Category: Health and Wellness
CONCORD, N.H.—Advocates for the mentally ill filed a lawsuit against New Hampshire on Thursday, saying the state needlessly confines the disabled in mental
wards because it lacks services to treat them in the community.
The plaintiffs and their lawyer, led by the Disabilities Rights Center, want a federal judge to order the state to expand community services and crisis
intervention programs.
"People who are institutionalized are isolated from loved ones," said Attorney Amy Messer, legal director of the Disabilities Rights Center. "For others
who cycle in and out of New Hampshire Hospital and community hospitals around the state, their lives are marked by constant disruption and change."
Assistant Attorney General Anne Edwards said her office is in the process of reviewing the lawsuit. "Obviously we will be defending the state's system."
The class-action lawsuit comes 10 months after a federal investigation found the state's mental health system fails its citizens in need and is in crisis.
Federal investigators say the state's mental health system relies too heavily on confining the mentally ill in the New Hampshire State Hospital and its
nursing home component Glencliff Home.
"Reliance on unnecessary and expensive institutional care both violates the civil rights of people with disabilities and incurs unnecessary expense," Assistant
U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez wrote in the April 2011 report.
Claims in the lawsuit mirror the conclusions of the federal investigation and come as no surprise to state officials who for years have acknowledged deficiencies
in the system and developed a 10-year plan to address them. DHHS Commissioner Nicholas Toumpas in 2009 labeled it "a broken system."
The Disabilities Rights Center and advocates who filed the lawsuit say the state is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by segregating the mentally
ill in institutions and not providing less restrictive alternatives in the community. They say they filed the lawsuit as a last resort, after lengthy negotiations
with the state failed to produce any results.
Lawyers for the mentally ill said Thursday that New Hampshire has regressed since the late 1980s, when it was lauded by the National Institute of Mental
Health as a leader in providing community services for the mentally ill. Messer said admissions to New Hampshire Hospital and Glencliff House in Benton
have "skyrocketed" from 900 in 1989 to 2,300 in 2010.
"Once sent to Glencliff, few people ever return to their community," Messer said. "Over the years more people have died at Glencliff than have returned
to their community."
Kenneth R. is a 65-year-old resident of Glencliff House and a named plaintiff in the lawsuit. His guardian, Jayne McCabe, said Thursday he's been there
seven years and desperately wants to leave, but there are no services in the community to help him cope with his mental illness and paraplegia.
Messer said she met Kenneth R. when she visited Glencliff House and interviewed a number of its residents. "He looked up and said, `Can you get me out of
here?'"
The federal report released last April stated that the average cost of institutionalizing a mentally ill patient is $287,000 a year, compared with the $44,000
it costs to treat them in the community. Lawyers for the mentally ill say the annual cost of a bed at New Hampshire Hospital is $435,000.
Wow!!
I can't believe that New Hampture is so far behind with its mental health care system!! I didn't think there were any hospitals like this left in America. Wow, I think this is incredibly sad!! In my opinion, this is robbing people of the lives they could be leading as potential members of society. Ugg, how depressing!!
Just my two cents,
Dawnielle
Hmm interesting.
Anyone who follows my ass on Twitter, or reads the BlindBadAss knows I am pretty paleolithic in my perception of institutions and institutionalizing people of any sort.
However, having grown up through the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1980s I have had cause to question some. Not just because of the humorous instances of mentally ill people singing in trees, or the sad case where my friend and I each dropped a hot sandwich from a local deli on this mental guy's lap, only to come back a couple hours later to see him still spaced off and both sandwiches still there, he apparently too nuts to eat it.
But it does seem it's not a either or, but there's cases where they gotta be locked up or they'll either die in the cold or be in and out of hospitals. Anyone living in northern cities knows the mentally ill turn up dead in the bleak of winter, outside and frozen or died of hypothermia.
Just saying there is more to the picture than just one solution or the other. I don't have the professional background, I just been around and seen a lot over the past decades, and now wonder about some of that turn-'em-loose-and-let-nature-take-its-course approach with those.
wow: this is offle. it makes me think what this wirld. is comeing to... ug... vary sad..
And NH seems like a very nice state too.
I think this will always be with us sadly.