When Nancy Carter and four other professional women began meeting five years ago to vent their frustrations about the mental health issues devastating their families, they discovered three things in common: Each of their mentally ill loved ones was an African American in their 20s at the time of their psychotic break, each had been well-educated and upwardly mobile, and each had landed not in a hospital but in a jail facility, notably the Twin Towers, the downtown branch of the Los Angeles County Jail. As a result, Carter, owner of a firm that supplies audiences for television programs, founded an Inglewood chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill along with novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, pharmacist Benita Council, school administrator Jo Helen Graham and physician Lynn Goodloe. We spoke with Carter about her quest to address a local crisis.
The Go-to-Jail Card
For people of color, mental illness often means incarceration.
Metropolis / Snapshots from the Center of the Universe
What motivated you and your co-founders to start a NAMI chapter in Inglewood?
The perception in all communities is that black people deserve to go to jail, they're all criminals, they all use drugs. This was not the case with our young people. Our young people were in college, had careers, they all had lives. They would never have encountered the criminal justice system had it not been for their mental illnesses.
You call the Twin Towers in downtown L.A. the nation's largest de facto mental health facility. What does that mean?
For the year 2004, statistics from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health list 50,534 forensic episodes at the Twin Towers. A "forensic episode" means clients coming through the Twin Towers who have some form of mental illness. The tragedy is not so much the huge number, but the increase from the year 2000. In 2000 that figure was 33,805, so this year represents a 49% increase in four years. That's ridiculous. African Americans top the list with almost 41%, Latinos come in second at almost 24%. So 65% of the mental health patients incarcerated in the Twin Towers were people of color.
What accounts for the increase?
Thirty years ago we closed state hospitals, and there was a promise from state government that more community clinics would be opened. That promise was never realized. As a result, everyone poured out of state hospitals onto the streets. Homeless people commit petty crimes, mentally ill people traditionally get in trouble with law enforcement, and instead of being sent to treatment facilities that no longer exist they end up being sent to jail.
