Just as you believe that maybe, perhaps, the tide is turning and the government that is charged with the responsibility and care of those most in need — the severely mentally ill who are hospitalized — actually “gets” it, you read a story like this …
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Things like that should not happen in the Union, of course this was Texas.
Maybe the state motto should be,
“YOU ARE WARNED, THIS IS TEXAS YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN”
of course here in NYC our Police Commissioner said of a bipolar man who was tassered of a ledge,
“
Things like that should not happen in the Union, of course this was Texas.
Maybe the state motto should be,
“YOU ARE WARNED, THIS IS TEXAS YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN”
This is what people mean by state’s rights.
The right of the state to abuse those the community does not like.
I’ve been suicidal several times in my life. Each time I was hospitalised (voluntarily) I was discharged within one week with a fist-full of scripts and a “Good Luck to You!” Only my faith in God and the love of my children kept me fighting the desire to end my emotional suffering.
There is a new law that mental illnesses are to receive the same coverage as “medical” illnesses. I’m grateful for this new law, but I’ll have to depend on God for the next year still. Because the new law does not come in effect for 12 months!!! If I had a broken leg would they make me wait a year to get treatment?
Just another example of how mentally ill citizens are treated with no respect nor concern. After all, it’s ONLY IN MY HEAD, right? One problem with that idiotic conclusion — that thing in my head runs EVERY function of my body. Perhaps people could consider this!!
3,000 people a year are discharged from that hospital in precisely that manner. One dies, which is sad, but surely not an indictment.
2,999 didn’t die…..
Of every 3,000 sane people that enters an automobile…how many die?
@Bastiat… True. The difference being that the state has taken on the responsibility for treatment and care of those 3,000 people, which includes proper and appropriate discharge planning.
We do it for any medical procedure, ensuring that if a person needs home nursing for wound care and maintenance, they get it. Why wouldn’t we do the same minimum for someone who has a mental illness, ensuring they, at the very least, get to where they’re going so someone else can look after them?
Indeed, the state may have been technically well within its rights for behaving as it did. And perhaps that’s the point — when did we, as a society, stop using basic common sense (and a little human compassion) to care for folks who just need a little extra attention? An extra 10 minutes spent with this individual may have prevented their needless death. But since it wasn’t anybody’s “job,” nobody did it.
Technically correct. Humanely sad.
This sadly reflects a mental health system where the Golden Rule can be “Don’t die on my doorstep.” Anything that places distance between a provider, a hospital or an agency is sufficient to end both responsibility and culpability. The mental health system is represented as delivering compassionate, responsive, and successful care but all too often we find that persons with serious mental illnesses, especially when it is both serious and prolonged, are just inventory to be palmed off to be someone else’s problem somewhere else. Here that somewhere else was a bus stop.
Those that consistently promote the message of “Recognize, Reach Out, Receive Treatment and Recover” would be well served if they took a moment to actually consider how grim reality can be. That someone died absent a discharge plan is not surprising. That more don’t die when a discharge plan can be as little as “Patient will return to ……” is amazing. Even when a discharge plan appears to be extensive and well developed absent pre-discharge care coordination, and follow-up with both the consumer and post discharge service providers, it can be no more then a piece of paper.
It is important to acknowledge that it wasn’t a Texas hospital which led to Raquel Padilla’s death, it was a team of individual human beings employed in their professional capacities at this hospital who putatively cared for her welfare and well being and prepared her for discharge. There is a difference. We might well wonder if these same professionals did any better for Raquel Padilla when she was an inpatient.
From San Antonio State’s Hospital’s Admission Information:
“The team of professionals will develop an appropriate treatment plan with the patient. If in-patient hospitalization is deemed unnecessary by the treatment team, the MHA is notified and discharge planning is initiated. If in-patient treatment is necessary, the treatment team will continue to provide in-patient psychiatric treatment to prepare the patient for discharge, and/or transfer to an alternate placement.”