Overcrowded prisons can be toxic for both prisoners and guards, according to a recent GAO report that found overcrowded conditions contribute to increased inmate misconduct, more competition for prison services such as educational or vocational training programs and a lack of meaningful work opportunities for prisoners during their incarcerations

Prison overcrowding is a problem for countries around the world, including the United States, where 30,000 California prison inmates initiated a hunger strike in July to protest solitary confinement policies at the state’s prisons

Additionally, those with higher levels of education are also significantly more likely than those with less education to seek mental health information online

Women account for much of the growth in online research of mental health issues over the past six years

In 2008, however, the percentage of internet users to look online for information about depression, anxiety, stress or mental health issues rose to 28%, a statistically significant increase.

From 2002-2006, online searches for information about mental health issues remained relatively stable, around 22

, that my God, our society cannot tolerate this, we're much more advanced than that. And I just find the irony so thick that that same society finds it OK to put the same people in jails and prisons

Here you have a population clearly identified as mentally ill, and you're releasing them to the street with nothing. This isn't left or right, conservative or liberal talking. What do you think is going to happen

What I had to do was basically come to county to get my meds. And sometimes, you know, I would even commit a crime just to make sure I would get my meds.

Officials acknowledge what's happening here is reminiscent of mental asylums of the last century. But they say the only other option is to lock the mentally ill in solitary confinement for weeks on end - this is after all a jail.

But here and throughout much of the country, there's no where else for them to go. City and state governments have cut funding for mental health services nationwide

To walk in and feel like every other person I'm interviewing be mentally ill on any given day, to me is - I can't wrap my brain around it. It is staggering what we're really dealing with.

One man tells her he's going to kill himself because he thinks he's already dead. Another guy explains that the voices tell him to hurt people.

issue with its programs and efforts to handle mentally ill inmates. But if you ask anyone here, even this jail is barely managing.

With 10,000 inmates, it's a small city. Except here at least a third of the people are mentally ill.

Patients were released to live independently. Over the past decade though, states have cut billions from their mental health budgets, clinics across the country have shut down. The result is thousands of mentally ill people funneling in and out of the nation's jails, locked behind bars and institutions ill-equipped to help them.

Fifty years ago, this country saw a major change in treatment of the mentally ill. States shut down insane asylums in favor of community mental health centers

 Minnesota's involuntary commitment law allows courts to order treatment whenever a person's behavior poses "a substantial likelihood of physical harm to self or others

On a typical winter day, more than 100 street people line up for hot meals, medical care and emergency housing at Dorothy Day. Among them are nine or 10 who are so severely disordered that they cannot function in a shelter or drop-in center, said director Peter Trebtoske

it amended the law last year to place more emphasis on a person's failure to meet basic needs--rather than his or her assaultive or suicidal behavior--as a criterion for involuntary commitment. That amendment and another one encouraging greater use of outpatient mental health care took effect last August.

it took five calls to the St. Paul Police Department by mental health workers to persuade the department to send an officer to pick him up

In order to be taken to a hospital, a mentally ill person practically has to be running the wrong way down a one-way street, naked, screaming and flailing a machete,

say the law changes have had virtually no effect on the dozens of severely ill men and women who roam the streets, shelters and drop-in centers of the Twin Cities.

Social workers usually must wait until a law is broken or violence is threatened before they can force a mentally ill person to accept medical care.

most homeless people in his condition are still on the streets or in shelters

St. Paul-Ramsey Hospital Thursday night, it wasn't because he was ill, but because he had been banned by both men's shelters in St. Paul

Timmer said many people with mental illnesses are ineligible for treatment programs because of welfare, income and Social Security restrictions. Others cope with it in secret or live with relatives, often their parents

First of all, no one knows with any degree of certainty how many people in the state suffer from serious and persistent mental illness

Nonetheless, drug therapy was one of the primary reasons that mental institutions in Minnesota and elsewhere around the country began discharging those once thought incurable

It was completely effective on only 20 to 30 percent of patients, partially effective on 50 percent and completely ineffective on the remaining 20 to 30 percent

Thorazine can produce other significant side effects: low blood pressure that causes the lethargy, as well as dizziness and blurry vision; an unpleasant condition called akathisia, or severe jitters; symptoms that resemble the tremors and rigidity of Parkinson's disease; and loss of motivation

 The rate at which Minnesota's regional treatment centers have emptied since the 1960s is directly related to the introduction of increasingly effective medications.

 Each of them says that he or she is nervous about the move. But what they really fear is a return of their illness

. The medications can treat the illnesses so that patients can learn to function again, and the support and social programs help them learn how.

The transition from asylum to hospital represents the triumphs of the past four decades in both increasing the understanding of mental illness and improving the treatment of those who suffer from it

The sprawling $37 million facility, filled with light and the smell of new construction, boasts basketball courts and a library, double rooms and private bathrooms. It looks more like a college dormitory than a mental institution

bone-breaking electroshock therapy and the modern drugs and social programs that can bring even the most severely delusional person back to reality and function.

  In one especially horrendous episode, he pushed a teen-ager in front of a truck. Fortunately, the driver swerved the vehicle in time, avoiding a tragedy.

He was often picked up by police

 For the first time in decades, she is in close contact with her family. She has discovered grandchildren she did not know. And she is attending college on a scholarship. She just started a job as a counselor at a halfway house associated with the program that helped her.

It was involuntary treatment, but a good kind of involuntary because it helped to stabilize me and it was done with kindness."

is comes at a time when we have a new generation of anti- psychotic drugs that are more effective and have fewer side effects,

Consigning such people to live on the streets, eat out of trash cans and suffer without care or medication--all in the name of protecting their civil liberties--is perverse, they argue.

1950s, government policy, medical opinion and the law lined up together to enforce strict limits on the conditions under which such involuntary commitments could occu

a Project Help psychiatrist took Tressa to Bellevue, despite her pleas to be left alone in the tiny triangle park where she felt safe.

but significant change in the way American society is dealing with the mentally ill, especially those who are indigent and resist treatment

he Massachusetts Behavioral Health Partnership--the state's largest mental health insurance company and the outfit responsible for managing mental health care benefits for tens of thousands of children on Medicaid--has, in fact, met all of its contractual obligations

I observed from a front-row seat as mental health services for children in Massachusetts deteriorated

 Fourteen years old and sullen, he came to the hospital on a Sunday afternoon for evaluation of long-standing abdominal pain. As a first-year pediatric intern, I thought of incredible diagnoses

Deinstitutionalization became more of a cost-saving measure than a human rights initiative. However, recent studies show that it can cost as much, or more, to care adequately for seriously mentally ill people in the community as it did in state hospitals

Research also shows that jails and prisons are poorly equipped to recognize and treat inmates with mental illnesses.(7,8,9) Estimates are that fewer than 50 percent of men and women with severe mental illnesses receive mental health treatment while incarcerated

Several recent studies have shown that up to 15 percent of incarcerated men and women have severe acute and chronic mental illnesses,(4-5,34) such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness and major depression

We also have seen a large homeless population emerge during the past 40 years, and approximately 30 percent of homeless men and women have severe mental illnesses

One such result is the incarceration of large numbers of mentally ill individuals. The United States currently has more mentally ill men and women in jails and prisons than in all state hospitals combined.(3,50)

again

The mentally ill sometimes must wait between one and two months to be seen by a clinic after leaving jail.

he 1992 survey also estimated that only one-third of seriously mentally ill inmates received continuing psychiatric services once they left jail

Mental disorders place them at increased risk of suicide and being victimized or sexually abused. Several studies have shown that at least half of all inmates who committed suicide either had a major mental disorder at the time or had been hospitalized for one in the past

 How much treatment is available in jail? That depends on the jurisdiction. Cities like Alexandria run model programs, while others ignore legal mandates to provide psychiatric checkups. Funding appears to be the issue.

"there will be an increase in pressure for use of the criminal justice system to reinstitutionalize them."

By the early 1970s, researchers were noticing that some former patients were slipping through cracks in the community mental health care system, ending up homeless, psychotic, and arrested by police.

Mental hospitals, moreover, were a drain on state budgets and carried the stigma of abuse and neglect.

 Sadly, many U.S. jails are nowhere near as equipped to handle the mentally ill as the AADC, and newspapers are full of suicides of inmates with a history of mental illness

akin to mental retardation."