Police mental health training a positive step
We don't know if we have more mental illness now or if - as is more likely - we've just gotten better at noticing and categorizing it and less inclined to shrug off "peculiarities" in family members, friends and neighbors.
But we are sure the Anne Arundel County Police Department's decision to give all its officers training in mental health is a good idea - and probably long overdue.
In the story on that effort, an adult after-care specialist with the Mental Health Agency estimated that about 18 percent of the county's adult residents suffer from some form of mental illness. If you go by the U.S. Census Bureau's 2014 estimate that Anne Arundel's population is 560,000 - and that 77.4 percent of that population is 18 or older - that would mean roughly 78,000 people. And only about 31,000 of them, according to the specialist's estimates, could be expected to seek help each year.
Even if you assume such estimates are high by a factor of five or 10, there are obviously a lot of county residents with untreated mental problems. Most such people are totally nonviolent. But some of them can be expected to come in contact with local law enforcement in high-stress situations.
A few months back, The Washington Post released a national database indicating that a quarter of the 462 people fatally shot by police in the first six months of this year were in the throes of mental or emotional crisis. And the pressures of police work can create serious problems for officers themselves. Post-traumatic stress isn't limited to the armed forces.
So police departments across the country have increasingly insisted their officers get mental health training. By the end of fall, as part of their in-service training, each of the nearly 700 officers in the county department will have taken an eight-hour Mental Health First Aid course led by the director of the county's Crisis Response System.
The training stems from a general heightened awareness by county police of the effect of mental health issues on their work. The agency has already partnered with licensed clinicians to create a Crisis Intervention Team and has formed a peer support group to help officers in the aftermath of particularly traumatic incidents.
Dealing with unstable or potentially unstable people will always be part of police work. It can only help to give officers more grounding in what to look for and how to deal with such individuals.
But, of course, mental health problems are not primarily a police responsibility. Anne Arundel is woefully short of treatment facilities - the only inpatient mental health unit in the county, at Baltimore Washington Medical Center, has 14 beds. Beefing up such programs will be much costlier than the police training program. But it's going to be necessary.
Our say: For police today, knowledge of mental health comes with the territory