Washington state mental health care is ‘gravely disabled’
September 9th, 2008From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: An investigation of Washington state’s troubled $1.8 billion mental health care system. The paper writes that the state leaves thousands of families …
snared in a Kafkaesque system that won’t help people with serious symptoms until they are in imminent danger of harming themselves or others, or gravely disabled — standards so high they exclude many who desperately need help.
But this strategy ends up costing the public more money, and puts citizens at greater risk, a scenario tragically highlighted in this state by a string of high-profile slayings by people who had severe mental illness but could not be treated despite signs that they needed help.
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on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 5:12 am and is filed under criminal justice, law, law enforcement, mental health.
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