Police Shoot Mentally Ill Teen After Allegedly Stating ‘We Don’t Have Time For This’

On Sunday, January, 5, 2014, Keith Vidal, 18, of Boiling Spring Lakes, N.C. was shot dead in his home by police. A known history of depression and schizophrenia had troubled the young man in the past but never to the point of violence according to neighbors. The incident began while Vidal was sweeping the floor between the laundry room and the kitchen. He was carrying a screwdriver, but, the family said, never threatened anybody with it.

“He just wanted his screwdriver. It’s his screwdriver, he’s gonna keep it,”  said Vidal’s mother, Mary Wilsey.

ThinkProgress.com reports,

“During Sunday’s incident, Vidal had apparently picked up a small screwdriver — small enough that it couldn’t have caused serious harm, his family says, but enough that they sought law enforcement assistance”.

12:31 p.m. Police are called.

Mark Wilsey calls police for assistance. The first of three different police departments respond to a 911 call for assistance.

“We wanted him to put the screwdriver down because he does have schizophrenia and we didn’t know if he was gonna hurt himself,” said Mary Wilsey.

Nevada Being Sued Over Practice Of ‘Dumping’ Mentally Ill Patients In Cities Where They Know No One

Nevada has apparently come up with a new way of controlling the cost of caring for the institutionalized mentally ill: put them on buses and send them to other states.

That is the basis for a lawsuit that has been filed by the city of San Francisco against the state of Nevada, which claims that it has cost the city over $500,000 to house and care for homeless mental patients who had previously been living at Nevada’s state-run Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement:

Homeless, psychiatric patients are especially vulnerable to the kind of practices Nevada engaged in, and the lawsuit I’ve filed today is about more than just compensation. It’s about accountability.

Reuters reports that the suit has been filed as a class action, but has not yet been certified by the court.

The lawsuit stems from a Sacramento Bee report published last April, which found that starting in 2008 Rawson-Neal had sent more than 1,500 patients to cities around the country, sending at least one to every state. The paper discovered this information after reviewing bus receipts provided by the Nevada mental health division.

According to The Bee:

In recent years, as Nevada has slashed funding for mental health services, the number of mentally ill patients being bused out of southern Nevada has steadily risen, growing 66 percent from 2009 to 2012. During that same period, the hospital has dispersed those patients to an ever-increasing number of states.
By last year, Rawson-Neal bused out patients at a pace of well over one per day, shipping nearly 400 patients to a total of 176 cities and 45 states across the nation.

NPR: Bans Of Same-Sex Marriage Can Take A Psychological Toll

As the country awaits two important Supreme Court decisions involving state laws on , a small but consistent body of research suggests that laws that ban gay marriage — or approve it — can affect the mental health of gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans. When several states passed laws to prohibit same-sex marriage, for example, the mental health of gay residents seemed to suffer, while stress-related disorders dropped in at least one state after gay marriage was legalized.

Here's the research trail:

Beginning around 2004, several states banned gay marriage. Just before that series of bans, the National Institutes of Health happened to conduct a massive of 43,093 Americans. The questions elicited detailed information about respondents' mental health. (To validate what people reported about themselves, psychiatrists also interviewed samples of the people in the survey, and their medical diagnoses closely matched the findings of the survey.)

Soon after the wave of state bans on gay marriage, in 2004 and 2005, the NIMH conducted a second round of interviews, managing to reach 34,653 of the original respondents. (That's a high rate compared with most polls and surveys.)