Yes, President Trump is shaking up Washington, but some things definitely need to be shaken up. Exhibit A is the nation’s mental-health services — or lack of same. As if we needed another reminder, when a man with a gun walks into an FBI office hearing voices and complaining that the CIA is pushing him to become a member of al-Qaeda, he is asking to be treated for his psychosis. It is the same story, year after year, differing only slightly in detail and diagnosis. But the outcome is the same: innocent people needlessly killed and injured.
Members of the media regularly call the Treatment Advocacy Center to ask, "Why is your estimated total of people with 'serious mental illness' so different from -" before naming another group or agency or similar resource. The answer inevitably lies in how SMI is defined.
The National Sheriffs' Association and Marion County Sheriffs' Association brought #aBedInstead all the way to the White House last week when they urged President Trump to focus on mental illness in US jails and prisons during a roundtable discussion.
HB 1420 exempts psychiatric hospitals and intermediate care facilities from the need for a Certificate of Public Need (COPN) as a way of making it easier for Virginia to add hospital beds to treat and rehabilitate individuals with severe mental illness and substance abuse issues. The Senate Health and Education Committee will discuss the bill on Friday, February 17th. Please contact your senator and urge him or her to support HB 1420.
A South Dakota hospital has come under fire for refusing to admit would-be patients suffering from severe mental illness. Instead, hospital staff are directed to contact police to take such individuals to jail, even though they haven’t committed a crime.
Today, as the nation’s few remaining psychiatric hospitals continue to shutter their doors, the resulting critical psych bed shortage leaves a giant mental illness treatment void. A recent blog featured in Scientific American hits the nail on the head with its assessment of this dire situation and its support of community mental health interventions as a means of filling the void.
Individualized risk assessment is already used to promote prevention and achieve better outcomes for health conditions including heart disease and breast and prostate cancer. Calculators for these diseases equip medical providers to make risk predictions for individual patients based on how the individual’s disease indicators compare with a large sample of similar cases.
The passage of the 21st Century Cures Act last month represented a watershed moment for individuals and families affected by serious mental illness across the country. But US Representative Tim Murphy, author of the landmark Cures Act, doesn’t think the bill goes far enough to help families locked out of their loved one’s care due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule.
The Treatment Advocacy Center’s newest study proposes a course of treatment to improve the health in at least one aspect. Emptying the ‘New Asylums’: A Beds Capacity Model for Reducing Mental Illness Behind Bars takes a mathematical approach to the critical shortage of treatment beds for mentally ill inmates who cannot come to trial because they do not meet legal standards of mental competence.