The Go-to-Jail Card: For People of Color, Mental Illness Often Means Incarceration (1/13/05)
When Nancy Carter and four other professional women began meeting five years ago to vent their frustrations about the mental health issues devastating their families, they discovered three things in common: Each of their mentally ill loved ones was an African American in their 20s at the time of their psychotic break, each had been well-educated and upwardly mobile, and each had landed not in a hospital but in a jail facility, notably the Twin Towers, the downtown branch of the Los Angeles County Jail. As a result, Carter, owner of a firm that supplies audiences for television programs, founded an Inglewood chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill along with novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, pharmacist Benita Council, school administrator Jo Helen Graham and physician Lynn Goodloe.
The complete article can be viewed at:
www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-crcarter02jan09,1,3570368.story
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