Sleeping in Vermont Dumpster Shows Psychiatric Cuts’ Cost
By Tom Moroney - Jun 4, 2012 12:01 AM ET
Katherine Gluck blurts out to the judge, “I’m guilty.”
Gluck, 47, is charged on this March morning with threatening her former husband with a hammer. Police who arrested her in Burlington, Vermont, know those tired eyes and stringy blond hair. In December, Gluck was charged but not jailed or hospitalized after she slammed a dead raccoon against the front door of City Hall. Her family urged her to get help for her bipolar disorder, which usually involves getting back on medication. She refused.
Now, court-appointed lawyer Sarah Reed hopes Judge Thomas Devine will send Gluck to a hospital. The odds aren’t good. Hurricane Irene wiped out the last state-operated psychiatric beds in Vermont nine months ago.
Since then, private-hospital emergency rooms have been backed up with mentally ill patients -- some handcuffed to ER beds for as long as two days. Dozens of people are turned away each month without being admitted, and calls to Burlington police about mental-health issues increased 32 percent over the prior year.
As the only U.S. state with no government-operated psychiatric beds, Vermont’s experience reflects a growing realization among mental-health experts and advocates that the decades-long trend toward outpatient care has reached its limit -- and public outcry against the latest round of cuts is beginning to change the game.
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Opposition Rallies
A similar outcry in Alabama forced Governor Robert Bentley, a Republican, to moderate plans to close four state hospitals and displace 524 patients. In Massachusetts, 200 gathered in March at the statehouse to oppose the shutdown of a 169-bed psychiatric facility in Taunton. The same week, a crowd of 300 in Brooklyn, New York, rallied to preserve the 265-bed Kingsboro Psychiatric Center.
“For the first time, there is pushback against closing psychiatric hospitals,” said D.J. Jaffe, executive director of the New York-based Mental Illness Policy Org., a nonprofit policy center.
“There is a direct connection between violence and lack of hospital beds,” Jaffe said. “You can’t stabilize someone who’s psychotic anywhere other than in an inpatient setting.”
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-04/sleeping-in-vermont-dumpster-shows-psychiatric-cuts-cost.html
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