Policing Mental Health
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Psychiatrizing
The
Police
a question of police?
In the current debate around police violence, it is often said that the police should not be involved in mental health crises. "Leave it to the experts" is the slogan of the reformist wing of the defund the police movement. The first thing that must be acknowledged is that all involuntary psychiatry legally legitimates its capacity to coercively treat or incarcerate through 1. the parens patriae (the power of guardianship) and 2. the police power. The first power defends “incompetent” people from themselves, and the latter protects society from “dangerous” people. Such debates, then, are generally not really about whether we ought to police the mad, but who should do the policing, how, and with what means. What exactly is "it" that must be left to the mental health experts? What is this problem we commonly refer to in short hand as "mental health crises" they should solve? Each such crisis seems to be unique, so what are we referring to when we use this phrase?
securing the citizenry
Much of what has been deemed "community" psychiatric care has taken the form of preventative measures that resemble policing as much as treatment. Among these are included risk-assessment metrics, drug tests, welfare checks, involuntary out-patient therapy sessions, digitally monitored medications, and placements in halfway houses and group homes. This web of surveillance mechanisms, outfitted with agents ready for intervention at the sight of danger, could be considered illustrative of what Rachel Jane Liebert has recently termed "psycurity." Anti-stigma educational campaigns around mental illness train the general public to look out for "signs" of mental disorder. The growth of the business of adolescent psychiatry as a whole is a part of this trend: younger and younger children are being identified as mentally ill while medicating them at increasingly younger ages is being legitimated in the name of prevention and security. More to the point, psychiatric categories are still used to regulate the movements of populations between borders. To this day, the US can refuse entry to the "mentally unfit" seeking citizenship.
on violence
Critiques of the involvement of police imply that the problem of violence perpetrated against the mad could be stemmed or at least reduced by sending "experts" instead of armed officers. It should be made clear that left-leaning activists are virtually alone in calling for this. The APA, NAMI, the TAC and other psychiatric or advocacy organizations are overwhelmingly conservative in their visions and take it for granted that the municipal police will continue have the most interface with the mad. At most, they are lobbying for more training or for increasing crisis-response teams budgets to work with the police. This push for expert jurisdiction ultimately brushes to the side the psy-police function of surveilling, detaining, or forcing treatments on patients, framing them as the relatively innocent and intelligent foil to the brutish police's senseless brutality. To create "non-police" psychiatric teams would conceal that fact that psychiatry is at present fully embedded within a coercive civil and criminal legal system, the violence of which would continue unabated behind the scenes in psych wards, the courts, locked residencies, jails, and treatment centers.
which crisis?
Why has the conversation around abolishing or defunding the police returned again and again to the question of "mental health crises?" The police, for their part, have long incorporated psychiatric methods and knowledge when it serves to improve their methods and mechanisms of the management of public space; doing so has done little to stem the violence associated with them. Eras in which police interaction with the mad was less likely were violent in a different way. Fewer people were executed in the streets, but more were disappeared into filthy environs and medicated shoulder-to-shoulder in the hopes they would live out their remaining years without bothering anyone. The psychiatric profession having only slightly changed in this respect (relying still on the same or similar methods and frameworks they have for a century), we have no reason to believe now would be much different.
bibliography and resources for further reading
o Rachel Jane Liebert. Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Creativity.
oRobert Castel, Françoise Castel and Anne M. Lovell. The Psychiatric Society.
o Susan M. Schweik. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.
o Jacques Donzelot. The Policing Of Families.
o Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
o Cesare Lombroso. Criminal man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso.
o Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.
o Machado de Assis. The Alienist.
o Alan Schwarz. "Still in a Crib, Yet Being Given Antipsychotics."
o Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210 (1990)
o FDA. "FDA approves pill with sensor that digitally tracks if patients have ingested their medication."
o Lutz Kaelber. Eugenics: Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States.
o Camille Nelson. "Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race and Mental Status."
o Shawn M. Wold. "O'Connor v. Donaldson: Due Process and the Involuntarily Civilly Committed Mental Patient."