![]() To prevent these needless tragedies we must maintain a functioning public mental health system, reform our treatment laws to eliminate barriers to timely treatment and ensure that if people with a mental illness do end up in prison, they receive appropriate and necessary medical care, just as inmates with other medical illnesses already do. There are now 10 times as many people with severe mental illness in our jails and prisons than receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital. “Josh needed help, instead he got punishment,” Francisco’s mother said following his suicide. In his cell alone for weeks on end, “the illness consumed him.” Like many other people with severe mental illness who are untreated and ill-equipped to handle the harsh prison environment, Francisco ended up in solitary confinement. During his time in jail, he refused to take his medication ( Read our report on state laws governing medication in jails and prisons). In the February before his death, Josh was returned to jail to await a mental competency hearing. “His illness was a cruel one in that the sicker he became, the more convinced he became that there was nothing wrong with him,” his mother wrote in a letter to Pete Earley. Francisco became stuck in the familiar cycle of homelessness, hospitalization, stabilization, release, decompensation and sometimes arrest. ![]() When he was finally admitted into a hospital for treatment, he was released as soon as he became stable only two days later. In the years leading up to Francisco’s final arrest, his family sought psychiatric hospitalization, but Josh was “convinced that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies were in cahoots to dispense medicine and make huge profits,” she wrote. Josh would not believe he had an illness” “We loved him the most of anybody and our hands were tied. “We were just powerless to help,” said his mother, Annie Francisco. 24, 2014) Years before Josh Francisco, 39, hung himself in his jail cell, his family had desperately sought treatment for his mental illness (“ Family devastated by son’s suicide in Farmington jail,” St.
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