I was playing Urban Dead which is an awesome, free text-based zombie apocalypse game on the Internet. Players can spraypaint messages on the walls of the "buildings" in the game. I saw a message that read "RIP Allan: Save-Allan.org". Save-Allan.org is a website about a young man whose insurance company refuses to pay for a life-saving operation. Its strange to see this kind of reality cross over into a virtual world, especially given the context of themes of mortality implicit to a zombie narrative.
posted by geoff on 12/02/2005 03:10:00 PM
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I had the idea, recently, of trying to blog things related to prison issues, to use for talking to people about pages. I was looking through the "Safety Net", which is this amazing community newsletter for Bloomington that covers a different social issue every month and profiles social service organizations serving the community, and I found this article:
Lack of affordable healthcare linked to overcrowded jail
By Vil Beldavs, Secretary, Citizens for Effective Justice, member, Board of National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Indiana
119 West 7th Street
(812) 349-2542
Our Bloomington community is struggling to find local solutions to a national healthcare crisis. National data shows that over 80% of bankruptcies result from inability of the uninsured to pay major medical expenses creating a growing population of homeless people and broken families in desperate need. Over 70% of those in jail or prison have addictions problems. Over 20% of the incarcerated suffer from serious mental illness. Community-based care, such as provided by the Center for Behavioral Health (CBH) emerged to provide ongoing care for the mentally ill following the de-institutionalization that came with the availability of increasingly effective medication in the 1960s and later. In recent years with restrictions on Medicaid funding poor people in crisis have been increasingly denied access to mental healthcare. Jails and prisons -- generally viewed as places of punishment -- have all too often become the mental health care providers for the poor.
Mental illness can strike anyone. The failure of our system of mental health care has resulted in the criminalization of severe mental illness and addictions. Wealthy people who can afford care for their loved ones can avoid this problem. The same generally applies to poorer people whose care is financed through Medicaid and related sources. Poor people with treatable neurological disorders without sources of financing for care whose disease expresses itself in public are arrested and taken to jail. Over the past year we have listened to many horror stories about abuse in our criminal justice system. The combination of poverty and a neurological disorder has resulted in incarcerations in our County Jail that have extended for man months -- in some cases beyond one year for minor offenses sometimes without criminal charges. These abuses must stop. Such abuses are criminal acts against people with a treatable illness.
We believe it is exceedingly important that schizophrenia and other neurological disorders are treated as what they are -- medical problems and not moral deficiencies. The mentally ill should not be "customers" of the criminal justice system unless they have committed serious crimes.
We also know that treatment requires financial and other resources. The buck ultimately stops with the community and its taxpayers. Ways must be found to pay for treatment of the poor. The consequences of failure of treatment are unacceptable - miserable lives, suicide, avoidable deaths sometimes of officers called to deal with a crisis. Untreated mentally ill and or addicted people can become a danger to themselves and others. But, treatment works. Increasingly with improved medications recover is becoming possible for those with severe mental illness. With effective treatment people with a disability can become productive, even tax-paying citizens. We are encouraged by the commitment of city and county agencies and organizations to resolve the healthcare / criminal justice crisis facing the community. Clearly a communitywide strategy would be helpful. The jail diversion program initiated in 2004 by the FSA-MHA has been a positive step to help mentally impaired inmates and their families. The means must be found to continue this program. We applaud efforts by Captain Michael Diekhoff of the Bloomington Police Department to involve all law enforcement agencies in the community in the development of training and protocols for crisis intervention that are suited to our community. We are very pleased with Sheriff Steve Sharp's decision to send a deputy to the CIT training at Fort Wayne. We applaud Charlotte Zietlow's leadership of the Monroe County CIT Task Force. We are heartened by the effort to bring together all stakeholder agencies, particularly the mental health services providers with law enforcement, to assure that trained law enforcement officers have a place to take mentally disturbed people in crisis needing treatment.
posted by geoff on 11/30/2005 03:29:00 PM
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Uses an RP-SMA connector (male, I think).
posted by geoff on 11/30/2005 12:12:00 PM
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