Re: police should not respond to mental wellness check in Canada.
This letter addresses the wellness check of mentally distressed Canadian citizens in the Toronto Star. In Canada, when an individual suffers from mental distress, police officers are contacted to evaluate their mental wellness.
Should police respond to an acute mental distress call? Authority should not be the first person to respond to a mental health crisis in the community. In Canada today, numerous people live with mental health crises (Jamil,2020). For this reason, calls for wellness checks have been rampant. Ideally, mental health calls should be responded to by mental health expert such as psychiatric nurse and not police officers; likewise to when an individual suffers from a physical health problem, they are generally attended to a physical health expert, physician for better outcome. (Preddy, Stefaniak & Katsioloudis, 2019)
Police checks in Canada have been associated with violence. The ending of violence statements has been thought of due to a lack of training skills and de-escalation skills needed during the checkup. Most people with mental crises do present with physical aggressiveness, which triggers police officers to apply force irresponsibly, resulting in injuries or sometimes death (Hirst, Lane & Miller,2015). I wish to remind the police department that should they persist in carrying out mental checkups evident in the communities, and they need to acquire the necessary skills to tame down the people living with psychosis to the baseline and find amicable solutions without significant harm to them.
References
Jamil, R. (2020). Well-Being and Mental Health of Arab-Canadian Immigrants.
Preddy, J. E., Stefaniak, J. E., & Katsioloudis, P. (2019). Building a Cognitive Readiness for Violent Police–Citizen Encounters: A Task Analysis. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 32(1), 55-76.
Hirst, S. P., Lane, A. M., & Miller, C. A. (2015). Miller’s nursing for wellness in older adults. Wolters Kluwer.
