Stop NYS Psychiatric Hospitals
(The following Mental Illness Policy Org. op-ed appeared in 2/23/12 NY Daily News and is available at http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mentally-ill-yorkers-article-1.1027041?print
The recently proposed closure of Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn looks like the latest step by the New York State Office of Mental Health to get out of the business of providing treatment to people with serious mental illness.
We should all worry deeply about the consequences of this policy shift.
In the past two months, the Office of Mental Health has announced it is “reducing census” — i.e., kicking many of the mentally ill out — at the Bronx, Mohawk Valley and Sagamore psychiatric centers. These came on top of previously announced ward closings at the Rockland, Pilgrim, Mid-Hudson Forensic, Hudson River and Buffalo psychiatric centers. The bureaucrats insist that when these people can no longer get help at such facilities, they’ll get the same services elsewhere.
The truth is, some will. But most won’t.
As someone with a mentally ill relative, I know the let-’em-loose policy is cruel to people with mental illness, who desperately need and want treatment.But it’s also dangerous to the public. According to the Daily News, late last month, “a 25-year-old mentally ill Brooklyn man stabbed his mother and kid brother and beat them with a hammer.”
Near where the Buffalo Psychiatric Center reduced beds, 6,300 homes experienced a blackout when a mentally ill man recently released from another facility used a chain saw to cut down utility poles. Near where the Rockland Psychiatric Center reduced beds, police rescued a suicidal mentally ill man who was off medications, barricaded in his home and brandishing a pellet gun.
And earlier this month, between where the Rockland and Hudson River psychiatric centers reduced beds, police shot and killed mentally ill Tim Mulqueen after he brought a loaded shotgun and 50 rounds of ammunition to court.
When will this madness end?
New York went from 599 psychiatric beds per 100,000 citizens in 1955 down to 28 in recent years. The new closures will take us even lower.
All this means the state is simply transferring the seriously ill to the criminal justice system. New York currently incarcerates 14,000 people with serious mental illness — largely because the Office of Mental Health, the agency that should be helping these people, has beds for only 3,600. There are more mentally ill in a single jail, Rikers Island, than in all state hospitals combined.
The most conservative estimates are that if New York had the best community services available — and we don’t — it would still need 4,311 more hospital beds to meet the minimum needs of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers.
A study released late last year on homeland security and mental illness by Chief Michael Biasotti, vice president of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, found law enforcement is being overwhelmed by a “policy change that in effect removed the daily care of our nation’s severely mentally ill population from the medical community and placed it with the criminal justice system.”
One would think ensuring the seriously mentally ill get treatment would be the core mission of the Office of Mental Health. But it hasn’t been ever since Michael Hogan was appointed commissioner in 2007. His stated goal is to “create hope-filled, humanized environments and relationships in which people can grow” — not to get medications to the seriously mentally ill.
One can understand what drives his hospital closure policy: It saves OMH money. But it is far harder to understand how Gov. Cuomo doesn’t recognize the negative impact on the criminal justice budget, on people with serious mental illness and on public safety as a whole.
Jaffe has a family member with mental illness and is executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mentally-ill-yorkers-article-1.1027041#ixzz1nagSmVuE
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