Remember, if you are in the US at least, and someone tells you they aren't ok, and you recommend a crisis line, and they mention anything regarding suicide, they are very likely going to be extracted from their living situation by force and end up incarcerated at very high expense to themselves.
If their life was going poorly before that, it sure won't be better after.
edit: as another poster mentioned, the record of this could follow you around for life as well.
Also having your name officially recorded for this cause in a database can have negative impacts on the rest of your life, as this Canadian woman found:
First of all, that's not much better. "Don't talk about mental health publicly or there will be consequences" is not something we should be OK with.
Second, from the article itself:
> Richardson told CBC News that border guards referenced her 2012 hospitalization, and not her book, in denying her entry into the U.S.
Third, this result is not unique to people who have spoken out:
> The Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office has received reports from more than a dozen Canadians who have been denied entry into the U.S. because their records reveal they have a mental illness.
> It’s important to note that police officers, by virtue of their role as emergency responders, are the first to arrive at the scene of a mental health crisis. They respond to the person experiencing a mental health crisis and often escort the individual to the hospital emergency department or other health care facility for medical assessment. This is the moment when the mental health police record is generated.
It's probably worth mentioning that if the police are involved during a mental health crisis there is a strong likelihood of physical violence even if you are not a minority.
> The call resolution data further revealed that transports to hospitals were more frequent than arrests (44.9% versus 5.8% respectively)
Officers reported far more cases of arrest-worthy behavior/actions that they chose not to act on. The authors concluded:
> Our analysis of a sample of mental health call resolutions in the Chicago Police Department reveal that police are disinclined to use legal action, and considerably more inclined to transport individuals for hospital psychiatric assessments. Moreover, police routinely resort to on-scene call resolutions involving an array of informal tactics.
Appreciate your push for more concrete sources, I don't have any. There are four points that led to my comment:
[1]: Police violence in the news in the United States. How common it is is very debatable, the worst news bubbles to the top and catches the media's attention. For every police shooting there are probably 100+ stops with no shooting. Hopefully the increased media attention has led to concrete studies that will either prove or invalidate my point.
[2]: The very recent shooting of a 13 year old with autism whose mother called the police (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/linden-camer...). This is one event, its my opinion that it is representative of many police encounters with the mentally disabled.
[3]: Living in two cities (Eugene OR, and San Francisco) with high rates of homelessness, vagrants, and transients, and observing the success of non-police based services versus police-based services interacting with the homeless.
[4]: Internet comments from people who I believe are EMTs, crisis counselors, and teachers, on stories like [2], sharing similar experiences, sharing their own de-escalation training, and calling out terrible process and active escalation by police in mental health situations.
EDIT:
[5]: For your own source is this violence/non-violence rate based on police reporting, or do they interview other non-police participants?
Thanks for such a thoughtful response. On #5, it appears to be based on police reports, interviews, and corresponding docs (arrests, hospital admissions). The arrests and hospital visit counts seem objective and the authors don't appear to have an agenda.
I don't have any particular expertise or strong opinions about this topic. My interest is that the threshold/evidence requirement for telling people to avoid a certain resource should be set pretty high.
Separately, the data confirms your #1: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467379). The numerator is absolutely massive -- 53 million people per year. Roughly half of those are traffic stops, but even excluding those, it's still big. Citizens were asked the level of escalation of their most recent police-initiated contact or traffic accident and 0.3% said that a gun was pointed (page 17). That 0.3% is from citizens, not police, so it's probably an upper bound. For comparison, about 3% of people's most recent contact included any use of force, mostly handcuffs (1.8%) and push/grab/hit/kick (0.7%).
> [1]: Police violence in the news in the United States. How common it is is very debatable, the worst news bubbles to the top and catches the media's attention. For every police shooting there are probably 100+ stops with no shooting. Hopefully the increased media attention has led to concrete studies that will either prove or invalidate my point.
Without diving deeply into the data, I know that such collections efforts are occasionally prone to issues where different departments record similar events in drastically different ways. So there are known shortcomings in the data set, but there is data. I'm reasonably sure researchers have worked with this data.
> [3]: Living in two cities (Eugene OR, and San Francisco) with high rates of homelessness, vagrants, and transients, and observing the success of non-police based services versus police-based services interacting with the homeless.
I have no doubts whatsoever about the success of kind, compassionate, and humanitarian services in Eugene. However it seems to me to be contra-factual to describe SF's services to community members experiencing being unsheltered as at all a success except by the metric of quantity of money spent. Police-based or no seems minimally impactful.
I think the obvious point is that if the police are involved there is a small but non-zero chance of physical violence or arrest, and if they are not involved, there is a zero chance.
It's depressing that The Onion headlines are becomming more and more milder version of reality. There was a skit a while ago about wounded people fleeing ambulances to escape debt hell, what we have here is arguably worse.
I had an ambulance called for me years ago when I passed out in public (nothing serious) and it was fairly difficult to convince the EMT's that I didn't want to nor needed to go to the hospital.
Mostly I knew I didn't need to go so it was time but yes money was a large factor as well. I had no idea what the bill would look like. I tried to get away so they wouldn't try to charge me just for coming out.
I've been a victim of this very thing, and can certainly second this.
My friend was trying to be helpful, but I lost 2 weeks of my life and felt dehumanized during and after it.
I don't blame them, because it's very counter-intuitive, but
TLDR - be careful when contacting any sort of government authorities, because they often have far more consequences than you're considering in the moment.
I cannot believe America is like this. TIL. As a non-American, I was thinking of moving there one day. These days, the reasons to not want to (which have nothing to do with politics) are racking up.
(i don’t live in the US) this is insane. What’s the rational for extracting people from their environment by force? And worse, what’s the rational for recording the person who gave the advise and punishing them for it? I genuinely don’t understand.
I recall hearing that in Eastern Bloc countries, telling the wrong story to the wrong person could get you 'disappeared'.
The (possibly apocryphal) story that sticks with me is of the young child who told their teacher that their parents didn't have a photo of Lenin in their house. The parents were taken away in the middle of the night, and the child went to live with their grandparents.
When I hear about how easy it is for innocent, law-abiding people in the US to be incarcerated, it reminds me of these stories.
Who cares if it costs money, or if you have a record? I get why these are worries in today's world, but neither of these matter when your life is on the line.
If you have a record for this, wear it like armor (Tyrion quote). You had the strength to do something good for yourself, and a record to prove it.
Also, if you "recommend a crisis line" to a friend, you are a shit friend. Go play frisbee with them and stop outsourcing responsibility.
Do you have any data to support that incarcerating someone via forceful removal of them from their home and creating a financial burden on them is an effective suicide prevention measure? It certainly doesn't feel self evident that is and it seems quite possible that it would have the opposite effect.
Personal experience, if that counts as supporting data to you.
I spent a couple weeks in a mental hospital and was able to interact with a lot of amazing people who were dealing with all kinds of personal struggles. Not everyone was involuntarily committed, but many were, and for varying reasons. One guy was having a hard time dealing with the loss of his father and was involuntarily committed by his doctor. He left in a much better state than he arrived in after being there for only two days. Many people had similar outcomes.
If you only look at the uncomfortable nature of being removed from your home, or the dollars it costs you, sure, "No! This just equals more bad!" makes sense as an argument. But you can say the same thing about going on a vacation. The emotional benefit makes both the financial burden, and discomfort negligible in the big picture.
It is better to take care of emotional distress voluntarily, if you are able to do so, but if we are simply asking if it is effective as an extreme measure, yes it is, for many people.
If their life was going poorly before that, it sure won't be better after.
edit: as another poster mentioned, the record of this could follow you around for life as well.