Discrimination Prevalent Amongst Nursing Homes

By John M Grohol PsyD
May 21, 2008

If you’re an older person with a history of mental illness, you may be denied admission to a nursing home.

That’s the chilling report of widespread discrimination from the Leader-Telegram (WI), in a story about how many local nursing homes don’t even both to pre-screen potential residents who have a history of mental illness.

The article sadly reinforces the mental illness stigma, associating mental illness with “behavior problems.” Most people with a mental illness do not have accompanying “behavior problems” (unless someone is defining a behavior problem as being sad and depressed).

What it comes down to is that people don’t want to be bothered with complicated cases, when they have their choice of paying customers with less complicated lives. I’m not sure its an intentional effort to discriminate against the mentally ill, but it surely has the same result — people with mental illness finding it nearly impossible to get into a nursing home.

The article quotes a person saying, “There’s a lot of people working on it, but I don’t know that anybody has the answers.”

I’m not sure there’s a “lot” of people working on it, because it’s one of those problems readily solved by more resources (e.g., money) and education. But the system, as it’s setup in Wisconsin anyway, rewards nursing homes right now to turn these people away. So although there’s a lot of complexity to this problem, there’s also a few simple solutions (such as reimbursing higher rates to help cover people who have behavior issues; prosecuting any nursing home that discriminates solely based upon a mental disorder diagnosis).

Read the full article: Turned away

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.