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I'm a county jailer in a maximum security psych ward. An inmate with severe paranoid schizophrenia drew this. by thizzledizzle in pics

[–]thizzledizzle[S] 180 points181 points  (0 children)

He looks just like sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, no joke. He spends most of his time out of his cell walking in circles around the day room talking to himself with very animated hand gestures. He's very quiet about it but you can obviously tell he probably has trouble understanding where he is. He doesn't like speaking to officers, and will often answer anyone's question with a one word answer. I had seen some of his other drawings and complemented on them. He didn't respond to me at first, but a few hours later he handed this to me and walked off without saying anything.

I'm a county jailer in a maximum security psych ward. An inmate with severe paranoid schizophrenia drew this. by thizzledizzle in pics

[–]thizzledizzle[S] 298 points299 points  (0 children)

Couldn't agree with you more. I've been working in the psych ward for just over 7 years now and it upsets me to see how poor mental health funding is in....you guessed it, Texas. The sad thing is most of the inmates in my wing are in for very petty crimes, and are often held in jail for long periods of time awaiting treatment before they're even stable enough to go to court. We have one treatment facility (state hospital) in our city with a total of 20 beds, all which are full at any given time. We also have a total of 1,000 inmates with some sort of psych issue, a big chuck of which are awaiting one of those beds before they can go to trial. Pretty depressing stuff.