Home  Blog Police, Cuffs, and PADs
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PADs are meant to help people with mental illness have dignity when they experience a psychiatric crisis. But in many places, it is law enforcement who have first contact with a person having a crisis. Often times, police need to resort to placing people with mental illness in handcuffs, such as when it is required that they provide transport between emergency rooms and psychiatric facilities. Should police know about PADs? If I write in my PAD I don't want to be cuffed and I get hurt, do I have any recourse?
Readers have left 3 comments.  1. UntitledRick Z., UnregisteredIt is saddening that this web site needs to bring handcuffs up as an issue. It is disgusting in the first place that people with mental illness have to be treated like criminals and animals when they have even done anything wrong. That the mental health system has not figured out a way to handle these crises in a more humane way is incredible and depressing. 2. Re:Guest, Unregistered It is saddening that this web site needs to bring handcuffs up as an issue. It is disgusting in the first place that people with mental illness have to be treated like criminals and animals when they have even done anything wrong. That the mental health system has not figured out a way to handle these crises in a more humane way is incredible and depressing. — Rick Z.\Ditto 3. CuffsGuest Roxann Hamilton, Unregistered Every time the police "help" me by taking me to a Crisis Center (not the hospital where my Psychiatrist practices... which is the other side of the Crisis Center Building) they put me in handcuffs and a waist belt to secure the cuffs. I have no history in 58 years of severe mental illness (Schizophrenia) of being a danger to someone else. Being in handcuffs is very frightening and humiliating, and occassionally painful. |
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