Meth Trip Or Mental Illness? Police Who Need To Know Often Can’t Tell
Intelligencer JournalNov 05, 2019
The dispatch call from the
“Here we go,” muttered Officer
“There he is,” said Cregg. The officer pulled to a stop and approached a man who fit the caller’s description. Cregg frisked the man, whose name was Kerry.
“Why were you lying on the ground under a truck?” Cregg demanded.
Kerry, head hanging, rocked back and forth, offering quiet one-line answers to Cregg’s questions. There’s a contest, Kerry said. The prize was a new pickup truck, and he just had to find the truck with a key hidden underneath. He said he had searched three so far.
“Kerry, did you take anything today?” Cregg asked. “You’re not acting right.”
“No, no,” said Kerry, shaking his head forcefully. “I’m just stressed out.”
Cregg watched Kerry, looking for signs — is this meth or a mental health problem? Over the past three or so years, as meth has surged in
“Stay right there for me, all right?” Cregg told Kerry. “I like you too much — stay right there.”
Cregg walked a few steps away from Kerry to speak to one of two other officers called to the scene. It turned out this was the third time in the past few months that alarmed drivers had reported finding Kerry under their car. Cregg decided Kerry’s delusions were mental health issues and didn’t call for more backup.
Kerry, now cuffed, climbed into the back of Cregg’s cruiser, and they headed for the station. Kerry’s suspected crime: prowling.
“Hey, uh, Kerry — man, you feel like you want to go up to the hospital to speak to somebody?” Cregg asked a version of this question four times.
“No, no,” Kerry said repeatedly, “I’ve been through that route years ago; don’t want to do it again.”
Kerry said later that getting stuck in a hospital emergency room — waiting days, maybe weeks for an opening in a psych treatment program — makes his anxiety much worse.
At the station, Cregg found something that changed his view of the day’s events.
“What is that, Kerry?” Cregg asked, pulling a tiny plastic bag of glistening white shards out of Kerry’s coin pocket. It appeared to be meth. “This explains a lot.”
Cregg said what he thought was psychotic behavior likely had more to do with meth.
But “on that call, they mimicked each other. I wasn’t able to tell at first,” Cregg said.
That may be because Kerry is one of the 9.2 million adults in the
“With somebody that’s high on methamphetamine, you want to treat them a little firmer and control them,” Osgood said, “because they often are very volatile and aggressive, and you just want to treat that hostility differently.”
With meth now accounting for 60% of drug seizures in
“The officer’s foremost [concern] is ‘How do I open up communications? How do I get compliance in order to accomplish safety?'” Cochran said.
There are visual signs of longer-term meth use that are less likely to show up among mental health patients: skin wounds and scabs, rotting teeth, dilated pupils. But addiction medicine specialists agree it is difficult to determine what’s going on, at first glance, with someone who appears extremely agitated.
“The possession of methamphetamine may be a clue, but teasing out the acute effects of methamphetamine versus a long-standing mental illness may take a longer period of time,” said Dr.
Surging meth use is relatively new in
“But let’s be real, there are some individuals that are so sick,” Cochran said, that “officers find themselves having to act immediately to protect safety. Sometimes that may mean a hands-on approach.”
Cochran and another mental health advocate, Dr.
“And then, ideally,” Balfour said, “whether it’s meth or mental health or both … you’re going to be able to take that person to somewhere where they are going to get treatment — and not to jail.”
Balfour is also chief of quality and clinical innovation at Connections Health Solutions. The organization operates a network of psychiatric crisis centers in
Kerry was due in a
This story is part of a partnership that includes WBUR,
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