"There's No Effective Emergency Mental Health System in America"

"When you or someone you love, or just someone you are vaguely concerned about, experiences a mental health crisis, your options pretty much begin and end with calling 911. There are resources like Crisis Text Line, which can be very helpful. If you need somewhere to go, however, you can opt for hospitalization, but there can be wait times for a bed. That brings us to 911. If you have a mental illness, you’re already 16 times more likely than the general public to be killed during a police encounter. As a white woman, my own prospects in these kinds of situations are exponentially better than they are for people of color, especially black men. In resorting to law enforcement during a mental health crisis, I risk being laughed at and dismissed; black men risk being killed... 

If you’re fortunate to get past the law enforcement stage without incident, a big fire truck may come to collect you and bring you not to any kind of psychiatric facility, but to a regular ER where you’ll be pawned off on regular ER doctors. When I went through this process my senior year of college — about a month after the Sandy Hook massacre — an overnight stay in the hospital involved no psychiatric treatment or services of any kind. Nurses took some blood samples, presumably just to test whether I was high, and in the morning I was told I was free to go. At no point had it occurred to me I was not free to go, probably because no one really spoke to me, but the truly wild part was that when I said I’d thought I was still waiting for treatment I was told I’d already received it. Every few hours someone had stopped by my gurney to read some questions off a clipboard; apparently one of them had been a social worker, which qualified as my having been seen by a mental health care professional."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/theres-no-effective-emergency-mental-health-system-in-america?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "anyone wrongly reframing mass shootings as the responsibility of emergency psychiatric treatment is calling upon a system that does not exist."