 Welcome back to another beautiful day during Mental Health Awareness Month and in this video we're going to be taking a look at the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case and ask the question was the punishment of Gypsy Rose and Nick go to John way too harsh based on the fact that they both struggle with mental illness. What is up everybody this is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel what I like to do is take a look at the YouTube community or things happening in pop culture or just society in general and try to see what lessons we can learn from them. So if you're into that stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and by the way I have recorded three episodes of the podcast they are right now on the YouTube channel but make sure you're following me on social media at the Rewired Soul on Instagram and Twitter because I just submitted them to like iTunes and Spotify and the Google podcast platform and everything so follow me over on social media so you know when you can listen to them but anyways yeah I have an entire playlist dedicated to the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case if you want to check that out that will be up in the info card but like I said it is Mental Health Awareness Month so in this video we're gonna be talking about mental illness and the prison system all right but I got a little surprise for you because it's actually not me who will be talking about this subject I have brought over my girl Jennifer so Jennifer she has an awesome awesome awesome mental health channel it is called Awkward Anxious Jen she'll explain to you a little bit more about what her channel is but please please for the love of God do me a favor make sure you go subscribe to her channel I will link her channel down in the description up in the info card and it'll be at the end screen as well well anyways I'm gonna shut up now and here's Jen thanks Chris what's up everybody Awkward Anxious Jennifer here and I like to talk about mental health on my channel from various different points of view I have bipolar disorder anxiety and some other struggles so some of my videos are about my struggles and triumphs and tips I've learned to help me out and things that I hope might help you all out some of my videos are more factual telling you for example symptoms of depression if you think you might be having depression some of my videos are more just showing you my everyday life and showing you that even if you have struggles you can still go out and lead as normal of a life as possible and try to overcome your things so anyway today I wanted to talk about you know right now the act is popular on Hulu talking about Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her boyfriend Nick Godichon so I posed the question would Gypsy Rose and Nick have been better off being sentenced to a mental health treatment center versus prison so I pulled up a few facts about inmates with mental health struggles in the prison system in America and it's kind of shocking and upsetting so let me talk about a few of these statistics and then I'll give you my opinion on whether or not I think Gypsy Rose and Nick should have gotten mental health care rather than just kind of prison so some of these statistics kind of vary depending on the side I got them from so take them all with a grain of salt but about 1.2 million individuals living with mental illness sit in jail and prison every year that's a lot of people who are you know a lot of them committed their crimes as a result of their mental illness not all of them clearly but a lot and one thing I found out is that states that have higher levels of mental health care have lower levels of incarceration and vice versa states that have lower levels of mental health care that's just available to everybody have higher rates of incarceration so there's clearly a link between people who can get care for their mental health and you know the people who can't tend to commit more crimes so in 2014 the Federal Bureau of Prisons imposed a new policy promising better care and oversight for inmates with mental health issues but instead of expanding treatment the Bureau has lowered the number of inmates designated for higher care levels by more than 35 percent increasingly prison staff are determining that prisoners some with long histories of psychiatric problems don't require any routine at all so basically what's happening is instead of hiring more staff to better meet the needs of inmates prison officials are instead determining that more inmates don't actually need that care which in my opinion is really not a good thing as of February I think this article was written in 2018 so about a year ago the Bureau of Prisons classified just three percent of inmates as having a mental illness serious enough to require regular treatment by comparison more than 30% of those incarcerated in California state prisons receive care for a serious mental disorder in New York it's 21% and in Texas it's 20% so you know you can tell the states that keep track of their own numbers that's 20 to 30% of inmates with serious mental disorder and on the federal level that you're saying no it's only 3% it's not nearly that high so clearly there's some trouble in there people with mental illness who wind up in prison are at greater risk of victimization and often the mental health conditions get worse so instead of treating the mental health conditions we're you know letting them they get get become victimized and you know that they have a harder time getting well and so if or when they get released they're likely to have more problems a federal judge has ruled that care remains grossly insufficient and extremely poor for those dealing with mental illness in the prison system in this country and according to federal data on state and federal prisons from 2011 to 2012 nearly 40% of inmates reported having being told by a mental health professional that they had a mental health disorder now sure some of those prisoners might be lying but even if you know 10% were lying and it's only 30% of prisoners who have previously been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and you know the federal government only thinks three of them 3% have you know needs serious treatment then that's kind of concerning and the last fact I have here is that correctional facilities in the U.S. are considered the largest provider of mental health services in the country but many prison systems are facing fiscal crisis and struggle to provide constitutionally adequate treatment even after lawsuits lead to court mandates for access to mental health care so that's the state of mental health care in our prison system right now obviously it's not great so now let's talk about Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Nick Godegen let's start with Gypsy Rose now I don't I haven't seen anywhere where she's been specifically diagnosed with anything but you would have to imagine that she's dealing with at a minimum PTSD from all the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother is she gonna help get help for that in prison according to these statistics probably not so what happens when she goes back to the real world and doesn't have any sort of coping skills to deal with her PTSD now you know I'm not gonna suggest that anybody with PTSD is more likely to become violent than anybody else so I don't know that her lack of treatment for PTSD would cause her to murder anybody again but you do have to wonder how fair it is that she already suffered terribly during her entire childhood in the first years of her young adulthood and now she's potentially going to suffer for the rest of her life because she's not getting the mental health treatment probably that she needs so I do think she probably would have been better served getting you know mental health care or being in a you know mandated to be in a mental health system for 10 years rather than being in prison for 10 years so that she's better equipped to handle the real world when she gets out and then with Nick go to John you know he already had some issues before this whole thing happened with Gypsy Rose you know he was arrested for watching porn and McDonald's for nine hours and masturbating and he was diagnosed with autism and lower levels of intelligence so one could argue that you know he was probably always going to have some sort of problems with the law but I personally don't think he would have murdered anybody if Gypsy Rose hadn't talked him into it so you know is it fair to punish him with life in prison for following his heart and thinking that he was protecting the woman that he loved or would he be better served in a mental health facility now granted if one of the biggest problems was his autism and sort of inability to maybe recognize that who's being manipulated then yeah maybe being released to the general public at some point in the future might not be a good thing it's hard to say so with Nick go to John it's more of a toss-up as to whether I believe that he would be better served in a mental health facility rather than prison so that's my opinion on the situation what are your opinions do you think that Gypsy Rose got off too easy do you think that Nick go to John should have gotten the death penalty or do you think one or both of them should have gotten sent to a mental health facility rather than prison let us know in the comments below and I hope you will come check out my channel for more content like this and other types of mental health content too have a great day how good was that video though yeah like I really appreciate how Jennifer pulled like stats and like looked at it you know from this angle because this is something that I think about a lot like I know that it's 2019 next year we have our elections and I come from the background of addiction right like so I'm a very fortunate recovering drug addict and alcoholic coming up on seven years clean but I'm very fortunate that I never had a run-in with the law right but I've seen many people with addictions get locked up and punished when treatment is something that would actually help them a lot more especially when you take into consideration most people with a drug or alcohol addiction also have some form of mental illness so like Jennifer talked about there are many people who are locked up and a lot can be attributed to the fact that they have an untreated mental illness and this is something that we're kind of looking at in the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case especially because Gypsy Rose was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy and obviously she went through a lot of trauma so I would love to know all your thoughts on this topic down in the comments below but again thank you so much Jen for coming over and doing this guest video on my channel and all of you other rewired soldiers out there please do me a solid make sure you go subscribe to the channel awkward anxious Jen again it is down in the description up in the info card and it is on the end screen all right but anyways that's all I got for this video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and boom just like I said look check it out right there click on that little button go subscribe to Jennifer's channel all right thanks again so so much for watching I'll see you next time