Mental Health Diversion Expert
Mental Health Diversion Expert
Mieke ter Poorten is foremost mental health diversion attorney. Her vast experience and expertise when mental illness and criminal law intersect is unsurpassed. So often people who have a beloved adult family member suffering from mental illness and/or drug addiction feel powerless to help them. They have ridden the torturous roller coaster of anguish, treatment, hope, disappointment, stability, and dysregulation. Hoping that each new medication or attempt at sobriety will be the magic solution. Here, Mieke’s extensive knowledge of various treatment modalities allows her to create a comprehensive and effective therapeutic treatment plan that gives both judges and prosecutors confidence in granting her clients mental health diversion – and gives the families hope.
Over 65% of inmates in the United States suffer from mental illness. For decades, doctors, nurses, attorneys, judges, and mental health advocates have urged legislatures around the nation to address the over-criminalization of mental illness. Their argument was simple—studies showed that increasing numbers of Americans are in jail or prison as a result of untreated mental illness, and that the incarceration of these individuals does great harm while doing little to decrease the likelihood of recidivism. The status quo was both unjust and untenable.
Thankfully, the legislatures and governors responded, creating mental health diversion statutes, which authorized courts to “off-ramp” the mentally ill from the criminal justice system and into treatment, under certain conditions. The expressly stated purpose of the new mental health diversion statute is to “promote increased diversion of individuals with mental disorders away from incarceration and into programs that could better treat mental illness.”
When a family member is charged with crime because of criminal behavior resulting from their mental illness, what they need is medication, treatment, and a plan that will put their mental illness in remission. So often the family has felt powerless as they watched their adult family member spiral deeper and deeper into mental illness and/or addiction. An arrest can be a blessing in disguise because, in the right expert hands, the criminal justice system can be leveraged to compel the adult into treatment, resulting in stabilization, new opportunities to reclaim their life, and relationships. A holistic view of the client and their family must be taken to have a chance of long-term success.
If your family member has been arrested because of addiction or mental illness, turning to an expert, who has over a decade of experience can be the beginning of new life and a reclamation of who they once were.