When mental illness goes public

A nude woman is arrested outside The Forum on Wednesday.

A woman believed to have a mental illness was walking around The Forum area Wednesday morning without any clothes on, according to police.

Rome police Lt. Joe Costolnick said the woman was taken in for medical evaluation. She is just one of possibly several thousand people in the county who have a mental illness.

“One out of every five people has a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetime,” said Jim Moore of the Rome National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Rome NAMI is the local affiliate of a national organization that focuses on educating and helping those with mental illness. Only about 5 percent of the population has a severe illness, such as deep depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or anxiety disorders like PTSD, Moore added.

Many times, those who are severely

sick don’t realize they are sick or they don’t have access to treatment.

“People have always fallen through the cracks, are falling through the cracks and will continue to fall through the cracks,” Moore said.

One of the challenges is getting help for those with the most severe disorders. Adults can’t be forced to get help unless they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

If someone is picked up by police for endangering themselves or the public due to a mental illness, Moore said, they are taken to Floyd Medical Center to undergo medical and mental observation.

If medical staff deems the person is still a danger to herself or others, they can require that she be sent to a crisis stabilization unit until she calms down.

One such place is Highland Rivers Health, which has three crisis stabilization locations in Northwest Georgia — Rome, Cedartown and Dalton.

The biggest problem, Moore said, is the lack of long-term treatment options for ordinary people since the state closed Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital in 2011. “It’s beyond the (financial) scope of the ordinary person,” he stated.

For now, the only option for mentally ill people is a short stay in one of the stabilization units.

Moore said he’d like to see a public or private long-term treatment facility in the area.

For cases of a criminal nature committed by someone with a mental illness, Floyd County has a mental health court.

“It’s only for those facing severe charges,” Floyd County Superior Court Jack Niedrach said.

More serious charges, according to Niedrach, are offenses such as terroristic

threats and battery, not rape or murder — which would be handled in Superior Court.

His interest in creating the court began about four years ago, in part because Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital closed. There appears to be a correlation, he noted, between the closing of the hospital and the increase in the mentally ill being found homeless, in local jails and emergency rooms.

National estimates state about 16 percent of prison and jail populations are made up of mentally ill people, but Niedrach said he thinks the number is higher than that.

Instead of sending people to prison, the court focuses on supervision and treatment. The treatment plan, Niedrach said, provides mentally ill offenders with physicians, psychologists and therapy sessions. The offenders are also visited randomly at their homes and drugtested randomly, Niedrach added.

All in all, offenders are in contact with the mental health program five to six times a week and have to visit the courtroom once a week.