Brian Shrader
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Brian Shrader’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think we have a lot of people who have successful careers or seen as having successful careers or living normal lives who suffer from some form of divergence or mental health issues.
And that can span all the different types of diagnoses and levels of it, whether it's anxiety and depression, which can be rippling for some people, all the way through schizophrenia and total psychosis and things like that. And so until we can really identify this,
And we have resources in place to be able to really track it and say, this is a much more significant portion of our population that's being underserved and it's being mistreated. And then the step two would be then provide the resources for it.
Maybe step one, we're so far from achieving, so unattainable under our current set of values and resources as a society that we can't even talk about step two yet.
It is a system that's going to have to fix itself while running at full steam.
there's not going to be an ability to stop the need we're going to have to just interject ourselves into things as they're happening and try and fix it on the fly at a state level you know might have more of a chance of getting someone to listen than at a federal level at least initially it'd be great to have federal resources allocated although i won't get into the current political and crises we may be facing with getting any of that a type of assistance or strange things that are going on but
We have to do something. And I know there's a lot of other criminal defense attorneys who would agree with all this. I wouldn't hesitate to call up my colleagues and say, don't you agree? And they would all say, yeah, we agree, but we don't know what to do. We don't have an answer to how to fix it.
And a lot of that is because we're looking, we're not looking a year down the road or five years down the road. We're looking six weeks down the road when I have the hearing. And then that hearing comes and goes. And unfortunately, that file gets closed out. We move on to the next thing and we start all over. And we may have some retained institutionalized knowledge that I'm
I'm happy to share anything I have with anybody else. And I find most of my colleagues are the same way. But it may need to come from public defenders, the elected public defenders or appointed public defenders, depending on the jurisdiction, to be able to talk about things loud enough and with enough kind of background and statistics that they keep themselves.
So that might be a great place to start.
Yeah, change is hard. Change is real hard and people will resist change every step, especially in the system where there's a lot of motivation for, like I said, for people just to get things off their desk and move on. to add an extra step in there or ask someone to spend some time putting into place a new system is tough. Funding it is always going to be a problem.
And these are programs that have to be government funded. There's not going to be a private donor step up and who are going through the systems sometimes by the very nature of what they're going through, are not going to have the personal financial resources to be able to fund their own way. That's just a reality for a lot of people.
And I know I mentioned before, and I'll bring it up, our homeless population is full of mental health problems. probably could be treated. And a lot of the individuals who are just languishing and really struggling on so many fronts, not just from a poverty front, but from the mental health front and physical, untreated physical ailments, a lot of these people are right in our face every day.
We're going to have to provide the resources for them, but we can't get them to get a job or
take some responsibility for yourselves we can't do that until we can get their mindset right until we help get them set up to succeed otherwise we're just picking them up dusting them off maybe we give them some new clothes some toiletries a place to stay for a few nights and they're going to be right back out into the struggle again they don't have those tools mentally to to put together everything they need and a lot of them are very ill
Tragedy sometimes will spur the media to do something. It's a terrible thing to think is what it's going to take. But we saw some reform after things like the death of George Floyd, and we can see some changes in policing there.
We're also dealing with a certain level of disparity because when the wealthy, the powerful class, has someone in their family with a mental health problem, it gets treated. It gets dealt with. This shouldn't be a problem in their eyes. You just go do the thing. And as long as you do the things, everything's going to be okay. And why isn't everyone just doing the things?
obviously now we can go down the rabbit hole of our health care system in this country spend a few hours on that but it just makes sense to me when we're looking at a portion of our population that the cynical and i think ill-informed portions of society look at and say it's a burden where those people are dangerous or those are are people that are prone for criminal activity
And we know, because common sense tells us, in addition to our own experiences, that a lot of that portion of the population has untreated mental health. Why not provide a little bit of those resources so we don't have to provide the other resources?
There are people in the system who do care. and who do want to learn and who do want to take whatever we learn and share it with our colleagues so that we can make change. But we're not equipped for it naturally as part of our professional progression and the path that most of us take to get to these positions. So we will miss some.
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