Between 1996 and 2005 I was incarcerated at four different facilities and saw many different psychiatrists and counselors. For most of the years I was in, I was lucky to see any single psychiatrist or psychologist more than three times. It was not until I was transferred to the psychiatric unit at Northern State prison that I saw the same psychologist for a year and a half.... But in general, I did not trust many of my counselors and most prisoners do not trust them. Most of my encounters with mental health providers, like those of most prisoners, were extremely brief, only about fifteen minutes long. We knew we could not expect to see them for long and that they worked for the prison. And we knew that even if we felt comfortable confiding in a counselor, we could not be sure that what we shared would not someday be used against us.

...Perhaps the single biggest problem that prisoners with mental illnesses face in prison is the insensitivity of correctional staff. In my experience, the majority of corrections officers responded to outbreaks by mentally ill inmates as a disciplinary problem, the response to which was to place the prisoner in lock-up where he would go without treatment and deteriorate. I witnessed a lot of resistance by corrections officers to the administration’s efforts to empower mental health providers to intervene on behalf of mentally ill prisoners. This resistance took many forms. For example, at times when I would meet with a psychiatrist to discuss my medication the officer who escorted me there would purposefully and unnecessarily stand in the door and listen, which made it impossible for me to confide in the doctor and signaled to me that there was no respect for the doctor/patient relationship. Often corrections officers would refuse to bring us to our appointments with mental health providers and it seemed they simply had no respect for mental health treatment.

Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission