Wyatt Cenac goes deep on mental health and law enforcement
By Erin Qualey
Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas deftly explores the often dysfunctional intersection between mental health crisis and law enforcement.
Police officers with minimal psych training are often the first to respond to mental health crises. It’s a fact. But it doesn’t make it our best option. When uninformed men in uniform appear on the scene, things can and do get ugly.
In my personal experience as a licensed therapist (eleven years and counting), I’ve encountered police officers with a wide variety of attitudes regarding psychiatric crisis. Sometimes they care and use a calm and nuanced approach to charged situations, but quite often they don’t. With the number of mental health-related emergency calls climbing, this is a giant problem, and the danger of having under trained yet fully armed officers dealing with mentally volatile individuals is palpable.
Cenac explores this unfortunate trend in a dense and informative episode detailing the intersection between mental health and policing. Full of fascinating information and peppered with heartbreaking news stories, he and his team successfully present several sides of this thorny issue.
The episode features stories of officers who use violence and force to deal with mentally ill people because they’re either impatient or fearful… or both. However, Cenac also speaks with several mental health professionals who want to change the way that these encounters unfold. Check out part of Cenac’s conversation with social worker Melissa Vollbrecht from The People Concern in L.A.
The show also takes care to present potential solutions to this problem. One such solution is playing out in L.A. right now. A mental health emergency response team called S.M.A.R.T. is pairing mental health professionals with police in order to decrease tragic outcomes in psychiatric emergency calls. The program is currently only able to respond to about half of the mental health crises calls that come in, but with more support from politicians and the public, programs like these can potentially become more prevalent in our society.
Related Story: Wyatt Cenac Continues to Shed Light on Police Brutality
The dysfunctional link between mental health and police may be a problem now, but with infotainment such as Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas bringing attention to the issue, we can all become more informed and hopefully increase the demand for solutions that matter.
‘Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas’ airs Fridays at 11:30/10:30c on HBO.