospitalization process. This potential for escalated tensions poses risks to everyone involved and raises concerns about civil liberties,” the researchers write.
The study was conducted by led by Kevin M. Simon at Harvard Medical School and published in Psychiatric Services.
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We’re nearly 8 million people on a destroyed Earth in a collapsing civilization, so the answer to the problem that today is called ‘mental illness’ will be needed for all of us. So we had better find the true, human, universal solution to this thing we call ‘mental illness’, because we will all be destroyed by what is happening and we are being destroyed by it already. It’s clear that in the 60s and 70s the assumption of inexorable human progress, technologically, politically, culturally and socially was almost universal among people of all classes across the Western and Eastern worlds at least, and probably this was true since 1945. Now none of you are sure of progress and if you were this should count as true insanity. You used to have a kind of space and quietness that has since been destroyed by technology, by the tyranny of cell phones which destroy outdoor peace and reverie and contemplation and interrupt all rest and sleep, by the mushrooming media and social media content of every kind, by an explosion of information and 24 hour news that now encompasses the world, and all the innumerable problems of social and global life which multiply year upon year and are constantly escalating in horror, insanity and absurdity, and are constant impingements on your consciousness and energy and stress levels and therefore health and physiology, and all of this is destroying all of our mental health already, as well as our physical health which is also being destroyed by the material social environment including through the food and farming industries and infrastructure and environmental problems. And declines in physical and emotional and psychological health are all mutually reinforcing, so we’re being dragged down by a total malaise of unhealth on every level, social, environmental, mental, emotional and physiological with even kids getting fatty liver disease and diabetes, something that only happened before to alcoholics or older people respectively just 70 years ago.
So the true solution to what we call ‘mental health’ is demanded for the whole of society, and it obviously can’t be confined to the sectors of psychiatry or medicine to answer these questions. We must answer these questions. Will we support each other or leave them at the mercy of inadequate services because it’s cheaper, easier and more convenient for us? You know our domestic populations can only chose the status quo. There is no hope in changing this. But there is hope in some of us waking up to the real solution, and it isn’t to be found in mental health services or psychiatry today. We have to find and articulate it, and it has to be the solution to all human problems. And there is a solution to all human problems. It’s to understand human problems actually, not through theoretical or academic disciplines like medicine or psychiatry. Only each of us can do this and understanding of human problems means observing and understanding without judgement, without taking sides otherwise you don’t see it as a whole, but by definition one sidedly. Then you are clear about what is as it is, and that is clarity. And in that clarity we can all meet, whereas all opinions divide and confound, because opinions are never facts. Any opinion or theory or assumption that is thrown into that observation actually destroys the possibility of total understanding and clarity on the issue, obviously. Can’t we see that? There is enormous hope in discovering this very simple but subtle fact. It is our only hope if you ask me. Or should I say any one persons only hope. There is no hope for the collective that’s for sure. Imagine the insanity of having rational debates about politics or social problems when the whole of your society is riven and infested by vampires, exploiters, tricksters of every kind. What is the point in preaching common sense to try and effect social change. And I feel that discussion and acknowledgement of all these difficult realities is essential, because otherwise all critique seems aimless and hopeless to me.
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