Nothing Has Changed Monday afternoon, first responders raced to Seattle’s Chinatown-ID for another drug induced mental health freak out. Last week, I warned city leaders about this encampment across the street from Summit Sierra High. It’s littered with drug supplies, feces, and abandoned tents. Nothing has changed.
Getting Close The mom of 26-year-old Danny Finnegan is in Seattle right now searching for her missing son. He was just spotted a few days ago in the University District. There is a $10K cash reward. Let’s bring Danny home. Spotted Outside University Village Surveillance video showing Danny pushing a shopping cart outside University Village shopping mall in Seattle. Look what he’s wearing.
After criticizing some scholarly articles and books, I have three books to recommend. First, here’s a tribute to 86-year-old psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, author of American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System (Oxford University Press, 2013). I first met Torrey in 1989 and heard about what was going wrong. Thirty-five years later, it’s even clearer that the federal panaceas have not panned out. Torrey shows how local and state charities and governments cared for mentally ill individuals, sometimes poorly but often adequately, until 1940, by which time state mental hospitals housed 423,445 individuals. During World War II half of the hospitals’ professional staff members were in the armed forces. Torrey: “The hospitals were grossly overcrowded Read More ›
People who live in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood say this homeless man goes on nightly rampages through their alleyways. Senior citizens living in nearby apartments say they can’t sleep because of all the commotion. Who is this guy? He needs an intervention.
Listen to Robert Marbut discuss how to solve the mental health crisis with radio host Ari Hoffman on KVI. Listen now to the August 29 episode.
Downtown Insanity Late Tuesday morning, Seattle Police (@SeattlePD) officers swarmed the encampment at the corner of 3rd Ave and Cherry St, just a block away from City Hall. The officers conducted a master class on responding to this mental health crisis. Look at the patience and care shown to this women who was literally spitting in the face of these officers. Thankfully the incident ended peacefully. Now imagine an unarmed social worker going into this scene without police? Well, that could happen very soon in this city. As Katie Daviscourt (@KatieDaviscourt) first reported, Councilmember Lisa Herbold (@Lisa_Herbold) is leading the charge to hire six unarmed “crisis responders” instead of police officers for emergency calls through a new 911 Dual Dispatch/Alternate Read More ›
