U.S. Prisons Becoming De Facto Home of the Mentally Ill

A new study reveals that prisons in America house ten times as many mentally ill as the state-run psychiatric wards that could actually treat them.

“If you wanna help, tell the CIA to stop trying to kill me.”

It’s a familiar line that Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist who’s spent 40 years studying America's treatment (or lack thereof) of the mentally ill, hears from schizophrenic prison inmates. Prisoners in their own mind with no way out, they wreak havoc at jails across the nation: throwing feces at guards, singing for days on end, battling with the voices in their own heads. Worst of all, they’re alone.

In a new study by Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to treating the mentally ill, Torrey and his colleagues expose just how bleak America’s mental health situation has become. In 2012, an estimated 356,000 mentally ill inmates were being held in state prison, compared to just 35,000 in state-run psychiatric hospitals. In other words, the number of mentally ill people in prisons is ten times that of mentally ill in state-run psychiatric hospitals.

Torrey’s basic tenet is nauseating: the majority of mentally ill in America are treated like monsters.

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