The article titled “Effects of Serious Mental Illness and Substance Abuse on Criminal Offenses for analysis” contains the study conducted to determine the consequences of serious mental illness and substance abuse on the criminal offenses of a group of community residents who had serious mental illness, as well as co- occurring disorders of substance abuse. The study was conducted by John Junginger, Keith Claypoole, Ranilo Laygo, and Annette Crisanti. The research focused on the effects of serious mental illness and substance abuse on criminal offenses.
This objective was informed by the need to explore how serious mental illness and substance abuse relates to criminal offences. For quite a while now, some people have believed by that serious mental illness has been “criminalized”, and the study sought to analyze the veracity of this belief. These effects were studied for 113 post booking jail participants together with their counterparts who were non-diverted (Junginger et al, 2006).
Researchers in this study studied 113 community residents who had participated in the Hawaii Jail Diversion Project and had thereafter been arrested for various criminal offenses.
The researchers applied research methods to complete the project; after obtaining Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval from the Hawaii Department of Health and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, the researchers proceeded with their research. They obtained information on the cause of index offense by asking the participants probe questions (3 or 4) during the intake interview of the project, which was undertaken within seven days of the participant’s arrest.
The Essay on Mental Illness
... to refusal of treatment, and the rights of a criminal defendant. Mental Illness was a very good book. It was full ... that same category of offenses? The final important section in Mental Illness is entitled Rights of Mental Patients. Mental patients just as everyone ... and severe cases of depression. Common substance-related disorders include alcoholism and drug abuse. In addition to the effect already ...
After getting responses to the probe questions, they used identical 5-point scales to independently estimate the probability of whether the index offense was due to direct or indirect consequences of substance abuse or serious mental illness. This estimation is what was used to get the results of the project, and consequently the discussion on the same. The findings show that the mean estimates of the consequences of serious mental illness were not correlated significantly with mean estimates of the consequences of substance abuse.
The results also indicated that substance abuse has a relatively greater effect on criminal offending than psychiatric symptoms. Draine et al (2002) explain that this may be a significant factor in the increased levels of incarceration and arrest of individuals with serious mental illness. Junginger et al (2006) argues that unless there is evidence to show that there are unique factors to serious mental illness relating to criminal offending, the hypothesis of criminalization has to be reconsidered.
This reconsideration should focus on other powerful risk factors for crime intrinsic in social settings that individuals with serious mental illness occupy. These factors include, but are not limited to: poverty, substance abuse, homelessness, and unemployment (McNiel et al, 2005).
Failure by community services and resources to adequately consider these factors will continue making prisons and jails “a haven for persons with serious mental illness”. This research has a number of contributions in the study of criminal behavior.
For over the years, criminalization of serious mental illness has denied the study of criminal behavior the opportunity to explore other risk factors associated with criminal offending. As such, this field of study suffered from scarcity of new information. The findings of this research project will provide the much needed new information in the area of criminal behavior. The project helps in discarding the long-held criminalization hypothesis by putting more emphasis on the need to concentrate on other areas of crime intervention such as disadvantaged social settings and substance abuse.
The Essay on The Benefits of Cross-training in Mental Health and Substance Abuse
The proposed study primarily aims to identify the advantages of cross-training in mental health and substance abuse for the Mental Health Director to consider a cross-training program implementation. In general, cross-training allows employees to learn other responsibilities in addition to their own tasks because they share knowledge and skills, address each other’s concerns or issues, and ...