Guest AuthorLast week, the news from downtown St. Petersburg set my heart racing. The Tampa Bay Times headline said it all: Ax-wielding man shot by St. Pete police had been institutionalized — and released — seven times.
We have lost something in this country when a man can be institutionalized seven times, released, and still find his way to a firefighter’s ax, using it to chase terrified citizens before being shot dead by police.
Kenneth Robert Sprankle had a long history of mental illness and was seen earlier that day smoking synthetic marijuana.
He didn’t kill anyone. The St. Petersburg police are to be commended for responding quickly to a volatile situation. But Sprankle’s death and thousands of similar sad tales around the nation demonstrate the enormous costs Americans are paying because we fail to properly treat people with mental illness.
In 2008, 58.7 percent of adults in the U.S. with a serious mental illness received the treatment they needed, according to the National Institute for Mental Health. The annual societal costs of those serious mental illnesses, much of which go untreated, exceeded $310 billion, including lost wages and health care expenditures — and that was in 2002.
Since the recession, we have seen the largest cuts in state mental health services since the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963.
Because government no longer can afford to care for the mentally ill, prison has become the de facto solution for those who are too sick to care for themselves. In 2006, 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners, and 64 percent of local jail inmates had some form of mental illness.
In Florida, the public health system provides services only to about 26 percent of those who live with those illnesses.
The percentage of state spending on mental health agency services in 2006 was just over 1 percent, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Of course, the Affordable Care Act — the law Republicans are so eager to de-fund — offers coverage and expansion for mental health services to 62 million Americans, one of the largest expansions of this type of service in a generation.
The non-profit leader in health research and data, the Kaiser Family Foundation, speaks to this in an April 2011 study: “The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) has significant implications for financing behavioral health services. Most notably, reform will lead to a substantial expansion of insurance coverage, which could replace out-of-pocket or direct government payment for behavioral health services with insurance coverage to finance costs.”
The study says that expansion of Medicaid “will result in new populations accessing behavioral health services through Medicaid and private insurance.”
Synthetic marijuana — the drug Sprankle supposedly was smoking — is so new that there is little data about it. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the FBI recognize it as a problem. In 2011, the Drug Enforcement Agency used its emergency authority to classify it as an illegal drug.
All of this is as awful as it is true, but it is not the reason my heart raced with fear as the news broke of an ax-wielding madman. The fear lay in the knowledge that my children, my babies, were in school almost exactly one mile away from where he was shot by police.
If Sprankle, who was homeless, came out of Williams Park heading south, as the newspaper article suggested, he was headed toward my children.
We must rethink our commitment to mental health funding in this state and in this country. It is the right thing to do economically. It is the right thing to do for people with mental illness. It is the right thing to do for my children, and for yours.
