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SALT LAKE CITY — May is Mental Health Awareness month, and several people in Salt Lake City joined forces at a symposium on Wednesday to say that the system for getting people help is broken and needs to change. Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, mental health experts and families of people with mental illness all attended the symposium. At the event, they called for better treatment programs and more resources for those struggling with mental illness in Utah. They said that in many cases, with the state's current system, someone has to commit a crime before they are offered help. Jerri Clark, the mother of 23-year-old Calvin Clark, said her son is an example of someone who needed help but couldn't get it. Calvin was bipolar and died by suicide. "Our families are asking for treatment before tragedy," she said. "Our families are asking for common-sense services that recognize a person's disconnect from reality as a psychiatric emergency, akin to a stroke or a heart attack." [gallery ids="906619,906618"] Gill said by the time someone with a mental illness reaches his office, a crime has already been committed. He pointed to studies showing that treatment for mental health works and dramatically reduces bookings and time spent in jail."Often it is the consequence of their mental illness that is there, which we've criminalized," he said. "And we've criminalized because we are not making the upstream investments that we need to make to actually change the model."
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