(Aug. 29, 2016) In Massachusetts’ mental health system, accountability for care of the most severely ill is often “lost or nonexistent,” according to the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. As a result, those with a severe mental illness “bounce from hospital to hospital, caregiver to caregiver, until, with some frequency, something awful happens.”The Spotlight Team details a host of failures, including the refusal to enact assisted outpatient treatment, the closing of psychiatric hospitals and the slashing of spending on inpatient mental health care by more than half — or nearly $161 million — from 1994 to 2013, resulting in a mental health system unable to address the needs of the most severely ill.
Even more damning, it is clear this problem is neither new nor unexpected. By 2009, state panels were noting an alarming pattern of people with severe mental illness returning to psychiatric hospitals soon after leaving, calling it, “a clear warning sign that the public mental health system is in trouble.”
Such failures are especially troubling when considering the care of the small portion of individuals with mental illness prone to violence. In reviewing a host of such cases marked by systemic failure, the Globe asked the question all too many families have raised, “If the care system can’t meet the needs of someone in such extreme and obvious straits, who is it there for?”
The consequences of the system’s inability, unfortunately, have been tragic. From 2005 through 2015, more than 10 percent of Massachusetts homicides with known suspects were committed by people with a history of mental illness or who had clear symptoms, according to a Spotlight Team analysis.
And in the four years between the release of yet another mental health task force report highlighting the system’s inability to meet the needs of people with severe mental illness and the end of 2015, 51 people were killed by assailants with a diagnosed mental illness or strong indications of it and 32 people with signs of mental illness were shot by police, 17 of them fatally.
These tragedies will continue until Massachusetts begins to finally take severe mental illness seriously by devoting adequate resources to care, implementing an assisted outpatient treatment program and ensuring that psychiatric beds are available to those in need. Those with a mental illness, their families and all of the Massachusetts deserves more than their current system. They don’t need any further studies to show them that.