system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What happens when someone, like say a homeless person, gets arrested on the streets but has no form of ID on them? How do they get processed? And say the person has a mental illness and doesn't even know his/her own name?
gpt
I work as a psych nurse and can answer part of your question. If the person has mental illness and meets criteria for detainment (they pose a danger to themselves or others or are so psychotic they can't make decisions for themselves), then a mental health officer could be called and place the person under an emergency detention. A psych hospital can accept the person as a patient and keep them up to 72 hours for treatment. A lot of homeless people brought in on EDs don't have IDs. We just take their word for it as to what their name is. We had a psychotic person come in once under one name, got treated, discharged, stopped taking her meds, became psychotic again, and came back under a different name. Admissions didn't catch it, but we did once she got to the unit, so we changed it back to her original name just to keep all her records congruent. But honestly, we had no way of knowing which name was the correct one. She came in with nothing but the clothes on her back and 35 cents. That's living free, no ties to anything.