California's mistreatment of the severely mentally ill has come full circle: After muckracking reporters exposed horrible conditions at psychiatric hospitals in the 50s and 60s, the state started kicking the slightly-less-ill out onto the streets.
"Deinstitutionalization" was supposed to put the milder cases into the care of community mental health centers, halfway houses and social workers. It wound up leaving most of the sickest people on the streets. Walk along Main Street downtown or any boulevard in Santa Monica and you see the result.
Metropolitan has about 650 patients, including approximately 50 who are under the age of 18. Many of the patients have been committed there by criminal or civil courts and are suicidal, schizophrenic or suffer from other maladies that make it difficult to control their impulses.
But the U.S. Department of Justice report also finds that between April, 2001 and March, 2002, "there were 475 patient-against-patient assaults, 310 incidents in which patients hurt themselves and 304 accidental injuries," the Times reports.
Mental health experts said the conditions at Metropolitan could partly be a reflection of systemwide breakdowns in care for the mentally ill.
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., and the author of "Surviving Schizophrenia," said funding is getting increasingly scarce, there is little continuity in care, and facilities such as Metropolitan find themselves treating the "sickest of the sick."
"But deaths shouldn't happen very often," Torrey said. "I can't say that a coincidence of bad events isn't possible, but when you have a series of deaths like that it suggests that the quality of care on the wards is not good and the staffing is either insufficient or they're sleeping on the job."
In more than two dozen visits to the hospital in 2004, officials with state Department of Health Services found that Metropolitan's staff failed to stop patients from attacking or raping one another, harming themselves with potentially dangerous objects or fleeing, according to documents obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act. (The Health Services Department inspects the hospital and the Mental Health Department runs it.)
Many patients of state psych hospitals are locked up under "5150," a section of California's Health and Safety Code that lets the courts lock them up because they present a danger to themselves and to others. The idea is to give them medical and psychiatric treatment, to stabilize their condition and get them back into "community care."
Looks like the Metropolitan State Hospital staff was content to let conditions devolve to the level of Twin Towers Jail.
Let's hope there's a little money in Prop. 63 to beef up staff and overhaul administration there before things get any uglier.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Monday, June 06, 2005 - 08:58 AM
