Tuesday night, a town hall on mental health hosted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness at the Warren County courthouse was eye-opening.

Sitting in the audience covering the event for The Post, it was mystifying to hear the current state of affairs the experts and representatives outlined.

In 2018, somehow the state of Mississippi’s response to people with mental health issues who have been issued chancery writs is to house them in the county jail. Warren County opened a holding center in 1997 and it is still the only one of its kind in Mississippi and one of only three certified holding centers in the entire state.

In 2018, the response to someone issued a court order that they are mentally unstable or a possible danger to themselves or others should not be to lock them in a jail cell.

ProPublica highlighted an extreme case of this issue in December with a story about an inmate named Tyler Haire. Now his case was more extreme as he did actually attack someone — his dad’s girlfriend — when he was only 16. He was indicted by a grand jury five months later.

According to the article, Haire’s attorney argued that he lacked “sufficient mental capacity” and demanded a physiological evaluation.

What happened next highlights the state of Mississippi’s failings in the area of mental health. It took three and a half years — 1,266 days to be exact —before Haire underwent an evaluation, spending his 18th, 19th and 20th birthdays in jail before going through a trial or even being convicted of a crime.

As the opioid crisis grows throughout the country and mass shootings seem to happen every week, we cannot continue to ignore mental health. We cannot throw people who are suffering in jail and hope they get better or forget about them. It is inhumane and unacceptable that jail remains a first line response to people who are dealing with a mental health issue.

Jails cannot provide treatment, and as people sit in their cells without ever having committed a crime, the issues that brought them there in the first place only worsen.

As Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said in his opening comments Tuesday, for too long when the budget gets tight the first thing cut is mental health funding.

Suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States according to American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Statistics from NAMI show that suicide is the third leading cause of death for people 10-24 years old, one in five adults experience a mental health illness and nearly 10 million American adults live with a serious mental health illness.

It is beyond time for Mississippi and the country as a whole to stop skipping over the issue and dedicate resources to those who are suffering.

  Brandon O’Connor is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at brandon.oconnor@vicksburgpost.com.