Title: Mental Illness Soars In Prisons, Jails While Inmates Suffer | HuffPost
Headings: Mental Illness Soars In Prisons, Jails While Inmates Suffer
Mental Illness Soars In Prisons, Jails While Inmates Suffer
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Content: After he told a guard he was contemplating ending his life, he was placed on suicide watch. On July 9, he was deemed stable. On July 11, his roommate woke up to Lester’s blood dripping on him. He had stabbed himself vigorously in the neck, wrist and groin with a razor. “Treating the mentally ill is different than acting with a normal population,” says Joe Baumann, a corrections officer at the California Rehabilitation Center. “ The problem is there’s so many of them either self-medicating or not taking medication at all. No one monitors whether inmates take their medication.” Corrections employees are not properly taught how to recognize and handle mental illness, he says. “There’s a lack of any real training to identify specific issues and how to deal with them,” says Baumann, who says he only receives a few hours of mental illness training each year and it isn’t enough. “ There’s a lack of direction from management.”