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Sounds to me like you’re falling right into the stigmatizing myth that the mentally ill are especially likely to be violent. Even calling them “the worst societ

• bigbubba 6y ago
  It sounds to me like goodells is relating their experiences. > Presumably there would be some up front report and assessment of whether the person is exhibiting violent behavior. That's a very presumptuous thing to presume, when the person who actually has personal experience with the matter says that dispatch is notorious for misevaluating situations (surely through no fault of their own much of the time, since dispatch is not on the scene and can only relay what they've been told.)
  • bluntfang 6y ago
    It's just as presumptuous that every mentally ill person is carrying a firearm and is violent.
    • dageshi 6y ago
      It only takes one to kill you? I think that's op's point.
      • spoondan 6y ago
        But it isn’t a good point absent the bad assumption that the mentally ill are more dangerous. It only takes one bicyclist that’s fallen off his bike to kill you. So what?
        • dageshi 6y ago
          It isn't just the aspect of someone being mentally ill, it's someone being mentally ill and that their behaviour caused the police to be contacted.
          • joshuamorton 6y ago
            This is a symptom of people being to primed to believe that mentally ill people are dangerous, not a legitimate cause for concern. Purple call the police on someone yelling. A mentally ill person yelling isn't a danger. They might be in crisis or pain, or they might be unable to effectively communicate. A gun didn't help in any of those, the vast, vast majority of cases.
          • bluntfang 6y ago
            like that one time a white woman called the cops on a black man in central park? I don't think doing an action to have the policed called on you is the best approach, considering it can be weaponized by dishonest actors.
    • bigbubba 6y ago
      Nobody in this discussion has presumed such a thing.
      • ruined 6y ago
        It's the explicit expressed fear in the root comment, and the basis of the police warrior ideology.
        • bigbubba 6y ago
          The root commenter has said explicitly of armed violent people: "the vast majority of patients are not like that" So to reiterate, nobody in this thread has presumed as bluntfang claims.
          • joshuamorton 6y ago
            Yet their claim is that we need to respond as though every mentally ill person is an imminent threat.
            • bigbubba 6y ago
              Their claim, as I've interpreted it, is that their lived experiences have lead them to believe any situation must be treated with caution because they never know what to expect. That is simply not the same as presuming that every mentally ill person is carrying a firearm and is violent. As I see it, that's just common sense. If you get a call from a woman telling you she's fallen down and is hurt, how likely is it that EMTs are met at the door by a drunk man who claims nothing is wrong? What first appeared to be a simple medical situation may actually be a case of domestic violence. Neither the dispatcher nor the EMT can know this before anybody arrives on the scene, so whoever gets there first needs to be cognizant of all possibilities. Recognizing the possibility that somebody might be violent is not the same as believing they will be.
              • joshuamorton 6y ago
  • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    If the EMTs are being paid $12, is it any wonder dispatch is notorious for misevaluating situations? Deep structural problems.
    • Natsu 6y ago
      I don't know what dispatch is paid, but EMTs are not dispatchers so this doesn't make much sense to me.
    • bigbubba 6y ago
      I don't follow. Why should EMTs getting ripped off be a factor in dispatch being unable to do more than relay whatever inaccurate or incomplete information they might gave been able to extract from a member of the general public over the phone? If a woman dials 911, says "Help!" then hangs up, how is the dispatcher supposed to accurately convey the situation to an EMT? EMTs should be paid more, but paying EMTs more won't address this problem.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        Sorry, yes, I can see how my comment could be confusing. I was implying that the call centre worker is probably less credentialed than the EMT. Yours in a strong point though: dispatch can only pass on what they know, so their misevaluation may not actually be the result of mistakes or a pack of training, and I probably shouldn't have read that meaning in to OPs words. Thank you.
    • dkdk8283 6y ago
      Paramedics have more training and are paid more. While $12 is pretty low it’s not the ceiling.
• NoOneNew 6y ago
  And you're falling into the trap of "everything works in theory". Dont pretend the real world is a clear cut place. Boots on the ground experience breats armchair keyboard academics.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ggghhhfff 6y ago
    Spot on. In theory, it is a fantastic idea to send mental health professionals, without any guns or self defense tools, or any bodyguards (police) to an ambiguous high-intensity crisis situation that seems like it involves psychological distress. In reality, when those professionals come face-to-face with, for example, someone high off of bath salts or PCP, they might have to abandon the scene due to the imminent threat to their lives, which then results in both the drug user and random passerby being placed into harms way due to the government not sending a full complement of healthcare + police professionals to the scene.
    • likeclockwork 6y ago
      It's too dangerous for anyone to go there. They should just launch missiles on any address 911 is called for. There is always risk.
• gfodor 6y ago
  It sounds to me like you're saying mental illness is irrelevant when it comes to predicting a person committing harmful behavior, which is a bold claim to make, to say the least.
  • kayodelycaon 6y ago
    As a whole, people with mental health issues are more likely to be abused and harmed than those who don't. The rate of violence in those with mental health issues is the same as the general population. Suicide rates are a separate issue.
    • JamesBarney 6y ago
      There are a couple problems with those studies. The first is mental health issues are a very wide umbrella. This includes anxiety, depression, and things like eating disorders which all parties can agree are probably not associated with increased rates of violence. But if we limit it to diagnoses like bipolar or schizophrenia I'm sure there are increased risks of violence. My mother (who had schizophrenia) for instance was fine 364 days a year. But on the 365th she'd try to claw my grandmother's eyes out because she thought she was the devil. And EMTs and other people who aren't being called out to deal with my mother on the 364 days a year she's fine. The other issue with those studies is they control for a host of other factors to get the conclusion it's not correlated with violent crime. If you just look at a bland, we separate people into two buckets, mentally ill and non mentally ill. Which bucket commits more violent acts per capita, the mentally ill do. You have to do a lot of statistical correction before you found that mental illness isn't correlated with violence.
      • dsego 6y ago
        As someone with a family member with schizophrenia I can support this, things tend to turn violent during a psychotic event. Bed restraints in hospitals aren't just decorations.
    • briandear 6y ago
      > The rate of violence in those with mental health issues is the same as the general population. But what about the rate of violence among mental ill people who are committing some action that warrants a 9-11 call? What exactly leads to someone calling 9-11? It isn’t that someone is sitting in their house mentally ill — they are doing some action that is concerning enough to warrant a callout. So among that group of mentally ill, what’s the violence rate compared to the “general population.” It’s going to necessarily be higher. I honestly think most people opining on the subject have never worked as a front line first responder before. It’s like news pundits talking about battlefield tactics when they have never been in combat. Lethal force should obviously be a last option, but when some literally insane person starts lunging at you with a knife all that theory of “the best way” goes out the window. There are thousands of mental health “dangerous” 9-11 calls happening every day and the vast majority end peacefully. Police on-duty firearms discharges are very rare but people act like it’s an epidemic because these incidents get magnified and broadcast to make people think it’s a frequent occurrence. How many mental health 9-11 calls end violently? 1 out of 10,000? 1 out of 100,000? Without knowing that number, any implication that this is a systemic problem is grounded in emotion rather than data. There are also unintended consequences. Saving that 1 out of 10,000, could result in an increase in risk that would offset any gains from such policies. If NYC wants to experiment, good for them. I am not opposed to a better way. I am concerned about unintended consequences of policies — consequences that are often ignored.
• Rebelgecko 6y ago
  I would imagine someone whose behavior triggers a 911 call is much more likely to be violent than the average person, regardless of any mentally illness
• refurb 6y ago
  I love it when someone with direct experience on the topic gets a talking to by someone without it. I mean, what’s does this guy know? It’s just his day to day job.