List of easy ways YOU can help:

1.  eMail your representatives and ask them to support H.R. 619 to reinstate Medicaid insurance for inpatient treatment for indigent mentally ill people - loss of this insurance caused many mental hospitals to close, resulting in 1.25 million sick prisoners.

2.  eMail your representatives and ask them to establish assisted outpatient treatment programs which provide for mandated treatment and subsistence assistance for mental patients released from hospitals and incarceration.  Otherwise, most only go back again - sometimes after committing crimes ranging from simple vagrancy to murders. New York participants in Kendra's Law (an AOT) experienced over 90% decrease in homelessness, arrests, hospitalizations, and prison sentences.  That means communities were safer, taxpayers saved significant amounts of money, and mentally dysfunctional persons were helped, not punished. It costs $60,000 per year to imprison New Yorkers, and around $90,000 more each year to imprison acute mental patients and condemned inmates. Ask your reps to repeal the death penalty, too, if you live in a state that has capital punishment.

Use these links to email 111th Congress:  www.house.gov/writerep/
.
and your governor: www.usa.gov/Contact/Governors.shtml

3) Mention Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill whenever you comment on news at Care2 News Network and other news regarding human and civil rights.  AIMI is the only organization that I know about that is dedicated to decriminalizing mental illness.  The media will not report our work, probably because media owners are also prison investors.  It is up to We the People to notify the public that there is a saner, more financially prudent, and most of all, a more humane way to address mental illness in America.  Publish our link:  http://www.Care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI

4) Protest mentally ill inmates being asked to accept the H1N1 vaccine, a vaccine that for which neither the government or vaccine manufacturers will accept liability for possible injuries and deaths.  The mentally ill have a limited or no understanding of the risks associated with that or any other drug. Require that a next of kin, or other person if no relatives are known, be assigned power of attorney over institutionalized acute mental patients to approve or disapprove drugs.  Until it was outlawed, inmates were used as test subjects for Big Pharm, and some would like to resume.

5) Share AIMI's links and links to my articles with Care2 groups and your friends to help them learn about the 1.25 million mentally ill inmates in America and their conditions of incarceration as well as abuses to the mentally ill in our communities.  I research and write about these subjects constantly, so it is EASY for you to share.  See links by browsing for "MARY NEAL GOOGLE PROFILE" or using http://www.google.com/profiles/MaryLovesJustice 

See an article about a mentally ill man who was handcuffed to his bare, iron bed frame in a solitary prison cell while naked for 32-hour intervals while deprived of any food at his prison doctor's orders.  While you are visiting my blog, see a list of other such articles on your left and grab a link to send or use the handy ADD THIS button to send to Facebook, Twitter, or other networks:

PRISON TORTURE WITHIN THE U.S.A
http://freespeakblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/prison-torture-within-usa-by-mary-neal.html

6) Join online groups to access government, such as:
Congress.org - http://www.congress.org/ 
and
Congress at Twitter - www.TweetCongress.org 

7) Invite your friends to join AIMI