Patient Dumping

[cajunrevenge]

What the actual **** is this.

[57Brave]

thank you for pointing this out

[57Brave]

5 will get you ten some Rapid Responder will jump in to argue Reagan was not to blame, so what.
Which is really beside the point - he's been dead for over 20 years and the problem
both mental health care and homelessness still exists.
But let's try to understand how we got here
in order to repair a broken system

The issue here is, deinstitutionalization



How Reagan’s Decision to Close Mental Institutions Led to the Homelessness Crisis



By Divya Kakaiya, Ph.D., M.S./ San Diego Union-Tribune Op-Ed / April 24, 2023

As a psychologist who began practicing nearly 40 years ago, I’ve seen a significant shift in the care of the mentally ill since the mid-1980s — and it hasn’t been for the better.

After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets.

Without those facilities, many mentally ill people ended up in jails and prisons which are not set up to provide safe, compassionate care for brain illnesses. But in 1981, when President d Reagan deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and emptied the psychiatric hospitals into so-called “community” clinics, the problem got worse.

Most of those who were deinstitutionalized from the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals were severely mentally ill. Between 50 percent and 60 percent were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The fact that many of these people struggled with various forms of brain dysfunction was not recognized back then. With so many advances in brain science, experts now know that we need to be able to coordinate care in residential facilities, especially if we are housing people at $4,000 per day in a local medical hospital.

People with severe mental illness need to be supported every step of the way. They need to be housed with compassion and supplied with medications, state of the art brain health therapies, nutritious food that supports brain health and extracurricular activities that give them a chance to live meaningful lives. They need to receive quality care with programs like art and music therapy, equestrian therapy, job training and volunteer opportunities to become actively engaged members of society.

According to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, in 2022 the number of homeless people in San Diego County was 8,427 individuals, a 10 percent increase from 2020. Of those surveyed, 85 percent said they had fallen into homelessness in our region.

Fran Butler-Cohen, the CEO of Family Health Centers of San Diego, said in 2019 that homeless patients made about 100,000 visits to California hospitals in 2017, up 28 percent from two years earlier. More than a third of those visits involved a diagnosis of mental illness, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. By contrast, 6 percent of all hospital discharges in California during that time involved a mental health diagnosis.

Butler-Cohen said that in 2017, homeless people staying in San Diego hospitals cost $3,000 to $5,000 a day. Even at the low end, the cost to taxpayers is more than $1 million a year for one patient. Any quality, supported, residential program would not cost $5,000 per day. The system is paying for the care of the severely mentally ill homeless populations in multiple other ways.

One program that has the potential to be very successful if implemented correctly is the statewide CARE court system that Gov. Gavin Newsom and California lawmakers created last year and that county government is implementing locally so courts can impose services on people with severe mental illness. This program will provide the support and the extra guardrails needed for a person whose brain is not functioning at its optimum capacity.

We need to recognize that deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill is one of the primary causes of the rise of homelessness all over our country. Do mentally ill homeless people deserve care, dignity, security, compassion and brain growth? We know the answer is yes.

We also need to not be in denial that jails and prisons have become surrogate psychiatric hospitals for many people with severe mental illnesses, and we need to do something about that, too. Humanity asks that we look after the vulnerable with hearts of compassion.

.....................

would be interested in other states and their response