Tag: Social Impact Financing

Averting Mental Health and Fiscal Crises: Crisis Intervention Teams and Access to Meaningful Treatment for Mental Illness

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

[Blogger’s Note: I am very pleased to share this post by my colleague at Seton Hall Law, Tara Adams Ragone. This post was cross-posted at Health Reform Watch.]

By Tara Adams Ragone

Social media recently focused my attention on two very different law enforcement interactions with people with mental illness that reinforce the need for increased training of law enforcement in crisis intervention as well as the need for improved access to treatment for people with mental illness.

The first is a video of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis, Missouri earlier this month.  Mr. Powell was twenty-five years old and suspected of shoplifting junk food from a convenience store.  The first eighty seconds of the video show Mr. Powell pacing and muttering on the sidewalk — with four pedestrians passing by without incident — before the police arrive.  The police then exited their vehicles with their guns drawn, shouted at Mr. Powell to drop his weapon, and fired about twelve shots fewer than twenty seconds after they arrived on the scene.

The second is an NPR story that included an audio recording of law enforcement officials in San Antonio, Texas responding to a 911 call about a twenty-four year old group home resident named Mason, who was off of his medications, had set his blanket on fire, and was a danger to himself and others.  When they arrived at the scene, the officers acknowledged that they did not use the “tough guy command voice” that they typically would in responding to a 911 call reporting suspected criminal activity.  Instead, in plain clothes and without their weapons drawn, they spoke calmly with Mason, reassuring him that they wanted to get him help.  They astutely noticed signs suggesting that Mason was experiencing tactile, auditory, and visual hallucinations, and with patience and skilled questioning, got him to acknowledge the hallucinations and seek psychiatric treatment.

The San Antonio officers were members of a six-person mental health squad that the city created to confront severe prison overcrowding. Read More

Treating Addiction in Pregnant Women and New Mothers: A Promising Application for Social Impact Financing?

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By Kate Greenwood

Cross-Posted at Health Reform Watch 

Last week, vtdigger.org ran an interesting article by Laura Krantz on the difficulties pregnant women and new mothers who are addicted to drugs have accessing not just drug treatment but also all of the other services and supports they need. Krantz reported on a hearing before the Human Services Committee of the Vermont House of Representatives at which a new mother in recovery from addiction, “a neonatalogist, a substance abuse clinician, a Health Department employee and a representative from the Phoenix House, a residential treatment facility in Brattleboro … all said women need not only treatment, but housing, transportation and help finding jobs.”

Alice Larned, a substance abuse clinician at the Lund Family Center in Burlington, told Krantz that spaces in residential detoxification facilities are increasingly scarce. The demand for transitional housing for women who have completed inpatient detoxification also exceeds the supply. Add to this the sad fact that women can wait a year or more for an appointment with a physician who can treat them with methadone or buprenorphine. Larned told Krantz that many of the women who start treatment with her are taking buprenorphine they bought illegally, an “indication they want help ‘yet we don’t have the legitimate means for them to get this medication[.]’”

In another story that ran last week on NPR, Steve Zind spoke with Harry Chen, the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Health, who emphasized the complexities inherent in treating addiction in pregnant women and new mothers. To do so successfully, Commissioner Chen explained, “requires so many different systems working together well: the social service system, the health care system, the substance abuse system and even to some extent the correctional system.”

I confess that one reason that these two articles caught my attention is that Alice Larned is my sister.  Another reason, though, is that the problem described in the articles seems like a promising application for social impact financing, something that has been in the news here in New Jersey in recent weeks.

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