I am happy to confirm that I have a bi-polar disorder. But that is irrelevant to this discussion. There are indeed many people out there with mental disorders, be they personality disorders, substance abuse issues or profound psychological difficulties. These are not biological mental illnesses, as any psychiatrist will tell you, and the people who 'suffer' from them largely have control over their actions and therefore can and must take responsibility for them, like anyone else.
I don't believe I have over-generalised on this thread any more than anyone else. However, you are clearly bruised at having your views challenged, which is your problem, not mine, BelgiumBrit. It seems to surprise you that someone who has a mental illness is capable of holding a higher degree and working full time as a professional clinician. Does that make you feel more threatened, than the idea that I am The Great Heywood Nut? I would put it to you that it probably does. I respect your own experience of people who come into contact with the police. But it is, I'd have thought, perfectly obvious that you see only a tiny minority of the people that CMHTs work with every day. Your training is in law enforcement, not in psychiatry, so forgive me if I don't see that as qualifying you to make a judgement based on factual evidence, outside what you have directly had experience of.
Psychological disorders affect about 1 in 4 people at some time in their lives. Only about one in every hundred of the population suffers from a severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and other psychotic illnesses. Of these very few are likely ever to behave in a violent or threatening manner. Far more people with mental illnesses hurt themselves than other people.
In 15 years of working with a wide variety of people in the mental health system I have come into contact with a very few who broke the law, and of those, just a couple did so as a result of their illnesses. That's a couple out of probably several thousand that I and my immediate colleagues came into contact with. Not many really.
People with mental health problems are like you and me. They are not monsters or criminals any more than any other group. As I said before, my patients have included professors, teachers, parents of well adjusted and brought up children, students, doctors and yes, police officers too.
That is the only point that I am trying to make here. I just want to redress the balance a little and reduce prejudice. Is that so bad?