According to an estimate by the Houston Chronicle, the jail serving Texas’ most populous county spends $87 million annually to incarcerate and treat inmates with mental illnesses. Many mentally ill homeless people return repeatedly to the Harris County Jail, committing crimes and getting rearrested in part because they cannot get care or supervision when they are released, experts say.

“The jails have become the psychiatric hospitals of the United States,” said Clarissa Stephens, an assistant director of the county’s budget and management services office who has been studying the jail’s mental health costs.

… “What happens here happens in many communities. We are criminalizing mental illness,” said Betsy Schwartz, president of Mental Health of America of Greater Houston, a nonprofit that promotes effective treatment for the mentally ill.

Associated Press story on MSNBC:

Experts say the case of Esmin Green, whose death in a Brooklyn hospital waiting room was caught on security video, is an extreme symptom of a national crisis facing patients with mental illness. Green (at left in 2007 photo) had been waiting more than 24 hours when she toppled out of her chair and lay writhing on the floor in view of hospital staff until she died, unattended, an hour later.

Emergency rooms, they say, have become all-purpose dumping grounds for the mentally ill, with patients routinely marooned a day or more while health care workers try to find someone to care for them.

A survey of hundreds of U.S. hospitals released last month by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 79 percent reported that they routinely “boarded” psychiatric patients in their waiting rooms for at least some period of time because of the unavailability of immediate services.

Average routine waiting times were reported to range from eight hours to more than 24 hours.

(CNN photo)

See also:

• Mental patient dies, ignored, in hospital waiting room
• Children with mental illness endure long hospital waits
• A psychiatrist examines Esmin Green’s tragedy — Chicago Tribune
  
• Woman who died on hospital floor called ‘beautiful person’ — CNN

(CNN photo)

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

An agreement between Georgia and the federal government announced this week will help move Georgians with intellectual disabilities and mental illness out of psychiatric hospitals and into community settings such as group homes.

The pact with the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the latest in a series of actions designed to force the state to move people out of institutionalized care and into the community.

If the agreement announced Tuesday is successfully implemented, Georgia, at the very least, would be compelled to significantly boost its spending on community services for individuals with mental or developmental disabilities. Those services in Georgia have consistently been criticized by mental health advocates as severely inadequate.

From the New York Times, Newsday:

A surveillance camera at a public psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn has recorded the death of a patient who collapsed onto the floor after waiting 24 hours to be seen. Forty-nine-year-old Esmin Elizabeth Green died after laying on the floor for about an hour while hospital staff members looked at her and walked on. One staff member prodded Green with her foot. An elapsed time video of the last hour of Green’s life is here.

Since the video has surfaced, New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation has agreed to increase the monitoring of patients at the King’s County Hospital Center psychiatric ward. The agreement is part of the settlement of a lawsuit, filed by the ACLU, that accused the hospital of keeping psychiatric patients in filthy conditions, systematically neglecting them, and drugging them into submission.

Criminal charges are also being considered.

From Variety:

HBO has announced that is developing a one-hour drama based on the bestselling Terri Cheney book “Manic, A Memoir,” about a successful female attorney with bipolar disorder.

In the running for the week’s least-PC wording are Variety’s headline and lead sentence:

• HBO crazy about ‘Manic’
• HBO is hyper for ‘Manic’…

By former First Lady Rosalynn Carter in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

I am shocked by the announced $8.4 million cut in funds for mental health services for children in the state of Georgia, particularly considering the current crisis that state mental health services face.

… The current budgets allocated for children’s mental health services clearly are not enough to provide for youth and their families in Georgia. Reducing these meager resources further is unconscionable and can only serve to exacerbate the problem.

From The Boston Globe:

In the past few weeks, parents and advocates in Massachusetts report that at least a dozen children and teens with mental illness - threatening violence to themselves or others - have waited up to a week in hospital emergency rooms or medical wards waiting for psychiatric beds. Other children have been turned away from treatment.

Among factors contributing to the problem are: the impact of increasing economic stress on children, lack of coordination in the mental health system, and insurance constraints on hospitalization.

Gail Rowell of Reading said that her 18-year-old daughter, Kelly, waited a full week in Merrimack Valley Hospital’s emergency room in March. Kelly has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and developmental disabilities and has been hospitalized 18 times since she was 9 years old. But this wait “was at least double or triple what we’d seen before,” Rowell said.

Children with difficult or multiple diagnoses are often especially hard to place. But “when you’ve got a kid in the emergency room for a week, that’s just wrong,” Rowell said. “It’s outrageous.”