For the past week I have been staying with my parents in Las Vegas. It wasn’t so much a vacation for me as it was an effort by my parents to supervise me. They had planned long ago to spend a week in Nevada, but since I have been doing so poorly lately (including suicidal ideation) they thought it would be best not to leave me all alone in Minnesota. While I was here I read in the paper about the shooting death of a teenage boy with bipolar disorder. Apparently he came at the police with a knife, and the police opened fire. The boy died.

The facts of the incident were not in dispute, but the mother of the boy said less than lethal force should have been used. It is a tragic incident, and upon thinking of the situation more, I wish the advertising slogan were true – what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Unfortunately, such tragic confrontations between the mentally ill and law enforcement are found everywhere. Due to my recent hopelessness, however, my initial reaction to the incident was not outrage; I simply wondered if it were for the best (was it a suicide by cop?).

Life with severe and persistent mental illness is often too difficult. Even though I’m quite healthy and high functioning, sometimes I desire death. At least I do on the dark days, and I have had quite a few of them recently. It is a shameful thought, but I’m confident that everyone with SPMI could fess up to having such thoughts at times. But I don’t want to dwell too much on my own misery. All in all, this trip to Las Vegas has been good and it has served its purpose and beyond. I am still alive, and it seems that I’m finding more hope and enjoyment in life.

Technically, I am still a member of the board of directors of the Barbara Schneider Foundation (BSF). I say technically because I haven’t been to a board meeting in about a year, but I am still on the roster. BSF is a nonprofit organization that advocates and facilitates specialized training for law enforcement and corrections officers to better equip them in dealing with the mentally ill. Officers who have undergone the specialized training form teams called Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) that respond to mental health related calls, including dealing with people who are manic or psychotic. Typically, law enforcement personal are taught to escalate the use of force up until the point of compliance by the involved civilian. The idea in CIT is to deescalate crisis situations in a way that doesn’t involve the escalating use of force, because escalating force is not particularly effective with those who have mental illness.

For instance, imagine a man with schizophrenia who has become psychotic with paranoid delusions about people trying to harm him. Then imagine a police officer barking commands at the paranoid individual while escalating force. Suddenly, the officer is unknowingly playing into the individual’s paranoia, thus provoking a confrontation that threatens the safety of both the individual with schizophrenia and the police officer. Due to the illness and the officer’s typical escalating force approach, the two are pitted against each other, often with tragic outcomes.

The formation of CIT is a good step forward, but it is only a band-aid on a large gash. There needs to be a way of limiting the number and severity of relapses into mania and psychosis, if not preventing them altogether. Officers are often called in to clean up the mess, but it is really an entire, well-functioning mental health community that is necessary to help a mentally ill individual and prevent crisis from occurring. Preventing relapse would be like hitting a jackpot, but since the issues involved are complicated and expensive, I think the odds of success might be better here in a Vegas casino.