Why do we expect our police officers to be intake personnel for the mentally ill?

[hedgehog]

19. Unfortunately, many hospitals are not prepared to handle someone in a mental health crisis.

The mentally ill person ends up waiting in a hospital emergency room with all the chaos that implies while someone calls around looking for an open psych bed. It's torture for some patients, and other patients are a hazard to themselves and the hospital staff.

I actually witnessed one incident of this type. We were sitting in an ER cubicle waiting for my young son to get treatment for his asthma. It was very irritating to be kept waiting while we could hear on the other side of the curtain, an ambulance crew chit-chatting with the nurses. Suddenly there was a great deal of shouting and running around. A gentleman who had been brought in for psych observation had gotten tired of waiting, strolled down the hall, gotten into the ambulance and drove off. As it happened, he was well known to the police in this small town, so they were waiting for him at home when he drove up.

(Please don't read this as a blanket condemnation of emergency room personnel and/or ambulance teams. This was a slow night at a small town hospital.)