San Antonio and Mental Health

I'm flying to San Antonio today to learn more about their approach to mental health. My hope is that I'll find three things.

1. Efforts pre-crisis to prevent people from going into mental health crisis.
2. Policies to insure that mental health professionals have command over mental-health-crisis incidents, rather than lightly or un-trained police officers (even the 40-hr CIT training is not, for example, comparable to a 2-year degree or years of professional experience.
3. Efforts post-crisis to provide structural care to prevent future crises.

Here's the NPR reporting on their policies.

• 8/19/14: Mental health policies help reweave the social safety net.
• 8/20/14: Reforms help San Antonio safe millions.
• 8/21/14: Mental health meets moneyball.

I'm also working on a big piece about criminal justice and disability this week, so much more to come.

The material from this will be in Part IV of my book, which is coming along, if slowly.