Former prison chaplain Rev Herro Blair Jr has questioned Jamaica’s penal system, wonders if churches are really prepared to deal with mental health, and lamented a lack of empathy.

In an interview with the Jamaica Observer, Blair Jr argued that self-righteousness is to be blamed for the attitude of Jamaicans towards individuals who suffer from mental health problems, which sometimes cause them to commit crimes.

“The options for some people are beyond their own handling. They can’t handle what they’re going through. The ordinary man on the outside says, ‘No, he should not have committed this crime or no, he should not have killed his wife.’ But the truth of the matter is that the mental state of the individual is what leads that person to often commit the crime,” Blair said.

“And that is why the Bible describes dealing with the whole man. The whole man is not just a spiritual man and not just a physical man, but also a man whose mental state has to be dealt with. We’ve lost our empathy, not realising that we, too, can go through the same situation,” he continued.

Blair pointed to reports of increased mental instability among Jamaicans over the last two years, and told the Sunday Observer that the issue has crept over into 2023.

“So, there is an issue there to be dealt with. If a lawyer goes to court and says a man committed a crime because of a [mental] situation, it needs to be addressed, certainly. We, the Church, are not perfect either. From the pastors down to the members, we all go through our own situations and we have to deal with them.”

At the start of the year, Prime Minister Andrew Holness implored Jamaicans to take care of their mental health and to seek help if overwhelmed, depressed, or unable to cope.

The advice came from Holness in his address to the nation on New Year’s Day.

“Find someone to talk to. We Jamaicans tend to think of ourselves as tough, ‘tallawah’, able to take on and defeat challenges greater than ourselves. However, over time, this tough attitude has led to an ineffective response to personal and social trauma in our lives,” he said.

Further, Blair said that oftentimes, Christians tend to deal with their problems by using prayer only.

“That is not the way to deal with it. There needs to be ways that we can identify and deal with our mental capacity, our mental state,” he said.

“Even me as a pastor going through a divorce and saying to myself, ‘I never planned to get divorced. I never planned to be here. I’m a pastor.’ But then, it happens and you have to face the realities of life; the loss of children, the loss of a wife. It drives you to do things you didn’t even think you would do,” Blair went on.

Meanwhile, Carla Gullotta, executive director of Stand up for Jamaica (SUFJ), said it is necessary to acknowledge that having mentally ill inmates in prison continues to be a concern.

She said the case of Noel Chambers, 81, who died in a facility after a 40-year wait for a trial highlights the urgent need for change.

“Inmates are hostages captured among different agencies which are supposed to deal with their trials and them serving time. The Department of Correctional Services may be an insufficient executor, but fundamental focus has to be on justice system and its lack of accountability. Mentally ill inmates cannot be fit to plead and need to be diverted to community mental health care and for a modern forensic psychiatric facility to be built to provide treatment for the most severe cases,” she told the Sunday Observer.

“The Department of Correctional Services is simply not equipped to deal with mentally ill inmates and as such, it is up to the courts to uphold the human rights of these persons by ordering that they be removed from prisons and be provided with the mental health services that they need. Prison is no place for someone who is mentally ill. Prison needs to become the place where inmates are still considered as human beings and use the serving time to learn a better life.”